Rick Newnham took up his new post at the start of last week after six years at Shell, which included roles as its regional economist for the Middle East and as UK economist, along with a contracts engineer seconded with Shell's Arrow Energy unit in Queensland.

 

He told Energy News that local service providers in the LNG space had a "great opportunity" to increase their output, and to also provide their services to companies around the world, particularly as WA will be one of the major LNG exporters in the world once Wheatstone and Gorgon Train 3 go online later this year.

 

"Australia itself will be one of the leading exporters rivalling Qatar, so we should have a great service export opportunity to go with that," he said.

 

His take on commodity prices is that "oil continues to have a positive outlook", though he cautioned to "keep an eye" on Iran and the US, and with that in mind he said predicting the oil price would be folly.

 

"I would encourage anyone looking at the oil price to take a conservative view, as we always should in economics," he said.

 

Reports surfaced this week that Iran was close to hitting the four million barrels per day target that it needed to reach before it considered joining rebalancing efforts after it was exempted from OPEC's recently announced production cuts.

 

A senior official at the state-owned National Iranian Oil Company reportedly said this week that the country was now pumping 3.9 million barrels of oil per day.

 

Costly US shale producers, meanwhile, are receiving new life from oil back up to around $US50/bbl and a Trump presidency that promises some regulatory relief.

 

Yet, more important to Newnham than LNG revenues dependent on oil prices to which LNG contracts are partly based, is stability in WA as a place to invest. 

 

While he would not comment directly on Labor's pledge to put a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, Newnham warned against "regulatory creep", particularly as industry was just starting to find its feet after more than two years of low oil prices and uncertainties remaining on that front.

 

"That's always something oil and gas companies are looking at - stability in policies, in the business environment, and a strong workforce to go with that," he said.

 

"That would be the challenge for the next government going forward, so we can attract as much investment as we can to the state in the future.

 

"Australia is widely regarded as a stable place to invest and WA follows in line with that. What would be good would be to continue that view.

 

"The current fiscal environment is a good one for people to invest. As a general rule, you could say any regulatory creep would not do great things for the market, particularly if it means locking out an entire part of the industry."