Since writing about the perceived ‘crisis’ in Australia’s gas supplies, the amount of bullshit coming out of the media, not least social media, is bewildering…… Some of it is downright amusing, and most of it would be really funny, were it not so tragic.

There is so much disinformation out there, it’s hard to even know where to start. The Lock the Gate Alliance fell right into the fossil fuel industry trap with this ridiculous youtube video….

The last thing you need to do if you want to stop the fracking fiasco is to tell everyone there is a shortage of gas… because how do you deal with a shortage? You frack for more..! Especially when there is no shortage and Australia is swimming in gas.

There are no winners in this. The gas companies are forced to sell gas cheaply to Japan and South Korea, neither of which have any energy resources of their own. Australia is the second largest gas exporter after Qatar, and will overtake it within a few years. We export to the nations with the highest demand too. Japan alone, which imports 34% of the world’s gas, so desperate are they for the stuff, could take all our gas, were it not for the fact other arrangements are already in place. Ironically, we sell our gas there so cheaply, it beggars belief. Worse…Qatar raises three times as much in royalties as Australia for selling the same amount of gas. You can blame John Howard for this….. he didn’t believe in peak energy all those years ago when the contracts were signed, and literally forced the hands of the companies to agree to stupid prices which they are now unable to get out of. Unless the government steps in again.

It borders on the ridiculous that Japanese gas customers buy Australian gas more cheaply than Australians, especially as the gas is drilled in the Bass Strait, piped to Queensland, turned into liquid and shipped 6,700 kilometres to Japan … but the Japanese still pay less than Victorians. And I’m reliably informed that piping the gas from Victoria to Queensland costs ten times as much as moving oil…… imagine the ERoEI of doing this..?

Notwithstanding Alan Kohler announcing on ABC news the other night that the era of cheap energy was over (yes, he actually said this… nearly fell of my chair…), energy is not dear. Remember this video? If people were paid for their labour energy at the same rate as fossil fuels, they would be paid SIX CENTS AN HOUR…… that sounds so dreadfully expensive….

While AGL was earnestly talking up gas shortages in 2014, BHP Petroleum chief Mike Yeager told journalists:

We want to make sure that the market knows that the Bass Strait field still has a large amount of gas that’s undeveloped … We have a lot of gas in eastern Australia that’s available. It’s more important to let the citizens of Victoria and New South Wales, and to some degree, you know, even Queensland … there’s plenty of gas to supply those provinces for – you know, indefinitely.

AGL later quietly issued a release to the ASX conceding it had plenty of gas supply. So there you go, it has nothing to do with those greenies locking their gates up after all….

Even the Guardian is at it…..:

Gas prices have doubled and in some cases tripled because gas suppliers are now capable of exporting our gas to high paying customers in Asia.

Like whom exactly…?

And…

Complicating matters is that gas suppliers rushed in to sign export contracts and then subsequently found they didn’t have enough gas to fulfill them. This has left the Australian domestic market very short of gas.

For pity’s sake, where do these people get their information from…?

Now, keeping all our gas to ourselves gets complicated here, and I hope I get this right, as this whole issue is really starting to make my head spin. It turns out, much of the money invested in the gas export system was actually borrowed from Japan. Ever heard of the yen carry trade? It is when investors borrow yen at a low interest rate, then exchange it for U.S. dollars or any other currency in a country that pays a higher interest rate on its bonds. Like Australia does. So if we decide to tell the Japanese to get stuffed, their banks may well want their money back, at which stage the brown stuff hits the fan…… Does our merchant banker PM know this I wonder……?

Luckily for us, last September, Japan’s energy minister informed the world that imports of LNG would continue falling. They fell by 4.7% in 2015 and another 2% in 2016 amid a rising commitment to renewables and the rebooting of nuclear reactors that were shut down after the Fukushima disaster……

Meanwhile, they are all panicking here in Australia trying to keep our ‘energy security’ intact by building batteries and a new gas powered station in SA, and pumped hydro energy storage in NSW at a cost of some three billion dollars. All made with fossil fuels of course, because there’s nothing like them… Most of the benefits will be swamped by population growth within less than a decade……

Because dear reader, the crisis is not a gas crisis, it’s a growth crisis, and it’s all coming to a head. But you already knew that, and we all know nobody will do a thing about it.