It used to be said, of something pointless, that it was like “sending coal to Newcastle”. Thanks to green lawfare, Australia may soon be doing just that, only with gas. Australia is one of the largest exporters of liquified natural gas in the world, yet its suffering such an acute gas shortage that it will likely have to start importing the stuff.
How on earth could such a ridiculous scenario come about?
You guessed it: greens.
As I wrote recently, Australia may be the only country in the world that pours millions of taxpayer dollars into quangos whose sole purpose is using lawfare to cripple the nation’s finances and security. The Environmental Defenders Office and Environmental Justice Australia have helped make Australia the “Lawfare Capital of the World”, using often underhanded and deceitful lawsuits to block resource projects. Worse, left-wing governments like Victoria have outright banned new gas developments, as well as gas appliances in new homes.
The rest of the world isn’t near so stupid. Which is why they’re buying up as much of the gas that the green-left are demonising.
While Australia is one of the top exporters of liquefied gas, massive volumes of production from Queensland’s gas fields are locked into long-term export contracts to LNG buyers in Japan, Korea and China, and gas produced in WA cannot be transported to the eastern states.
The southern states’ gas shortfall is driven by dwindling supply from fields in Bass Strait, which have historically provided up to two-thirds of their demand.
State governments have rolled out schemes to drive down gas usage, ban gas hook-ups in new homes and encourage people to switch to electric appliances. But the market operator said gas use was not falling fast enough to avoid shortfalls.
A new gas field cannot be built in time and the existing pipeline from Queensland’s vast gas fields is already running at capacity amid elevated demand for heating and power this winter.
Victoria already has a gas import terminal, at the site of the old Shell oil refinery in Geelong. But environmental groups are determinedly protesting not just using the existing terminal, but building any new ones. The green loons want every household to switch to electricity-only, despite the staggering cost (tens of thousands of dollars per household) and the massive drain this would impose on already perilously-stretched electricity supplies (itself a result of the green obsession with weather-dependent energy).
Meanwhile, local gas producers say more should be done to tap new supplies around the country to boost energy security.
“Utilising our resources and utilising storage can hopefully get us to the point where it diminishes the requirement or excludes the requirement for import terminals,” Brett Woods, the chief executive of gas producer Beach Energy, said.
The Age
Japan, for one, is not falling prey to the madness gripping Australia’s political and media elite.
Energy giant Santos has struck a 10-year deal to sell super-chilled liquefied gas to Japan, underscoring what the company argues is the Asian nation’s long-term appetite for imported gas even as the world tackles climate change.
The Age
This one sentence captures the clueless deceit of the left-media in a nutshell. Even while acknowledging that gas is vital to a nation’s energy security, the media peddle the self-serving lie that ‘the world tackles climate change’. By which they mean banning fossil fuels.
This is a lie so audacious that only a mainstream media journalist could believe it. In fact, global demand for coal, oil and gas continue with record-high consumption and growth. Simply put, the world is absolutely not abandoning fossil fuels en masse. This is as true of Australia and New Zealand as it is of India and China. Even Europe: for all the EU’s bragging that “renewables” have overtaken fossil fuels, what they neglect to mention is that nearly all of this “renewable” energy comes from so-called “biomass”. That is, burning wood.
Not even a Jonathan Swift could cook up a scenario as mad as this.
