Same story as Qld CSG. People looked at the sweet spots and...

Same story as Qld CSG. People looked at the sweet spots and extrapolated numbers from them that were simply enormous. 250 TCF was being thrown around, even by CSIRO, and 8 different LNG projects were planned.

Then as soon as they moved off the sweet spots... oops! Can't get it out. As they article says, "The best plays were tapped first, not by some accident of technology or lucky holes plunged into the ground, but because they were cheapest to prosecute."

Now it looks like they will get about 40 TCF, and might just about manage to supply 3 of the projects.

The ones who got stung were the majors who arrived late in the game and made these extrapolations, and then paid accordingly for the assets which subsequently turned out to be less attractive than initially thought, or in some cases actually completely uneconomic.

There is a lesson there for WPL with the recent talk about upstream acquisitions in Canadian shale gas...