Hats off to Peter Coleman at WPL, from Fairfax:
The natural gas industry has been “out to lunch”, taking years to build LNG projects that ran well over budget and only has itself to blame for failing to capture a bigger share of the fossil fuel market, Woodside Petroleum chief executive Peter Coleman has declared.
Coleman pointed to the $200 billion figure that is cited for investment in LNG over the past 10 years in Australia and said it was nothing to be proud of, representing a failure to deliver on what was promised.
“Whilst we may wax lyrical about the $200 billion, it actually started as $100 billion,” he told the APPEA oil and gas industry conference in Brisbane. “We didn’t deliver on our promise. We delivered a very expensive energy source.”
Coleman took the industry to task for losing discipline in investment, making projects too complex, and losing touch with gas markets and said a total change in thinking is required.
“We were taking years to build our projects and we became too expensive, we allowed the opposition, the competition to take our place,” he said. “The fact that gas holds such a low percentage of fossil fuel usage today is our complacency; the fuel itself hasn’t changed.”
Take that Grant King of rent seeking.
