brocky, australia has already mined huge amounts of gas. the world is awash with processed gas and the price has now collapsed - but we are locked into contracts to export our gas overseas at low prices. producing more gas here will not reduce the price to local consumers while we are linked to the international market.
international gas company AGL is now considering importing back some of the gas we exported to japan, to supply our domestic market. they will chage high prices.
this is insanity.
full facts available here .....http://www.lockthegate.org.au/media_releases
Seems ridiculous.
LNG: Having spent $200b to export gas, is Australia about to import it?
How did we arrive in this position , we supply the world with energy in uranium gas and coal yet have the worlds highest electricity prices .
It is simply Governments interfering in the market for ideological reasons .
if govtments did not mandate the use of uneconomic renewables and subsidies we would not have a distorted market .
The YES PEOPLE.
Perhaps it is their advisers Brocky......
who qualifies to be an adviser I wonder?
This is what husband and I discuss a lot......some people in government and in corporate employ YES people. They want to hear what they want to hear......I guess it makes them feel good.
We are doing the world no favours by using gas and should switch to electricity. Natural gas can never be carbon free and it's always inefficient to burn.
Governments should wise up and think of renewable energy and cheaper prices for electricity before it is too late.
Hi Banjo.
Are you saying we should be using all our coal to generate the electricity?
Woke up in the night and had to close the bedroom window, there was a lot of smoke in the air coming into the bedroom. We are on top of a hill so I hate to think what people are down lower than us.
I always associate coal with dirt and smoke so I don't like it.
Is this a monty python sketch
Why do you think it's a monty python sketch Brocky?
Don't you think coal is dirty?
Australia could resolve its energy crisis “very quickly” if it followed the lead of the US in unlocking its gas resources, the head of oil and gas giant Chevron’s Australian business says.
Speaking at a Committee for Economic Development of Australia breakfast in Perth this morning, Chevron Australia boss Nigel Hearne said the development of unconventional gas fields in the US had made businesses more competitive and had generated millions of jobs and billions in government receipts.
He said reliable electricity supply required reliable gas supply, and the only way to achieve that was to develop both new and existing oil and gas fields.
But while the US shale gas boom had transformed the country from a net gas importer into a net gas exporter, the likes of Victoria and NSW had stalled the industry by instituting bans and moratoria on onshore gas drilling.
How the big three robbed us of our own gas
Peter Martin
Published: March 15, 2017 - 11:00PM
In Melbourne, gas cooktops are only the start.
Melburnians use gas for stoves, hot water, central heating and room heating. Ninety per cent of Melbourne homes have gas, compared to only 50 per cent in Sydney. Victoria accounts for two-thirds of all the household gas used in Australia. And Victorian industry uses little else.
Because it's been astoundingly cheap.
Esso and BHP discovered it by accident, as a byproduct of searching for oil in Bass Strait in the 1960s. Rather than burn it at sea (as they might have been inclined to do) they were prevailed upon to pipe it to the mainland where they as good as gave it away. A feud between NSW and Victoria at the time meant that it wasn't piped north of Wodonga.
Sydney got its gas from the more expensive Moomba field near the Queensland-South Australian border at the end of a 2000-kilometre pipeline.
Until the mid-1990s, when, for ABC television, I stood in front of the stump at the end of the Victorian pipeline in Wodonga and the stump at the NSW end in Wagga Wagga and explained that they were going to be joined. The gas could flow in either direction, although because Victoria's reserves were running low and Moomba's weren't, Victoria stood to benefit the most.
Which is how it was until just a handful of years ago.
At the height of the minerals boom and the height of oil prices (which drive international gas prices) three of Australia's big gas producers each decided to build two giant freezing plants at Gladstone in central Queensland. The six "trains", each with a capacity to freeze and export half as much gas as eastern Australia used per year, would be connected to the network of pipes that extended all the way to Adelaide and Melbourne.
They signed cast-iron contracts to sell the gas to Japan, which was hungry for energy in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster; contracts they needed in order to justify the enormous expense.
Finding gas may have been a lower priority.
The Gillard government was relaxed, boastful even. It ruled out introducing a gas reservation policy along the lines of the one in Western Australia that stipulates that a certain percentage of local gas has to be retained for local consumption.
Without quite realising, it approved the creation of what an AGL executive later described as a "giant vacuum cleaner for the east coast gas market, hoovering up all the gas it can get its hands on".
Two months ago something extraordinary happened. The Moomba to Sydney pipeline, which for its entire 40-year life had only run in one direction (hence its name) reversed course.
Gas was sent from Sydney to Moomba and then north to Gladstone to feed the LNG export trains. Sydney got the gas from Melbourne and, ultimately, Bass Strait. The sucking sound was gas that would have once cheaply warmed Australians being sent an extraordinary 4300 kilometres north across three state borders to be frozen and shipped to Japan.
KAGOME Australia is our largest tomato processor. Based at Echuca on the River Murray it exports in competition with Californian processors and is powerless to increase its prices. Gas accounts for 5 per cent of its costs. It has just been told the price will double. Worse still, it and other business are being offered only short-term contracts at "take it or leave it" prices for gas they fear isn't there.
Retooling to use another fuel is prohibitively expensive. They installed gas because of an implicit promise that it would always be there. Rod Sims, an energy expert who heads the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, said this week that manufacturers hit by the sudden shortage and price hikes were more likely to close than re-equip. The owner of South Australia's emergency gas "peaking" power plant closed half of it some years back because it couldn't afford the gas.
An (incorrect) way to describe what's happened is to say Australians are at last paying the international price for gas after being shielded from it for so long. But the international price is low. There's a glut. Australians are paying far more than the international price (more than Japan is paying for Australian gas) in order to allow the big three at Gladstone to fulfil watertight contracts.
So wide is the price gap and so short are we of our own gas that there's serious talk of setting up a floating terminal and importing it back (perhaps even from Japan) at what for users would be a cheaper price.
Making more of the stuff here wouldn't much help. It'd be sucked up to Gladstone.
The easiest way out would be for the Gladstone three to voluntarily give up some of what they have bought, and the Prime Minister is pressing them to do that. The other, essential, solution is to ensure that any future gas finds have a portion of what's extracted set aside for us, something I reckon ought to have happened all along.
Peter Martin is economics editor of The Age.
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/how-the-big-three-robbed-us-of-our-own-gas-20170315-guydtp.html
Santos an Australian company wants to extract gas maturely without fracking in NSW and supply the NSW market , The Greens have stopped it ,
Victoria will not allow gas development .
SA is in such s mess it is going to incentivsye has development .
The pollutes have totally stuffed up our electicity supply .
If gas production can be increased without hazard then I’m all for it … as long as ….
it doesn’t end up like this debacle!!
Feel very sorry for those around Chinchilla. The whole state will end up paying for this because Linc Energy has gone into liquidation with estimated debts of $300 million.
Flammable levels of hydrogen have been found at a number of locations near the UCG plant at Hopeland, a controversial gas project that has been blamed for contaminating huge swathes of prime Queensland farm land.
Contamination more widespread than first thought.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-09/flammable-levels-hydrogen-found-near-queensland-gas-plant/8256808?WT.ac=statenews_qld