The Aussie gas price continued to plunge yesterday as the evil gas cartel games the Albanese Government. The electricity price crashed right along with it:
The gas cartel is playing funny buggers:
East coast gas exporters including Santos and Origin Energy are understood to be in discussions through their industry lobby group on proposals that would bring more gas into the domestic market as they look to head off potential curbs to LNG exports next year that would eat into profits.
…The discussions come as equity analysts are crunching the numbers on the potential impact on Santos and Origin should LNG exports from Queensland be capped next year.
Credit Suisse has estimated the potential hit to Santos at less than 3 per cent of earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, assuming 1 million tonnes a year of LNG (56 PJ) is curtailed and Santos’ GLNG venture bears 66 per cent of the impact.
Another analyst said they anticipated no discernible impact…
What a disaster. A 3% hit to one company instead of a huge negative income and wealth shock of over $1tr to rock every business and household east of WA. How dare we!
More:
…maintenance outage at Origin’s Australia Pacific LNG project in Gladstone that started last Thursday that will provide additional gas into the domestic market to meet winter requirements.
Even the release of more gas for political purposes is gamed.
What terrific measures of Canberra cowardice these developments are. Why are we even having this discussion? Apply $7Gj reservation NOW and everything will be hunky dory.
Or will it? No. Why?
Cheap gas will fix TAS, VIC and SA electricity prices because it operates as the balancing fuel for cheap (unexported) brown coal and renewables. However, it will help but not fix NSW and QLD prices because they rely heavily on exported black coal which is also price sensitive to the Ukraine war.
That is why VIC power prices were yesterday $27MWh while NSW and QLD were still $150MWh.
So, assuming Albo’s cowards do finally apply reservation to gas, they will then need to apply a similar solution to the coal market. As a measure of how tight is the domestic market, you may recall that even gas cartelier Origin could not secure enough to run its NSW power plants recently.
Anyways, we are hopefully making progress, though so far it is more moral than real.
As an aside, I’m so hot right now that I received an invitation to the Palace to appear on Credlin last night. The video has not been posted yet.
I also did Martin North so if you’ve still got an appetite for getting angry about being screwed by energy cartels then there’s plenty more where that came from below…
