From Domainfax comes a new chapter in the history economic stupidity:
Large industrial customers in north-west Queensland paid on average $11.97 a gigajoule for gas in 2015, compared to $5.68 in Victoria, a new report for the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science has found.
Industrial gas prices have been steadily rising in all states in recent years, except in Western Australia where prices peaked in 2009 and are softening. But buyers in Victoria benefit from their proximity to conventional gas fields in the Bass Strait and their distance from the three Gladstone LNG projects, which all started production within the last 14 months.
As a result, the biggest price increases over the past two years have been in Queensland, which has displaced WA as the most expensive state for gas for the first time since 2006.
“The further away you are from Gladstone the better off you were,” said Jim Snow, at Oakey Greenwood, the consultancy that wrote the report for the government.
“As you go down the coast the impact gets less and less.”
Truly you could not get more backwards than this. Over 2015 this is what happened to the international LNG price:
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.