Meet David Knox. Australian energy doyen.
Mr Knox was Santos CEO when it played a central role in the formation of the east coast gas cartel:
As Santos worked toward approving its company-transforming Gladstone LNG project at the start of this decade, managing director David Knox made the sensible statement that he would approve one LNG train, capable of exporting the equivalent of half the east coast’s gas demand, rather than two because the venture did not yet have enough gas for the second.
“You’ve got to be absolutely confident when you sanction trains that you’ve got the full gas supply to meet your contractual obligations that you’ve signed out with the buyers,” Mr Knox told investors in August 2010 when asked why the plan was to sanction just one train first up.
“In order to do it (approve the second train) we need to have absolute confidence ourselves that we’ve got all the molecules in order to fill that second train.”
…When GLNG was approved as a two-train project, Mr Knox assuredly answered questions about gas reserves.
“We have plenty of gas,” he told investors. “We have the reserves we require, which is why we’ve not been participating in acquisitions in Queensland of late — we have the reserves, we’re very confident of that.”
But even then, and unbeknown to investors, Santos was planning more domestic gas purchases, from a domestic market where it had wrongly expected prices to stay low. This was revealed in August 2012, after the GLNG budget rose by $US2.5bn to $US18.5bn because, Santos said, of extra drilling and compression requirements.
The east coast has been short of gas ever since, even as the global price crashed.
This has ensured a decade of energy shocks as renewables take-up has been met with an ever more aggressive gas cartel controlling firming power.
In 2015, as the Santos share price was crushed by writedowns owing to the over-investment, Mr Knox was sacked by the Santos board and fled back to the UK.
But five years is a long time in Australia. And Mr Knox soon returned to join the CSIRO in 2018 and to chair Snowy Hydro in 2020.
There he oversaw the implementation of Malcolm Turnbull’s energy storage catastrophe, Snowy Hyrdo 2.0. A project that is now six years late with a tripled budget of $6bn. With more to come!
The Turnbull/Knox white elephant is also responsible in some measure for the crowding out of private investment in energy storage across the east coast, guaranteeing more power for the gas cartel for longer.
Then there is this little beauty:
Mr Knox told the committee that the $600 million Kurri Kurri plant, formally called the Hunter Power Project, would come online “with a slight delay” from its targeted December 2023 date due to flooding at the site, and it would initially run 100 per cent on gas.
“Subsequent to that as the hydrogen supply becomes available we can go to 15 per cent hydrogen,” he said.
By helping make cheap Aussie gas the most expensive in the world, as well as being a part of delays to its substitute, Mr Knox has become a kind of one-man carbon tax that promotes the most expensive possible transition to a decarbonised grid.
But wait, there’s more:
A senior executive at CSIRO has been overpaid by $200,000 over the course of three years and has not been asked to pay it back yet.
Representatives from Australia’s top scientific research organisation admitted during a Senate Estimates hearing on Thursday that David Knox, the deputy chair of the CSIRO’s board of directors, was overpaid between 2018 and 2020.
That should be enough to cover Mr Knox’s next power bill.
Or is free energy a part of his package?
