Looks as though the East Coast has got some gas reserves set aside, for generation.
The big problem with gas is that for the past third of a century pretty much everyone has seen it as the solution to some problem.
The Australian Labor Party, Margaret Thatcher, BHP, Rio Tinto, Greenpeace and an assortment of local councils are an unlikely bunch to have anything at all in common but they do when it comes to gas.
Many associate the Coalition, or COALition as they prefer to call it, with coal. I won't argue about that but to the extent that's true, it could also be said that the ALP has been pretty close to the gas industry since the 1980's.
Thatcher liked gas since it was one of the keys to smashing the coal unions in the UK. Not many jobs to be had running gas turbines and it was a direct alternative to coal. That it just happened to greatly lower CO2 emissions made it an easier sell once that issue entered the mainstream consciousness.
Mining companies jumped on board because they needed power in the middle of nowhere. With governments not threatening to tax it as with diesel, and the simplicity of just plonking a pipeline in or even on the ground, it's a winner.
Greenpeace liked it because it seemed the easiest solution to avoiding Chernobyl Mk 2 and it also offered an alternative to coal. Plenty of other environmental groups have jumped on the gas bandwagon over the years, seeing it as preferable to everything from transmission lines to coal.
During the carbon tax era in Australia, there was very strong support from those on the "environmental" side for building a 2GW baseload gas-fired power station in Victoria to partly replace coal. Energy Australia almost went ahead and did it, all that stopped them was the political instability around it all.
Local councils liked it too. It's one sure way to get wood smoke out of the air if everyone heats with gas.
And of course households, commercial building managers and manufacturing companies have likewise been more than happy to use an energy source that turns up via a simple pipe in the ground, creates no waste to dispose of, needs little or no labour to use and which raises no objections.
And so on. Pretty much everyone's seen gas as the solution to something or at least a "less bad" alternative.
Trouble is, as was pointed out on this forum a decade ago and has been noted by many over literally the past 50 years, gas is a finite resource and in terms of conventional reservoirs a fairly limited one. If we're going to use it then over time the harder, more costly and more environmentally damaging sources of supply will inevitably be brought into production to supply demand.
That it has come to the point where the east coast (which in this context means the whole country except WA and NT) of Australia finds itself short on gas is a classic case of lack of foresight. Failing to grasp that there's no magic pudding, it's a finite resource, and that exporting two thirds of production is a sure fire way to deplete the currently producing fields rather quickly.
I'm not arguing that we should frack all the farmland and so on but there's a reality of numbers at work here. Can't burn it without producing it and all up rather a lot of gas consuming infrastructure has been built which now needs gas to operate.