,

Who owns Australia’s gas?

DOES AUSTRALIA ACTUALLY OWN ANYTHING ANYMORE?

Australia was the world’s biggest exporter of Liquefied Natural Gas in 2021.

So why are we now paying more for our gas than overseas buyers?

More importantly, why are we faced with a crippling gas shortage?

Ask the Queensland Government.

The days of enjoying some of the cheapest gas prices in the world ended when our Government began exporting LNG back in 2015.

Seems LNG exporters have not just been exporting our coal seam gas reserves offshore, but gas from conventional sources as well.

Companies like Esso and BHP Billiton have reaped a windfall from the practice, while domestic households and industry gas users have been left to compete on price with foreign-owned LNG exporters needing to fill their overseas export contracts.

The Queensland Government should have taken a leaf out of the Western Australian Government’s playbook.

It wasn’t stupid.  It passed a law requiring LNG exporters to ensure that 15 percent of liquefied natural gas (LNG) was reserved for domestic use.

This has kept gas prices in WA much lower than those on the East Coast and ensured a secure domestic supply for West Australians.

Over on the East Coast, however, we are hearing of various proposals for building multi-million dollar gas import facilities – presumably to import back what we sent offshore at 100 times the cost.

Just to add insult to injury, a new report shows that virtually all Australia’s gas projects, producers and facilities are now foreign-owned.

The Australian Institute researchers, who had access to the Bloomberg Professional Terminal database, has revealed the extent to which foreign ownership has been grossly under-counted in official figures.

Not only are companies like Shell and Chevron 100 per cent foreign-owned, but so are many supposed Australian companies like BHP, Santos and Woodside.

BHP is actually 94% foreign owned and 82 per cent American owned.

So a more accurate description for BHP, nowadays, would be the “Big American”.

Four LNG Export Projects – Prelude, Ichthys, Gorgon and Queensland Curtis LNG – are 100% foreign owned.

Even the least foreign-owned, Pluto, is 84 percent foreign owned.

The report calculated the average foreign equity share by project capacity is 95.7 percent, with Australia’s share, a measly 4.3 percent.

These foreign-owned gas companies are all funneling their profits to owners overseas, and paying little to no tax on any of it here.

Worse, offshore LNG projects are only subject to a petroleum resource rent tax, not Commonwealth royalties.

Something which analysts say has cost Australians billions of dollars in lost revenue per project.

LNG Export Companies 95.7% Foreign Owned: Research Report

 

/1 Comment/by
, ,

Say goodbye to the Kingswood

THE ELECTRIC VEHICLE SCAM AND OUR CARLESS FUTURE

This whole idea of ‘transitioning’ over to electric vehicles, is starting to look more and more like a huge smokescreen to me.

One masking the true agenda behind Queensland’s ‘zero emissions’ future –getting rid of individual car ownership altogether.

You just have to take a close look at what electrifying the State’s whole transport system would entail, to understand the whole thing is completely impossible.

It means replacing ALL our petrol fuelled cars, trucks, trains, boats, motorcycles, barges and farm transport by 2050.

And probably a lot sooner given the Government’s current roadmap includes a 50% ban on combustion engine sales by 2030, and a 100% ban by 2036.

At that point they will either impose a complete ban or so many pollution taxes no-one will be able to drive them anyway.

People accepted this ‘transition’ largely because they were led to believe they will emerge from the whole process still owning some kind of car, albeit an electric one.

I see three key problems with that idea.

There’s time.

There’s scale.

And there’s cost.

Right now, there are over 1.2 billion motor vehicles in the world.

Just imagine what replacing 1.2 billion motor vehicles is going to mean in terms of energy, labour, cost and resources.

Does the world even have the number of engineers or manufacturing plants needed to build that many EVs, let alone all the new infrastructure and transmission capacity to support them?

In Queensland, we have 4,303,713 million registered motor vehicles, only 8,000 of which are electric.  That leaves 4,295,713 million vehicles to be replaced.

In 2019, Professor Richard Herrington of the Head of Earth Sciences at the British Natural History Museum, told the British Government:

“Converting UK’s vehicles to electricity by 2050 would require two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper production.”

That’s just the UK!

“Society needs to understand that there is a raw-material cost of going green”, Herrington wrote.

And that’s the problem.

Governments have not been honest with people about any of this.

Last month, green energy experts admitted that 90-95 percent of the supply chain for EVs simply “DOES NOT EXIST”.

The EV CEO of Ford Motors, RJ Scaringe, spelt it out – “the world simply doesn’t have the resources or supply chain to transition ALL Americans into EVs”.

“All the world’s cell production combined represents well under 10 percent of what we will need in 10 years” he said.

Did you catch that?

90 percent to 95 percent of the EV supply chain does not even exist yet!

Say goodbye to the Kingswood!!
/0 Comments/by