Election Watch – Will Dutton’s ‘methane election’ backfire?

Despite investing what is now years of time, money and effort into a nuclear-centred energy policy, Dutton’s Coalition party seems to have ditched the energy technology in favour of methane gas.

As RenewEconomy’s Giles Parkinson recently laid out perfectly in a graphic, gas got all the attention in Dutton’s budget reply, while nuclear got almost none:

It seems pretty likely that internal polling shows the Coalition that fossil gas is more accepted by Australians than nuclear power is. Nuclear is unfamiliar, novel and sounds expensive (in addition to actually being expensive).

With that in mind, you can imagine what compelled the normally combative Dutton to breezily accept the suggestions of David Pocock in setting aside a proportion of gas extracted to be used domestically – increasing the local supply of the fossil fuel to bring down energy prices.

The calculus at play here seems to have been packaging the domestic gas reservation scheme with a brutal, merciless axing of environmental and regulatory approvals for new fossil gas projects.

Unsurprisingly, Dutton seems to have made another major blunder. While gas major Santos hestitantly welcomed Dutton’s plan, the all-powerful “Australian Energy Producers” – the cashed-up gas lobby group and the designated tone-setter came out hard, criticising Dutton’s scheme as a “misfire“.

The response from the gas lobby – hand-wringing about “oversupply” – demonstrates something very important about gas and fossil fuels in general. The companies that produce them do not like selling their product cheaply.

This is why a cartel exists, in the form of OPEC, to artificially constrain the supply of oil to ensure people continue to overpay for energy. It is one of the many reasons it makes so much sense to shift away from an economy where intermediaries squat in the supply chain of fossil fuels to steal billions from those who require energy.

Gas producers will go down swinging and fighting before fossil fuels become cheap and affordable. Dutton is in real trouble here: he wants to promise ‘cheap gas’, but he can’t make that a real promise without enraging the great, big methane industry of Australia.

Another long-running trope being repeated constantly is the concept that, under Labor, gas supply has been cranked down.

Dutton said:

“Part of the problem that Labor’s created is that they’ve stopped the supply of gas, they’ve stopped new projects from taking place, and, of course, you haven’t tempered demand, and that’s driving up prices”

Dutton exists in a media environment where there is essentially no cost for issuing outright lies. He knows he isn’t going to be checked or taken to task, so he can freely describe the pattern in the chart below as Labor ‘stopping’ the supply of gas – 6,149.5 petajoules of gas supply in FY2021-22 and 6,200.5 in FY2022-23 (Table A2).

The pace of gas exports in particular has not let up in the slightest:

Nor has the gas project pipeline been bothered at all under Labor:

The reason fossil gas causes such crippling price impacts is because it is perfectly suited for price gouging by corporations.

And it doesn’t make a difference whether the gas is burned or dumped into the atmosphere in Australia or elsewhere, when it comes to climate impacts. The only solution is to decouple society from it – and that doesn’t seem to be something either of the major players are interested in doing.