Speaking late last month, the former Liberal Opposition leader told parliament Ichthys partners Inpex and Total had been planning to bring LNG to Dongara for regasification and injection into Dongara gas field and the underused Parmelia pipeline.

Presumably this would not have been done via a conventional regasification plant but instead via a simpler and cheaper system, perhaps one similar to Woodside's proposed OceanWay system, which involves onboard regasification and offtake buoys linked to onshore infrastructure via a seabed pipeline.

According to a report last week in the Northern Territory News, Inpex external affairs manager Sean Kildare said the company had volunteered to negotiate with the NT utility Power and Water to supply emergency gas to the Territory.

Omodei went on to say that the State and Federal Government-backed Kimberley LNG hub - the idea that finally drove Inpex to seriously consider relocating the downstream portion of its project in Darwin - was poor risk management.

"I believe that the Government's current policy on hubs will lead to a security risk," he said.

"If any kind of explosion occurred in the centre of those facilties, the state would have been crippled for six to 12 months. The idea of a hub on the Broome Peninsula is flawed and proof of that is the situation on Varanus Island."