"It is absolutely vital that Australian industries, Australian businesses, Australian families have the gas they need at a price they can afford," he said.

The government has left all options on the table in terms of intervention should the gas producers not come up with solutions.

But industrial buyers see little relief from high prices in any case.

"Even securing some sort of commitment from the primary producers to ensure gas is available for emergency needs is not going to curtail the pricing," said David Karney, general manager of Ace.

"The issue is going to be, even if the gas is available, no one is going to be able to afford it."

Wednesday's summit will bring together the chief executives of major local producers such as Santos and Origin Energy, as well as the heads of the three Queensland LNG projects which many buyers blame for the soaring prices.

Little comfort

Last month's initial meeting called by Mr Turnbull resulted in measures to guarantee gas supply for peak demand power generation, as well as longer-term commitments towards increasing local supplies, improving market transparency, pipeline market reforms and persuading state and territory governments to lift onshore gas bans.


"All we've heard are vague assurances that gas will be available for electricity shortages," said Garbis Simonian, managing director of NSW aluminium scrap processor Weston Aluminium.

"There is no commitment to get prices down to something that's reasonable even to the level of global prices that our competitors are paying overseas."

Mr Simonian and others put the blame on Santos's $US18.5 billion GLNG venture which is sucking up gas from the southern states to help fill its export plant, rather than relying on gas from its own coal seam gas acreage in Queensland.

He points to the environmental impact statement for the GLNG venture in which it said it "is not diverting gas from local markets to export markets" and "has no direct implications for domestic gas prices".

GLNG was the only one of the three Queensland gas exporters that was unable to commit at the PM's last meeting on March 15 to become a net gas contributor into the east coast market and government and industry sources say it will feel most of the political heat on Wednesday.

Suggestions being aired by industry sources include preventing GLNG from importing gas from outside Queensland, or imposing controls on exports unless domestic buyers have enough supplies. Santos declined to comment ahead of the meeting.

But the gas industry expressed disappointment at AiG's stance which it said involved advocating "