Speaking to journalists in a conference call last Friday, Robinson and Beckett said the petroleum industry was aiming to increase Australia's domestic and export gas sales, which would help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while also trying to halt or even reverse the costly decline in the country's declining oil production.

Beckett said APPEA had several key goals.

• that oil and condensate production as a proportion of liquid fuels consumption is, on average, maintained at the 2006 level of 57% or better;
• that LNG production capacity increases from forecast production of 20 million tonnes per annum in 2008 to at least 50-60MMtpa by 2020;
• that the use of natural gas for industrial purposes and as a competitive feedstock for resources processing doubles; and
• that, in a competitive electricity market, 70% of all new electricity generation capacity installed in Australia is gas-fired.

Robinson argued these goals were not only in the industry's interest, but also in the national interest.

She said increased use of gas, domestically and in export markets, would reduce the use of coal, which produces significantly higher levels of greenhouse gases than natural gas, while maintaining or improving on current levels of liquid fuels self-sufficiency would prevent a harmful deterioration in Australia's current accounts deficit.

However, these goals were not likely to be achieved unless the industry's regulatory burden was lightened and more incentives were given to companies to explore frontier regions.

"The approvals processes and regulations covering projects, especially large gas projects, is too difficult," Robinson said.

"We have seen small projects requiring 163 decision points. We've seen a team of 90 people on Pluto navigating the way through approvals and regulations.

"We need a deep analysis of regulations and approvals processes, and we are pleased that COAG has now committed to such an analysis."

She argued that government departments would also benefit from simplifying and streamlining their regulatory processes as they were finding it hard to recruit and retain staff.

Beckett said the Howard and Rudd governments and the Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism had worked with APPEA to develop more than 50 recommendations for reforming the Offshore Petroleum Act.

"We expect to reduce the core regulations from 13 to just three - resource management, safety and environment," he said.

"This work has the potential to remove over 100 separate decision points without compromising the ability to regulate the things that matter."

APPEA was optimistic that this would reduce the delays associated with oil and gas projects, particularly large LNG projects. But Beckett said government also had to find ways to encourage explorers to enter frontier basins that might hold the next generation of major oil finds.

"If we want to have reasonable levels of [liquids fuels] self-sufficiency in 10 years time, we have to start acquiring geophysical information in frontier areas now," he said.

Beckett said it was important that government continued to acquire pre-competitive seismic in underexplored regions and that it considered possible tax incentives for frontier explorers.