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But the good news is that the region already has 8 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves – more than enough to meet the needs of the domestic market over the next decade, Core Collaborative chief executive Paul Taliangis told the AustralAsian Oil and Gas 2007 conference in Perth yesterday.
Most of the increased demand was expected to come from gas-fired electricity generation and industrial applications such as minerals processing, he said.
“Australia has adequate gas reserves and resources to meet demand through to at least 2017 and well beyond 2020 – if we achieve modest success from proposed exploration,” he said.
“Having said that, I could quite easily see these reserves tripling to around 20Tcf of CSM reserves. So I say ‘watch this space’ on this front.”
Taliangis used the conference to release a quarterly review of the outlook of Australia’s domestic gas sector through to 2020.
One projection was that by 2020 CSM would supply 35% of Australia’s east coast demand, offsetting declining conventional gas production from the Cooper Basin.
Taliangis said there was never any chance the CSM industry and PNG pipeline could have co-existed in the eastern states gas market.
“For PNG gas to flow in to the country at a rate of 300 petajoules, we’re talking 5-6 trillion cubic feet of reserves and that was going to take up all of the market,” he said.
“There was never any question that PNG and CSM could co-exist in harmony. They were always going to go head-to-head and thump each other.”
The study also found that natural gas was “expected to be the most significant element of Australia’s mid to longer term response to climate change,” especially if a carbon trading system was introduced, Taliangis said.
He predicted that a carbon tax of about $10 per tonne would be enough to make natural gas as cost-effective as coal.
“We need a clear government direction on how to handle pricing emissions,” he said.
“Coal is a fantastic fuel and will continue to play an important role in the future, but we also need an appropriate blending of gas and renewables to create a balanced energy portfolio.”
Using gas instead of coal would halve the emissions created in electricity generation, he said.
