There’s a unsettling story in The Australian today about a Japanese push to break the oil-benchmarked LNG contract pricing system:
JAPAN’S drive to sever the oil link in the pricing system for liquefied natural gas could slow development of Australia’s gas industry, oil and gas company Santos has warned, saying the current pricing system was important to funding new developments.Holy cow, Batman. You might recall we did the reverse to China (and Japan) when we held the pricing power in iron ore in 2007, forcing customers off long term contracts into the spot market, sending prices skyrocketing.This is the reverse of course, with the pricing power all with the customer as new, much cheaper, supply gears up to enter the market. Yet it has the same irresistible logic.The story also says that many of the current LNG projects are based upon the assumption of $14 per gigajoule. I sincerely hope that that is not the case.http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2012/09/will-japan-do-to-us-on-gas-what-we-did-to-it-on-ore/
…The Japanese move — revealed in The Australian yesterday — is linked, in part, to an extraordinary boom in shale gas in the US that has driven down gas prices in the domestic markets there.
…In Tokyo this week, Japan’s Trade Minister, Yukio Edano, told LNG suppliers a “paradigm shift” in pricing was needed to contain Japan’s soaring energy bills. He cited the growing gas demand and the linkage to soaring oil prices as the reasons for the rise. But he did not offer a clear alternative.
…But if LNG prices drop dramatically, some oil-linked contracts that underpin projects in Australia could also be renegotiated under price review clauses.
…With US domestic Henry Hub gas prices of about $US3 a gigajoule at less than one-fifth of Japanese LNG import prices, this would probably raise US prices and bring down those in Asia, where all of Australia’s LNG is bought.
Australia’s three mining booms – past, present and future | Westpac
Extract from a speech at ANCRE by Bill Evans, Chief economist at Westpac:
All in all, it seems reasonable to conclude that the peak in mining construction will coincide with the peak spending on the $180 bn in LNG projects which are currently underway. We estimate that the peak will be reached sometime in the second half of 2013 so that from that point onwards mining investment spending will be a drag on Australia’s growth rate. Nor of course do we expect that the consumer/housing leverage model will return. We expect that the deleveraging is going to be a long drawn out process as exemplified by the minimal progress made so far with leverage still above 150% after 4 years of the “cautious consumer”……Evans also observes that, despite rising exports from completed projects, the end of the mining investment cycle and the “high” Australian Dollar will have a negative impact on employment.http://goldstocksforex.com/2012/09/20/australias-three-mining-booms-past-present-and-future-westpac/
Shell Leads LNG Competitors Out to Sea With Biggest Ship: Energy
By Eduard Gismatullin and James Paton - Sep 20, 2012 4:10 AM ETFor more than a decade, the world’s biggest liquefied natural gas producers led by Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA) plotted how to move their $170 billion industry onto barges at sea to tap remote fields. Now they’re finally doing it.Shell will forge the hull of a floating LNG plant in South Korea by year-end that will be the world’s largest vessel, weighing six times the biggest aircraft carrier, a Nimitz-class warship. Some 5,000 workers will build the factory to produce LNG off Australia’s northwest coast in a $13 billion project that also will shield Shell from escalating costs it would have to pay at the country’s onshore plants.Enlarge image
A computer generated image shows the Floating Liquefied Natural Gas concept vessel for Royal Dutch Shell Plc, in this undated handout image, released to the media on Thursday, Oct. 8, 2009. Photograph: Royal Dutch Shell Plc/BloombergEnlarge image
A worker welds a component of a ship in South Korea. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg
A tanker receives cargo at the Woodside Petroleum Ltd. Pluto liquefied natural gas onshore gas plant on in Western Australia. Source: Woodside Petroleum Ltd. via BloombergEnlarge image
Shell, Europe’s largest oil company, will forge the hull of a floating LNG plant in South Korea by year-end that will weigh six times the largest aircraft carriers in the world, the Nimitz-class warships. Photographer: Aaron Tam/AFP/Getty ImagesRivals from Malaysia’s Petroliam Nasional Bhd. to GDF Suez SA of France likewise want to turn gas into liquid at sea, where many of the largest finds were made in the last decade. It’s a generational change for a land-based industry that started about 50 years ago in Algeria, where Shell provided technology for Camel, the first commercial LNG plant. Today those facilities typically cost at least $20 billion to build.“We remove the need for the pipeline and use about 50 percent of the raw materials for an equivalent onshore plant,” said Neil Gilmour, Shell’s FLNG general manager. He’s overseeing construction of the world’s first floating LNG vessel, which will be as long as the Empire State Building, for use by the Prelude venture partners.Costs for onshore LNG plants are surging in Australia as it moves to challenge Qatar as the world’s biggest LNG exporter. The U.K.’s BG Group Plc (BG/) and Woodside Petroleum Ltd. (WPL) have announced budget overruns at onshore projects in Australia amid rising labor expenses, while Chevron Corp. (CVX) is reviewing the cost of its A$43 billion ($45 billion) Gorgon venture.
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder