"People also naively think that it is now just a simple matter of the companies opening a valve and the gas flows into the domestic supply. Unfortunately there is also the small matter of a domestic gas processing plant, a custody transfer station, and a connecting pipeline."
This is not true - the Qld LNG plants are bolted on to the domestic gas network, and already can and do sell gas into the domestic market, before it enters their main pipelines to Curtis Island. They just sell as little as possible because the margin on sending it to LNG is much higher. GPFs, metering and pipelines already all exist, in fact all the main sweet spots in the CSG fields - Spring Gully/Fairview, Talinga, Berwyndale, etc - were all domestic gas projects before LNG came along so were built from the ground up to supply the domestic market.
In the case of Santos a lot of this gas is coming from the Cooper Basin which would have been sent to the domestic market. And they can still barely fill half their LNG plant, which is why any spare gas capacity in the East Coast gets sucked up.
(20min delay)