GOMEZ, MR R.

Mr KENYON (Newland) (15:40): Today I rise to acknowledge the work of Mr Rudi Gomez of RMG Services. Members may know Rudi; he has been around for quite a long time in South Australia. He is a former Colombo Plan student. He came to Adelaide and studied metallurgy and then travelled around the Philippines and other countries, working in mining, and so on.

Rudi has returned to South Australia and is making a pretty strong contribution. Most noteworthy of late has been his discovery, in concert with the state government through the PACE plan, of the Carrapateena deposit in the state's north. It is not far away from Olympic Dam—about 100km—and it looks like it is going to be a pretty tremendous deposit up there. With any luck, it will be a big mine and that will be a good thing, but Rudi is also doing some other work: he is working away on some water recycling technology, which is pretty interesting. He is using ozone to clean up water. It completely removes bacteria, but also removes pharmaceuticals from the water, which is another step forward in the recycling of water and will no doubt be particularly useful at some point in the future, especially in some of the more arid areas of Australia.

Rudi is also working on some carbon sequestration technology, which is probably novel. It does not rely on putting carbon into underground aquifers, or anything like that: it actually turns it into an insoluble salt and can make it disappear forever. It is quite unique. He works on a number of other technologies: for example, converting coal to hydrogen gas and, again, sequestering the carbon. There is all sorts of stuff going on. Rudi has a huge number of patents, over 30 worldwide patents, I think. I hesitate to call all these tremendous enterprises inventions, because sometimes that can give rise to the image of some mad inventor, and he is certainly not that. But, even if a couple of the projects that he is working on in this state come to fruition, then Adelaide will become the centre of the universe, I think, especially in conjunction with the work that Greg Watson is doing in Green & Gold Energy. I have spoken about him before. But I think this is a really exciting time.

These things are in their very early stages, but they could be very interesting for Adelaide and for South Australia. I bring them to the attention of the house, and for those members who have never had the chance previously, it would be worth their while catching up with Rudi and having a good look at what he is doing, because it is very exciting.