GAS PIPELINES
THE ROLE OF GAS PIPELINES IN AUSTRALIA’S FUTURE ENERGY SYSTEM by Rob Wheals, CEO and Managing Director, APA Group Pipelines have long been the backbone of Australia’s energy system, and as Australia continues on its path to a clean energy future, our existing network will have a critical role to play for decades to come.
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he shocks in electricity generation over winter in Victoria and Queensland were reminders of why we are so heavily reliant on gas. When it comes to our energy mix, gas is the workhorse. It can be turned on in minutes, and can stay on for days, giving it a unique ability to provide firming in Australia’s energy mix. Indeed, these events, including a coal outage in Queensland, flooding at Yallourn in June and technical issues that impacted production at the Longford gas plant in July, along with cold weather, underscored the critical role that gas plays across the national electricity market. It was gas and gas infrastructure that stepped up to provide secure supply in real-time in response to this perfect storm of events. When the production dipped at the Longford gas plant in July, it was the flexibility of APA’s 7,500km of interconnected gas transmission pipelines that form the East Coast Gas Grid that enabled us to get gas from the north to the south – helping address the shortfalls while ensuring the lights and the heaters of Victorian homes stayed on. That’s because our gas infrastructure enables us to seamlessly move gas throughout eastern Australia, anywhere from Otway and Longford in the south, to Moomba in the west and Mount Isa and Gladstone in the north, maximising every ounce of capacity to support gas generation.
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September 2021 ISSUE 15
Even as coal is retired and renewables penetration accelerates, the firming role of gas generation will be critical to ensure the stability of the electricity grid. Gas will continue to be critical to ensure we can keep their lights on when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, helping to ‘firm-up’ the energy grid. But while gas will continue to play a critical part in our nation’s energy mix, APA also understands that there are opportunities in supporting the development of technologies that can support Australia’s transition to a low carbon economy. And as new technologies come online – like hydrogen and biogas – it will again be gas infrastructure that will be critical to getting into homes and businesses. As we look ahead to 2050 and beyond, the gas industry is well placed to diversify and deploy decades of knowledge, capability and critical infrastructure to play a leading role in developing the low emissions technologies of tomorrow, at scale, and to support our own ambitions for a net zero future. Indeed, a recent Frontier Economics study showed that continuing to use gas infrastructure can reduce emissions at about half the cost to customers than electrifying the services provided by gas. It’s something that APA is working to support by getting ready now to support the carriage of different forms of gas in our pipelines and by investing in projects that will support the development of a clean hydrogen industry in this country.
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