No one company has whizzed on Australia for longer and with a greater gush than Santos.
How this company does it is beyond my understanding. It’s not like it’s some too-big-to-fail entity. A vile South Australian export that has ravaged the East Coast for two decades while its share price has halved.
I mean, what is the point of it?
Yet, according to reporting today, STO has done it again. Somehow putting its own failing interests ahead of the nation.
Santos-backed Gladstone LNG has demanded federal Labor protect an option to extend an existing export contract, opening a new front in the fight over the Albanese government’s plan to reserve more gas for Australian customers.
A win for GLNG would allow the company to keep gas flowing to overseas customers under its legacy contracts, limiting the volumes it would have to make available to the domestic market.
It’s believed the eastern seaboard will experience potentially economically damaging supply shortfalls within years.
GLNG is widely expected to receive significant protection from the proposed requirement for LNG exporters to make gas equivalent to up to 20 per cent of their export volumes available to the domestic market. That is because legacy contracts mean it doesn’t have any excess capacity, and the government has vowed to ensure there isn’t any diplomatic incident by threatening supplies which regional allies in Korea, Malaysia and Japan rely on.
This extension is huge.
The existing KOGAS contract is about 3.5mt of LNG per year, and the option would extend supply for roughly five years, from 2031 through 2035.
Using ~55 PJ of gas per Mt of LNG: 3.5 Mtpa × ~55 PJ/Mt ≈ 193 PJ/year
So the extension is approximately 193 PJ/year × 5 years ≈ 960–970 PJ of gas
This is all cheap gas from the Cooper Basin, which will be exhausted by the end of the contract.
If STO were forced to recontract this one agreement with gas from elsewhere, it would solve Australia’s entire crisis.
As it is, if the contract extension is enabled, it will make the East Coast shortfall much worse during the most critical phase of the energy transition.
This scenario virtually guarantees higher utility prices, ongoing industrial collapse, and the need to renovate coal-fired power stations so they can keep running with acceptable reliability.
All to save one lying scumbag firm that knew from the start it didn’t have enough gas for its LNG export development.
You are being whizzed on from a towering height by this firm and a government that lets it get away with murder.
