JUMPIN' Jack Flash, it's a gas, gas gas!
That was 1968. If something was "a gas" it was great. It was good. They were optimistic times.
The Stones were high priests of a cultural revolution that changed the world forever (even if the CIA had a hand in distributing LSD to America's youth as a mind-control experiment gone wrong as part of the hideous MK-Ultra programs).
Go ahead, Google it. All true.
But today, in 2021, the word "gas" has become a weapon of war, and not in the nerve-gas sense.
We are in the midst of a complex and very real global energy shortage, but mention the word "gas" - even as a "transition fuel" on the way to the "hydrogen economy" being targeted by researchers the world over, including our own University of Newcastle's hydrogen cluster - and it's daggers drawn.
In a few short years, Australia has gone from being a relatively minor player in the gas industry to being one of the biggest exporters, with 2021 output having us fourth - selling 108 billion (!) cubic metres of the stuff in 2021 - behind Qatar (128 bcm), the United States (180 bcm) and top of the charts, everyone's favourite target, Russia, trading a colossal 241 bcm.
The West's Ukraine war sanctions may knock the Russians down a bit, but either way, Australian gas (owned by the multinational companies that dominate the industry) matters to the market.
But while all that gas goes elsewhere, domestic gas prices have gone through the roof.
Earlier this month, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission issued an interim report - its 13th, I kid you not - into "the supply of and demand for natural gas in Australia" - the latest step in an inquiry commissioned by the previous Coalition federal government in April 2017.
On Friday in Canberra, gas was on the agenda as state energy ministers met with federal Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, who has carriage of Labor's energy policy; including the "43 per cent by 2030" target approved this month by the House of Representatives and being examined by committee before going to the Senate for a vote as early as next month.
With price being - at its essence - a function of supply and demand, the pro-gas lobby has been arguing furiously that household and industry bills would fall if only they could extract more gas.
On the other side of the fence, environmentalists (and a growing portion, based on the election result, of the general public) are developing an aversion to gas, seeing it as a fossil fuel that will only add to climate change concerns and make it harder to reach the aforementioned 2030 target.
That's even though natural gas emits about half of the greenhouse gases that black coal does per unit of energy, and that coal still produces 60 per cent of Australia's electricity.
One of the flashpoints of the gas debate has been the Santos project at Narrabri, which would extract coal-seam gas from under the Pilliga State Forest using a network, the company says, of up to 850 individual gas wells, which would be able to operate without fracking.
Indeed, Santos told me on Friday that fracking was not part of the approval granted by the state government.
Environmental group Lock The Gate Alliance accepts this, but says a similar "non-fracking" coal-seam gas operation in south Queensland is able to apply for approval to frack individual wells if the flow to the surface is insufficient, with the pressurised injection of fracking liquids giving them a tickle along.
So time will tell.
Once operational, Santos still has to get its Narrabri gas to the coast, and on Thursday afternoon it announced it was buying Garbis Simonian, Hilton Grugeon and the other shareholders in Hunter Gas Pipeline Pty Ltd (HGP) out of their project.
As I reported in Friday's Herald, HGP had been trying to sell their approval to Santos since at least 2017, but without success.
Until now, Santos had been focused on another pipeline, the Western Slopes Pipeline, proposed by the big gas pipeline company APA.
It's by far the shortest route for Santos to get its gas to market.; 460 kilometres from Narrabri to a point near Condobolin along the main Moomba (South Australia) to Sydney pipeline.
HGP, by contrast, is 820 kilometres, and requires a spur line into Narrabri as well. In its statement to the stock exchange on Thursday, Santos described the already approved HGP as "a second route to southern markets for Queensland gas . . . adding competition to the domestic market".
The Western Slopes Pipeline project is yet to gain approval, and the NSW government's Major Projects portal shows it is two steps along an eight-stage process.
APA lodged a preliminary environmental assessment in 2017 and the government has issued two sets of requirements for the full EIS, first in May 2019 and then in June last year, but that's as far as things appear to have gone.
If Santos uses HGP, then Snowy Hydro's Kurri Kurri peaking plant would get more gas, but that's not the main game.
Nor is hydrogen, although political pressure to ensure that gas infrastructure is hydrogen-convertible will mean an added complication for infrastructure companies to adapt to.
This about getting gas to "east coast markets" (ie Sydney), and making money while doing it.
