These are my thoughts only, but I think that this might play into our hands very nicely. Through various conversations that I have had and through some research, I think we are "johnny on the spot" with this. I do recall RC saying that they had enough gas to deal with the spare capacity.
The eventual moratorium on fracking in the NT has obviously spooked quite a number of explorers and some on the cusp of producing. Armour Energy, for example, has huge gas resources just to the north of us but they need to be fracked, so unless the CLP win the election and the ALP don't implement there moratorium, they won't be producing gas anytime soon. Their gas is shale gas and does need fracking.
There are also some smaller mobs poking around in some of the NT basin looking for gas, some local, some foreign but they are years away from being commercially viable.
On the other hand our resources are conventional in nature and don't need fracking for the time being. Will they need to be fracked to get full potential, absolutely, but it doesn't stop us from putting gas down the pipe once it is built. If I read it correctly we seem to be the only ones able to put gas into the pipe by 2018, unless the political landscape changes. If and when Armour & others come to the party with gas there are other ways of increasing throughput.
All we have to do now is go forward aggressively and prove up more reserves and resources and steal a march on the competition, get as much to market before the others and before they lift the moratorium on fracking, because I have a feeling of what RC might do with his spare cash going forward, especially if he is a creature of habit. Do your homework.
So is the decision to build a 12 vs 14 inch pipeline a deal breaker, I don't think so, I think it is business men being conservative in the current landscape. And the political class now are having a field day pointing fingers at each other trying to score points. A circus.
Cheers.
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