Charles Gutjahr

Melbourne, Australia

March 2017

Photo of Charles Gutjahr

Charles Gutjahr

Blog post

Natural gas in Victoria compared to world prices

19 Mar 2017 — a 2 minute read on politics

A number of recent articles claimed that Japan was paying less for Australian natural gas than Australians are. That surprised me because I always thought natural gas was very cheap here in Victoria, and remember uni lecturers telling me that we were underpaying for gas here. Did I have it wrong?

The articles lacked specific numbers so I went looking for data myself. What I found was less dull than I expected, so I put it in this graph:1

Natural gas wholesale prices, A$ per gigajoule
Natural gas wholesale prices, A$ per gigajoule

So it is true that gas prices in Victoria have been very cheap in the past, especially compared to Japan. But recently Victorian prices have jumped up, and that coincides with a fall in world prices.

That is presumably why gas prices are a big deal in politics now.

Sources:

  1. Disclaimer: I know hardly anything about natural gas or its pricing! I just looked up numbers from reliable sources, standardised the units and graphed them. There might be subtleties in natural gas pricing that I failed to account for.

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