Johnbennetts
I gtet the idea from the gas companies. Check this:
http://www.qgc.com.au/media/100587/13--shipping1.pdf

or this:
http://www.glng.com.au/Content.aspx?p=110

LNG tankers are big, sophisticated eskies, relying mainly on insulation to keep LNG liquid. The liquid is actually at a slow boil, with the boil-off gas used to either power the ship or re-liquified, but it does not rely on pressure to sustain it as a liquid.

The pipeline option is also fraight with problems. A single pipeline to a single market might conceivably represent a cheaper way to transport gas than an LNG project – though I doubt it. But several factors suggest to me pipelines are not a good option for Australia’s gas exports.

We don't have a single source of LNG, we source it from WA, Qld and the NT. And We don’t have a single market for LNG, we sell it to Japan, China and Korea. Future markets could include India, the smaller south-east Asian countries, or indeed anywhere in the world with a regasification terminal (we even had discussions with California before the USA developed its unconventional gas industry). Pipelines will never have the flexibility that shipping has to meet new, variable and unexpected demand.

We don’t know how much gas we have, nor what future demand will be. While onshore pipelines can expand capacity fairly easily through looping, compression, etc, this is not true for underwater pipes – especially in deep water. Piping gas will not allow us to expand supply to meet demand as readily as shipping it.

If we own the infrastructure and it is in our territory, we can control it. Sovereign risk multiplies rapidly when infrastructure crosses the borders of unfriendly neighbours. One reason Europe is interested in importing LNG despite its higher cost is to reduce reliance on gas piped from Russia through the Ukraine.

And I think it unlikely we’ll ever pipe biofuels to Japan

Oh – and another factual error. Australia’s GDP in 2011-12 was 1,473 billion, so $160 billion of LNG investment is equivalent of 10.8% of GDP, not 16%.
http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/5204.02011-12?OpenDocument

JohnBennetts

This comment is simply absurd. "Proven and probable resources of gas in Australia's south east (Vic and SA) are equal to about ten years' production at current rates."

You really need to check up on this stuff. If you look again you'll find that if the figure is true it is relevant to existing, conventional reservoirs and not shale and does not allow for new discoveries.. If you went back 10 years you may find they had the same figure for reserves. Then if you look through the literature you'll realise that the reserve figure is a function of price and availability of alternate sources and a couple of other factors such as technology - it has nothing to do with any actual limit to the resource in particular areas as such.

So the seeming rise and rise of Coal Seam Gas industry outside Vic and SA, would affect the search for new basins in those states - why look for the stuff if the CSG segment is producing the stuff by the ship load? The reserve figure by itself for a certain area is completely meaningless.

I have done some Googling on the claim that lifetime GHG emissions for LNG are not better than coal. Most analysis I have found doesn’t support that conclusion. More importantly for Stewart’s argument, the studies that find LNG no better than coal do so primarily on the basis of fugitive emissions. Burning gas to generate energy release much less CO2 than burning coal, but if gas production results in significant releases of methane (a far more potent GHG than CO2), then LNG’s advantage over coal diminishes and might even disappear.

Leaving aside for now the plausibility of this argument, it means Stewart cannot use the emissions intensity of LNG compared to coal to support his case. As most fugitive emissions occur in the production phase, and the transportation phase contributes very little to fugitive emissions, it follows that fugitive emissions will be equally problematic for gas transported by pipeline as for gas transported by LNG tanker.

So to parse Stewart’s argument:

1) LNG is liquefied mainly by compression and transported under pressure – wrong
2) This compression process requires very large amounts of energy - wrong
3) LNG’s emission’s profile is no better than coal – probably wrong
4) This is because of the energy needed to compress and pressurise the gas - wrong
5) Gas transported by pipeline will be much more greenhouse friendly than LNG – wrong
6) Therefore we should invest tens of billions in pipelines - ?

This GHD study provides a useful summary of emissions in LNG production. It suggests about 12% of CO2-e occurs in processing, transport and regasification. Of course, there would also be significant emissions in transporting gas thousans of km by pipeline.

http://www.communityovermining.org/appea_worley_csg_greenhouse_emissions_study_final.pdf

@ Rhian:
LNG means liquified natural gas.

We are not discussing CNG. We, including you, are considering LNG.

It is a liquid, which may or may not be at very low temperatures and thus reduced pressure - but it is still under pressure, way above atmospheric.

As heat is carried through the walls of the container, the liquid gas tends to boil/evaporate, which absorbs the latent heat of vaporization.

This vapour is typically bled off over time and captured and used as fuel (eg in the ships which carry LNG) or it is flared or simply vented. Flaring is preferable to venting because it reduces the GHG impact of the vapour. Some of the embodied CO2 may be injected back into the strata from which the gas originated, but this costs even more energy loss. No CO2 from CSG is currently being re-injected.

Now, to Rhian's point #1: Still wrong. LNG is, by definition, a liquid. Originally a gas, it is liquified by refrigeration, which involves pressurization, and stored as a liquid, typically under ambient temperature and high pressure or lower temperature and thus lower pressure.

#2. I reaffirm that refrigeration, including the necessary compression phases, involves very significant energy costs.

The reference document which is claimed to originate with GHD actually comes from Worley Parsons. Make your mind up. Besides which, from an initial perusal of the document, it appears that this report ignores the CO2 content of natural gas and CSG and commences analysis only after separation and venting or CCS of the CO2 fraction.

Further, its primary recommendations are made on the assumption that the LNG/CSG is used in a CCGT, which is far from the universal case. Primary comparisons with coal use subcritical technology, thus the best LNG case has been compared with the worst case for coal. Has the data been cherry-picked to serve the interests of the client, APPEA?

@ Curmudgeon:

What a waste of time it is reading some comments!

If the industry uses certain language to describe its known and probable reserves and the numbers so derived are reported by Commonwealth regulators, then that is good enough for me.

What language Curmudgeon chooses to use is his business, not mine.