If there is a surprise in that verdict of more losers than winners it might be found in the inference that there any winners at all in Australia losing another mega-bucks resource project.
In dollar terms, the mothballing of the Browse onshore project - as designed and promoted over the past few years - probably represents a high-water (or low-water) mark in terms of resource developments canned, topping the $30 billion Olympic Dam copper and uranium mine by a comfortable margin.
There was, however, a large group of interested players in the Browse game who did welcome the cancellation of the project as it has been known - the shareholders of Woodside.
Being members of the investing class and rarely seen in public, the shareholders gave their reaction in the way they know best - on the stock market.
Within minutes of the formal announcement from Woodside on Friday, the value of the company soared by more than $1.1 billion, a number derived by calculating the value of the company before than announcement and the peak share price on Friday.
For the statistically alert the actual numbers were a pre-cancellation Woodside share price of $35.28 and a Friday peak price of $36.70, with the extra $1.42 being applied to the company's 823.9 million shares on issue.
While seemingly meaningless to anyone outside the investment world that price difference represented a $1.1 billion gift to Woodside shareholders. In The Slug's book an extra billion dollars is the definition of a winner.
What remains to be seen is whether Woodside management will take the next step and actually share some of the extra wealth generated by mothballing Browse through a share buyback or special dividend.
While that might also seem a somewhat obscure suggestion it is one that introduces the first of the big Browse losers - some of the senior managers at the company.
The reason they are on The Slug's list of losers is that they persisted in spending vast amounts of shareholder funds on a project that unofficially crashed more than a year ago when the biggest shareholder in Woodside, Royal Dutch Shell, said it was not in favour of a land-based LNG processing centre.
Far better, said Shell, to switch the focus to a floating LNG system, or a long pipeline to the existing North West Shelf and Pluto processing facilities near Karratha.
An amusing number - but one which will never be revealed - is precisely how much Woodside management spent on its doomed James Price Point LNG processing option after Shell said it might be best to stop and switch focus.
Because nothing comes cheap in the oil and gas world, especially LNG processing, it would not be a surprise to learn at some stage that more than $100 million was wasted on the doomed onshore option.
Two other Browse losers are worth mentioning. The government of Western Australia, particularly the state's Premier Colin Barnett, who insisted (perhaps for domestic political consumption) that the Browse option was alive and well - when deep down even he would have known he was flogging a dead horse.
For Barnett the problem of being a loser will be quickly forgotten. He already has what he wanted - re-election. By the time the next state election comes around he will have made his glorious exit to a post-political life as a farmer.
The real losers - and The Slug feels genuinely sorry for them - are the traditional Aboriginal people of the Kimberley who have seen their second onshore LNG project whipped out from under them in less than five years.
The original loss was the Ichthys project, which is piping its gas to Darwin after being beaten into submission by a well-run anti-gas campaign from people who live far from the Kimberley.
Browse is a second loss courtesy of the same people who want to keep the Kimberley as a wilderness for occasional social outings and a chance to admire the primitive locals as they forage around for a living in the red dust of Australia's most remote region.
If that sounds an extreme view it's not really because what the people of the Kimberley have is a quaint but essentially impoverished lifestyle that offers few of the modern world's comforts, such as jobs and decent healthcare services - and now have no chance of anything better.
Whether Browse becomes an FLNG development, or one end of a long pipeline, is probably irrelevant because the anti-gas protestors got what they wanted, as did the Woodside shareholders, while the people of the Kimberley got nothing, which makes them the biggest losers.
