Melissa Price (Durack, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Resources, Energy and Northern Australia. Will the minister update the House on the significance of the first gas being produced at the Gorgon LNG facility in my electorate of Durack and the competitive edge that Australia's energy sector derives from innovation and new technology?

Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party, Minister for Resources, Energy and Northern Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Durack for her question. I remember the last time I took a question from the member for Durack, who has the largest electorate in the country, I said the Prime Minister's electorate could fit into Durack 53,000 times, but her electorate is so big that England could fit into Durack 12 times. One of the jewels in Durack is the Gorgon LNG facility on Barrow Island. Yesterday I had the pleasure to visit the LNG facility with the member for Durack, the member for Groom, Senator Back and the member for Brand, the shadow minister. As the member for Durack said, it has already started producing gas and soon will have its first shipment to Asia, which will be in a matter of days.

The Gorgon facility, at nearly $70 billion, is Australia's largest ever private sector investment. The figures are absolutely enormous: some 10,000 people were employed on the Gorgon facility; 99 per cent of that workforce was Australian; nearly 1000 local suppliers were used. The pipeline is more than 800 kilometres, which would go from Melbourne to Adelaide. Every shipment of gas from Gorgon carries enough gas to fill a Japanese household for one year. It is just an enormous project. ACIL Allen Consulting has estimated that, over the life of the project, it will provide some $70 billion worth of federal revenues and will add more than $400 billion to GDP.

Gorgon is just part of the golden age of gas in Australia. By 2020 it will be one of 10 projects that sees Australia overtake Qatar as the world's largest exporter of LNG. Australia will face fierce competition for future markets, particularly from the United States, which has started to export LNG.

But what sets Australia apart from others is its innovation. Companies like Santos have worked with IBM on big data analytics. Woodside is using autonomous vehicles underwater. At Gorgon they have the world's largest carbon capture and storage facility, which will reduce emissions by up to 40 per cent, and they have the largest subsea infrastructure that has ever been built. They have employed more than 1000 engineers and it shows that established industries like resources and energy can be at the forefront of innovation and technology. While first gas from Gorgon may not be discussed at every Australian household table, it is something that we can be very proud of, because it shows that we are using innovation to advance Australia's—(Time expired)