That's part of it, but it should have worked fine regardless of...

That's part of it, but it should have worked fine regardless of it being dry gas - there are dry gas shale plays in the US (the Marcellus) as well as successful CSG plays, such as San Juan and Powder River, though obviously at $2 Henry Hub they can't compete with the oil plays that sell gas almost as a waste stream.

But that wasn't an issue in Australia and the Qld CSG sweet spots are world class, better than the US CSG fields and much better than shale fields. Extremely productive just from vertical wells and much shallower than shale wells that need horizontal wells and fracking to produce. If there had been a single, 4-train project instead of three separate 2-train projects that stupidly commissioned three separate plants, pipelines, jetties etc and all competed for the same very limited contractors, then it would have been an extremely economic project with plenty of gas left over for the domestic market. Instead the costs blew out and there isn't enough sweet spot gas for 6 trains, which is unfortunate since they've already sold it.

Now STO are drilling wells that cost about a quarter of what they did in the boom days, which shows what could have been. Unfortunately all of them have mostly drilled out the sweet spots paying peak prices so the wells they are drilling now are cheaper but also recovering less gas.

WPL's track record wasn't perfect over this period, but you look at a project like Pluto and it's a pretty stark comparison. They didn't try to sell more than they had, they just took FID on one train and tried to prove up a second train. When they didn't find enough gas for Train 2 they kept it as a one train project, which has performed nicely and now ullage is conveniently going to open up at NWS. Meanwhile I don't think STO will ever actually manage to take GLNG to nameplate capacity, much less keep it there for 20 years.