Crucial negotiations over energy security involve bewildering jargon

IF YOU’RE confused by all the terms in the gas debate, don’t worry you’re not alone. Here is what they all mean.

Picture: Bloomberg

THE top-level showdown over gas supplies has left ordinary Australians baffled and not knowing their petajoule from their terajoule.

The terms being used are strangers to the usual public debate and the amounts being discussed are beyond the experience of householders understandably struggling to keep up.

And the scale of gas usage and demand is staggering.

For example, when a tanker pulls out of an Australian port loaded with liquefied natural gas for sale overseas it is carrying around 3.5 petajoules of the fuel.

Picture: AAP

It doesn’t sound much, but that is a huge amount.

A joule is a measure of thermal energy. A petajoule is a quadrillion (one followed by 15 zeros — a million billion) of the little devils. A terajoule is a trillion of them, a gigajoule is one billion joules, and a megajoule is a mere one million of them.

Just one petajoule is enough gas to fuel demand from a fair-sized regional centre such as Wollongong, or Penrith, or Warrnambool for a year. Or keep the lights on at a major industrial site such as a chemical plant.

So that single tanker load could keep all three of those regional centres running for 12 months.

The high-end average gas use by a Victorian household is 55 gigajoules a year while in warmer NSW it is 20 gigajoules.

So back to that tanker: Its cargo could, using the higher annual average, power a Victorian home for some 63,000 years.

Picture: BLOOMBERG NEWS

The projects domestic gas shortage for 2018 was at the bottom end 54 petajoules. That means some 16 of those tankers would have to be kept at home to make up for a domestic shortfall.

The east coast gas demand is about 695 petajoules a year.

The terms were tossed around on Wednesday when Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull reached agreement with the big three of the industry — Shell, Origin and Santos — to prevent the projected shortfall.

The deal would see an extra 54 petajoules of gas for domestic use, an expected shortfall, and up to 107 petajoules if needed.

The Government yesterday had warned the gas shortage was must greater than originally anticipated, and that it would use its export powers to divert supplies to local customers if necessary.