One of the universally acclaimed highlights of GasNZ’s Forum 2024 was the panel discussion on the first day.

Panellists were Andrew Knight, CEO of the Gas Industry Company, Paul Goodeve, CEO of Clarus, Paul Stocks, deputy secretary, building, resources and markets at the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment and John Kidd, director and head of research at Enerlytica.

Skilfully moderated by Angela Ogier, general manager fuels strategy at Genesis Energy, the in-depth panel discussion traversed recent issues around security of supply for natural gas, the current and future roles of LPG in the energy market, plus the potential for liquid natural gas to shore up New Zealand’s gas supply.

In terms of recent shortages of natural gas supply in the energy market over winter, Andrew Knight kicked off by saying the recent supply issues shouldn’t have been a surprise.

“There’s nothing that’s happened that hasn’t been forecast at some point in time.

“We all knew there was a decline [in supply] coming, we all knew there needed to be more investment, and most people worked out that at some point the wind mightn’t blow, but putting it all together into [an energy] system context hadn’t been really effectively done.

“We’re now in a position where we need to move quite quickly – we need to be making policy decisions, we need to be making investment decisions quite quickly to be able to look at how we get past this period.

“The industry has to step up to solve this – the big players and the little players.”

Paul Goodeve agreed that what happened this year shouldn’t have been a surprise.

“We operate an energy system in New Zealand of which natural gas is a hugely important part, LPG is part and liquid fuels are part.”

Over the last few years, the focus on the electricity sector had meant that “a lot of people have taken their eyes off the interconnectedness of the other elements.”

In terms of longer-term solutions, Paul Stocks noted the concern around political uncertainty that could undermine the confidence of long-term investors – the risk that government could change and policies be reversed.

He said these concerns were real. But it wasn’t easy nor necessarily right for one government to make laws or regulations that bound a future government.

“There are challenges in how we respond to that – we live in a parliamentary democracy and people have expectations that parliaments can make laws.”

(View the full panel discussion here.)