Twiggy Forrest wants to entrench the east coast gas cartel with his LNG import terminal. Now the Stokes family is into it, at the AFR:
Seven Group Holdings boss Ryan Stokes has urged the Morrison government to maintain regulatory certainty in the oil and gas industry as a way to boost east coast gas supply and investment.
Mr Stokes said he expected the government to take a cautious approach to tinkering with regulation “given the consequences for such an important industry”.
‘If you want to see more east cast gas, more investment, that regulatory certainty and support is important,’ says Seven Group chief executive Ryan Stokes.
Seven Group has become a significant player in the sector through its 29 per cent share in Beach Energy, which is looking to accelerate growth in reserves and production.
We don’t want or need more gas investment. It’s all too expensive. Our problem is we’ve over-invested in gas export terminals.
What we want and need is to keep some of the cheap gas here rather than selling it all to Asia and keeping the expensive stuff for ourselves.
Beach loves a high local gas price because it makes uneconomic gas fields profitable. Nothing it can do on supply will change that one iota. It’s reserves are not cheap or large enough.
Besides, cheaper gas is already supposed to be a done deal. The Morrison Government tax cut legislation was passed by Centre Alliance in exchange for a price trigger to be put into the Australian Domestic Gas Security Mechanism (ADGSM). The ADGSM review is complete and recommended that price be the ACCC’s net-back benchmark based upon the Japan/Korea Marker, currently trading at around $4. At net-back that is $2.50Gj or so. The current east coast gas price is $11Gj.
From what I hear, CA fully expects that the Government will honour the deal. Yet Scotty form Marketing is doing deals with NSW to develop the Narrabri gas field with breakevens around $7-8Gj.
Either Stokes is flogging a dead horse or Scotty form Marketing told Centre Alliance a $158bn lie.
