Oil & gas exploration free fall – welcome to the future

MEDIA RELEASE - 5 September 2016

The Greens NSW  energy and resources spokesperson Jeremy Buckingham today said the free fall in spending on oil and gas exploration (down by almost two-thirds), revealed by data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, is good news for the climate and shows technology is rapidly changing the energy market.

“The global glut of oil and gas means exploration for new reserves has dropped off, which is a good thing for the climate and is a trend that is likely to continue as our energy system rapidly switches to renewable energy and battery storage,” said Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham.

“Many of the existing gas plays in Australia were based on wildly optimistic assumptions, the consequences being LNG export terminals that are not financially viable, and a hike in the price of domestic gas that is causing strife for some parts of the manufacturing sector and for residential households.

“Technological progress in energy generation, energy storage, the electrification of motorised transport, and climate related policies around the world will decrease demand for fossil fuels over the medium and long-term. Investments in new fossil fuel exploration will increasingly face the risk of being stuck with stranded assets or useless data.

“From an ethical and financial perspective, Australia should invest in clean energy technologies rather than fossil fuels.”

Gas and oil exploration

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s