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Top officials from Australia’s second- and third-largest LNG markets, which ship in a combined $18 billion a year from Down Under, said gas-fired power plants risked being “stranded assets”, and represented only an “intermediate” step and a “transition problem”.

Stranded asset? Japan is worried its LNG power plants might be left behind in the race to net zero. Bloomberg

Shinichi Kihara, a top environment official at Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, also said that a hydrogen-based replacement for LNG could be workable “as fast as 2025”.

Korean senior Foreign Ministry official Minyoung Han said Seoul viewed LNG as at best an “intermediate” step, and the country’s investment focus was on shifting beyond that as quickly as possible.

“Ultimately we are trying to invest a lot of money into green hydrogen development, that’s the trend we are going to be working on,” she said.

Mr Kihara did signal a potential source of ongoing demand for LNG: because shipping hydrogen was so expensive, Japanese power plants might buy LNG from Australia, extract the hydrogen in Japan, and then send the carbon dioxide back to Australia to be buried.

Describing that plan as “very conceptual”, he said: “That’s a lot cheaper compared to importing hydrogen in a very expensive hydrogen tanker.”