The Australian east coast gas supply cliff

On Australia's east coast over the period 2013-2016, we forecast that aggregate demand for natural gas will increase three-fold, from 700 PJ to 2100 PJ per annum, while our forecast of system coincident peak demand increases 2.4 times, from 2790 TJ to 6690 TJ per day. This extraordinary growth is being driven by the development of three Liquefied Natural Gas plants at Gladstone, Queensland. In this article, we present our dynamic partial equilibrium model of the interconnected gas system and produce forecasts with daily resolution. We find that absent additional supply-side development, unserved load events will remain more than a theoretical possibility in the short-term due to inter-temporal spatial constraints. In the long-term, with appropriate policy settings in place, additional supplies will be brought to market, albeit at higher than historical prices.