The study’s findings fall in line with APPEA’s beliefs.

APPEA chief executive David Byers said Australia had to look to the future, not the past, to develop abundant gas resources to meet both export and domestic needs.

“Policies that manipulate eastern Australia’s domestic gas market to deliver perceived benefits to manufacturers would drive away investment in the sector and hurt the wider economy,” he said.

“Eastern Australia should not replicate the mistakes made in the west.

“Successive Australian governments have worked for decades to unpick protectionist policy because they have realised such strategies deter the very investment needed to drive new projects, industrial expansion, new employment and higher wages.

“It’s now time for all governments to work through COAG [Council of Australian Governments] to remove regulatory and other barriers to allow more gas to flow to the market.

“Such an approach can be successful if the Victorian and New South Wales governments can actively support onshore gas development through leading practice regulation and community engagement.

“Failing to allow gas producers to adequate supply will drive gas prices unnecessarily higher and hurt commerce, industrial and residential consumers.”

The study was driven by the fact that NSW will likely face gas shortages when the Queensland LNG export projects come online – the earliest at the end of this year.

The LNG plants will be taking gas that would otherwise have come to NSW from Queensland CSG wells and from Cooper Basin gas wells.

The looming gas shortage has led to cries for some of the gas going to these LNG plants to be reserved for Australian use at prices similar to what NSW gas users have become accustomed to.

The rub is that NSW has abundant gas of its own in the form of CSG. Its government just seems determined to stop it ever being accessed.

APPEA and its member companies want stable, predictable, robust regulation of the industry based on sound scientific principles and assessment.

“The Queensland and South Australian governments are using effective and proactive regulatory development processes to deliver enormous economic and social benefits,” Byers said.

“For example, Queensland’s natural coal seam gas industry now employs 30,000 people and has contributed more than $100 million to local community projects and causes.

“Yet in Victoria exploration has ground to a halt and in NSW our industry employs fewer than 300 people while the state heads towards a gas price crunch that will have serious consequences for both industrial and household gas users.”