By 2027, states including Victoria, NSW and South Australia would face yearly gas supply deficits unless new gas supplies were made available, AEMO said.

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State and federal governments are investing in a range of initiatives to reduce the nation’s reliance on gas – a fossil fuel that emits carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and contributes to global warming – and are developing programs to encourage people to switch from gas-fired heaters and stoves.

Conservation groups insist the projected shortfalls later this decade leave ample time for governments to develop strategies focused on reducing gas demand, such as switching appliances from gas to electric and prohibiting new residential gas connections.

However, AEMO has cautioned that gas demand is not falling fast enough to ease the looming crunch.

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“After many years of inaction, this latest forecast from AEMO is another wake-up call to the Victorian government that they need to get Victorian households off gas and support the rapid shift to energy efficient electric homes,” Environment Victoria’s Rai Miralles said.

“Electrification of Victorian households isn’t happening fast enough and needs to be turbocharged.”

The Origin Energy-backed Australia Pacific LNG (APLNG) joint venture, one of Queensland’s three liquefied natural gas producers, on Tuesday said it had struck deals to supply additional gas to retailers EnergyAustralia and Alinta, bringing APLNG’s overall domestic gas supplies for 2023 to more than 130 petajoules – nearly a quarter of annual east-coast demand.

But because the pipeline linking Queensland’s gas fields to NSW and Victoria regularly runs at full capacity on peak winter demand days, ExxonMobil’s Berman argues that additional investment in gas storage plants and upgrades to the pipeline will be required to ensure affordable and reliable gas supplies into the future.

“It has been encouraging to see some governments and regulators acknowledge that it is not possible to send more Queensland gas to the southern states at the time it is needed most,” he says.

“Peak southern state winter demand exceeds 2000 terajoules a day and the pipeline infrastructure which connects Queensland to the southern states already largely operates at full capacity moving gas south during winter.”

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