Bad policy, nation underpowered

The prospect that Australia will need to import liquefied natural gas in 2026 to back up its precarious east coast supplies is the culmination of years of policy failures, especially at state level, to boost domestic supplies. The heads of energy companies have joined the Australian Energy Market Operator in warning that energy will be tight from next year as traditional supplies run low. Energy infrastructure business APA Group chief executive Adam Watson and Origin Energy chief executive Frank Calabria told energy reporter Colin Packham east coast supplies were depleting quickly and imports were shaping as the most viable solution. That would force households and businesses to pay more.

If essential, imports should be only a stopgap measure, with the Beetaloo Basin reserve in the Northern Territory belatedly on track for production. And after more than a decade of delays because of red tape, green lawfare and native title argument, Santos has revealed it could give the go-ahead for its $3.5bn Narrabri gas project in NSW as soon as next year. As with Beetaloo, the project should play a major role in easing Australia’s east coast gas shortfall. The dithering undermining the economy, jobs, business and living standards must stop.

That gas imports need to be considered in such a resource-rich nation reflects decades of policy failures at federal and state level. Australia also will have no access to LNG imports until 2026, Packham reports, setting up next year as precarious. As we reported last week, a pipeline that NSW and Victoria relied on during recent winters is set to run at near capacity for nearly all of next year, leaving no leeway in the event of a major coal-fired power station suffering an outage.

The nation’s overall energy future is also less clear in the wake of new figures revealing cuts to greenhouse gases have flatlined in recent years. Federal Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen insists Australia is on track to achieve its Paris target of a 43 per cent emissions reduction on 2005 ­levels by 2030. But with overall emissions running at about 28.2 per cent below the levels recorded in the year to 2005, there is a long way to go.

Taxpayers deserve more detail about the cost benefits of the government’s renewables rollout and the opposition’s nuclear energy policy, about which Peter Dutton has yet to provide costings. On Sunday at Collie in southwest Western Australia, where the Coalition wants to build a small modular reactor on the site of the Muja coal-fired power station, Mr Bowen ramped up his attack on the nuclear plan, arguing it would not meet electricity demands of consumers across WA.