Australia 'Needs East-West Pipe': Barnett

A former premier of Western Australia, Colin Barnett, said the country’s east coast is unlikely to lift its bans and moratoria on coal seam gas exploration and development. He floated the idea of a trans-Australia pipeline to help address the tight supply picture.

“As much as the industry would see the logic [that lifting the bans and moratoria] should happen, and I agree with you, but it’s not going to happen any time soon,” he told delegates in Sydney at the Australian Domestic Gas Outlook conference February 28.

He said it would take at least a decade to do that. "The politics of that – the Shut the Gate campaign – has seemed to have captured both sides of politics,” said Barnett, who retired from politics in February. The solution to the east coast’s gas supply problems, he said, is a Western Australia-east coast pipeline. “It’s as simple as that.”

He said it would be somewhere between 2,500 km-3,000 km long with a 26 inch or 36 inch diameter. “This is not a big and dramatic project. It’s something very practical and pragmatic,” he said, adding that those he had talked to in the industry have indicated it would cost around A$5bn.

“There’s no real issues about constructing it – we don’t have a mountain range to go over or under, no major river systems. It’s fairly simple from a technical construction point of view. Critically, it will depend on the sort of policies that are set,” he said.

He said it would carry an initial capacity of around 600 terajoules/day (about 6bn m³yr) and could be delivering gas by 2022 or 2023, he said. Barnett was premier of Western Australia from 2008 to 2017.