But in the months ahead, things changed.
But even then, and unbeknown to investors, Santos was planning more domestic gas purchases, from a domestic market where it had wrongly expected prices to stay low.
This resulted in immense utility price spikes because as renewable power output increased so did the role of gas as the marginal cost producer in the NEM.
Surging renewables and alternative dispatchable baseload power such as battery storage have slowly eaten into that cartel’s local price gouge but it goes on.
But they were highly polluting unconventional reserves that not only produced immense quantities of greenhouse gases but mountains of carcinogenic salts to boot.
The NSW chief economist went to work on the problem and created a framework of 16 safety conditions under which the gas could be safely extracted.
But, again, STO was not done.
Kevin Gallagher, the head of energy giant Santos, is a University of Glasgow graduate and diehard fan of Glasgow’s Celtic Football Club.
This was clear when Scott Morrison and his Energy minister, Angus Taylor, finally unveiled “the plan” to deliver net zero by 2050 this week.
The plan’s fine print shows Australian coal exports will fall in the global push for net zero, but gas can thrive for decades to come.
The government, like the gas industry, is proposing vast amounts of the greenhouse gas emissions can be permanently buried in the deep underground geological storage basins around Australia, which once held oil and gas reserves.
And, critically, it allows Australia’s weak 2030 emission-cutting target to stand at just 26 to 28 per cent, well below most of the developed world, despite Morrison saying that Australia would “meet and beat” that target.
At the gas lobby’s talkfest in June, Gallagher described Australia as “a carbon storage superpower based on our vast tracts of pastoral and cropping land, and our depleted oil and gas reservoirs”.
With the climate crisis deepening, oil and gas companies such as Santos and ExxonMobil have stepped up their lobbying on CCS and are looking keenly at depleted gas reservoirs to make money from the CCS solution.
Climate activists and energy experts have long questioned the economic and environmental credentials of CCS as a way to reduce greenhouse emissions for coal and gas.
But the gas industry knows the liquefied natural gas business model can’t survive without dealing with its emissions – and CCS is one of the few cards it has to play.
In a world first, the Energy minister announced companies such as Santos could get “carbon credits” from the government for new CCS projects.
Until now, carbon offsetting in Australia has seen companies invest in projects such as reforestation, renewable energy, energy efficiency or efficient farming to reduce or remove greenhouse gas emissions.
While many climate scientists recognise carbon capture and storage will play a role in reducing emissions for a number of industries, they warn against using it as a way to expand the coal and gas industry.
Taylor’s decision to grant carbon credits for CCS has been widely criticised by climate groups.
At the same time as Santos was lobbying for CCS carbon credits, Gallagher hit the “go” button on Barossa, a huge new gas development 300 kilometres north of Darwin, which has been described as the most greenhouse-intensive LNG project in Australia’s history.
CCS is not proven.
The storage project is supposed to be capable of storing at least 80 per cent of the carbon dioxide produced by the Gorgon LNG facility, or around 4 million tonnes a year.
Chevron is understood to have spent more than $3 billion building the carbon capture facility, but it took several years after the start of gas production for the Gorgon CCS project even to begin operation due to delays and technical difficulties.
It is understood regulators may ask Chevron to offset the emissions it failed to store by purchasing offsets from either local or international carbon markets.
This will include blue hydrogen from those with access to low-cost natural gas resources and carbon capture potential – Russia, Canada, the United States and Saudi Arabia – and green hydrogen from those with vast renewable resources – Australia and the Middle East.
In a sensitivity analysis in which the methane emission rate from natural gas is reduced to a low value of 1.54%, greenhouse gas emissions from blue hydrogen are still greater than from simply burning natural gas, and are only 18%-25% less than for gray hydrogen.
It is the corruption of the political economy in ways that profit it over the environment, economic efficiency, market functionality, the national interest and the public good.
That Santos is a rogue gas robber baron; a huge political donor and lobbyist; a purveyor of snake oil and lies; an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen; a plaything of Chinese interests, and a legacy of a planet-killing energy regime, has somehow become pre-requisite over indictment.
ScoMo & his climate deniers have given them one, the Chinese would be stupid not to blame us.
I now use reverse cycle a/c and shut down the gas heating, so the higher the local gas prices the shorter my PV system payback period.