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Australia mulls gas reserve policy
POLICY
THE Australian government will consider a nat- ural gas reserve policy as it seeks to bring down the cost of the fuel on the domestic market.
e country is set to become the world’s larg- est exporter of lique ed natural gas (LNG) in nancial year 2019-2020, with the country pro- jected to export 80mn tonnes compared with current leader Qatar’s 77mn tonnes.
e rise in shipments to foreign buyers has put upward pressure on domestic prices, how- ever, prompting both domestic and industrial consumers to induce the government to do something.
Resources Minister Matthew Canavan and Energy Minister Angus Taylor said on August 6 that they would review a range of policies in order to come up with options by February 2021. ese will include gas reservation, pipeline access and price transparency.
“Past approvals of large gas export projects have not adequately considered the impact on the domestic gas market and that has contrib- uted to some of the pressures we have seen in recent years. We cannot a ord to repeat these past mistakes,” Taylor and Canavan said in a joint statement.
Canavan told a press conference that should a gas reserve policy be introduced it would not affect Western Australia or existing develop- ments. WA has had a 15% gas reserve policy in place for many years and has been cited by con- sumer lobby groups as an example of how local gas prices can be kept low without sacri cing investment in new export projects.
Queensland, meanwhile, has already intro- duced its own gas reserve policy in the form of issuing new exploration blocks that are only permitted to supply the domestic market. e state has released more than 39,000 square km of land for gas exploration since 2015, with almost a quarter of that carrying domestic marketing requirements.
Canavan and Taylor added that the Aus- tralian Domestic Gas Security Mechanism (ADGSM) would be also reviewed. e mecha- nism was introduced in 2017 as a means of pre- venting LNG export projects from running at a supply de cit to the local gas market.
e central government also intends to put pressure on state governments to li moratoria on onshore drilling, which Canberra hopes will bring new supplies to market.™
NZ’s Kupe gas field begins to decline
PROJECTS & COMPANIES
NEW Zealand’s fourth largest natural gas eld, Kupe, has started to decline and will continue doing so until a still-to-be approved compres- sion project is brought online, a junior partner in the project has revealed.
Genesis Energy said on August 2 that record production in recent years was behind the o - shore eld’s decline, but noted that dwindling output was in line with reservoir modelling. e eld produced 23.2 petajoules (604.33mn cubic metres) in the nancial year 2018-2019, accord- ing to operator Beach Energy. e project also delivered 1mn barrels of oil.
Beach has a 50% stake in the eld which lies in the Taranaki Basin. Genesis owns 46% and New Zealand Oil & Gas (NZOG) holds the remaining 4%.
In a statement to the New Zealand Exchange (NZX), Genesis said production was anticipated to decline by 1.2-1.5% per month until the inlet compression project is completed in mid-winter 2021. It added that the actual rate of decline was likely to vary based on “overall production and other factors”.
Genesis said Beach had concluded the development study for the inlet compression
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