Last year I took a look at the question "Should Natural Gas Be Used To Power New Zealand ?", after reading an article from NZ PEPA executive John Pfahlert arguing that New Zealand should be building new gas fired power stations instead of trying to become carbon neutral, and concluded that this seemed a rather risky strategy - depending on continuing offshore exploration success.

The view of the Australian government and gas industry seems to be that our gas supplies are essentially unlimited, with the phrase "more than a century of supplies left" bandied about at every opportunity. Ex-Prime Minister John Howard used to dream of Australia becoming an "energy superpower", with a vastly expanded gas (LNG) export industry being a cornerstone of this vision, based on Western Australian LNG exports from offshore gas fields.

In this post I'll have a look at how much gas Australia has and how long it will last under a variety of scenarios - from an indefinite continuation of the current rate of production to a pell-mell conversion to use gas for all our energy needs combined with a rapid expansion of LNG exports.