New Zealand’s Gas Panic Was Entirely Lies

Anyone remember it was just a year ago that businesses and government politicians were crying about the loss of natural gas availability?

The Business NZ Energy Council has been warning a gas shortage could lead to business closures.

Business NZ Energy Council executive director Tina Schirr said the biggest concern for gas-using businesses over the last couple of years was securing long-term contracts and the rise in gas prices.

Catastrophists like Geoff Smit at DETA were not only worried that the world was about to end, but also that the free money the government’s 2026 budget was handing out to transition away from gas wasn’t enough:

New Zealand’s industrial sector is facing a genuine energy crisis – one that’s been building for years and is now arriving faster than most businesses planned for. Gas fields are declining. Supply shortfalls have been experienced already, and now are forecast to increase in 2027 and 2028. And businesses that built their operations around natural gas are facing a future where that fuel is scarcer, more expensive and increasingly hard to justify.”

Even yesterday, the energy mining lobby was whining about how this massive new gas volume availability was bad for them and Jacinda was actually still evil.

Not to be outdone in the pearl-clutching foolishness, MBIE bought into the industry bullshit by this year hyping a massive LNG port in Taranaki and getting it through Cabinet:

LNG will provide a reliable back-up fuel source to manage dry year risk, help stabilise electricity costs, and address New Zealand’s declining domestic gas supply. Having access to LNG in New Zealand is expected to deliver savings of upwards of $265 million per year by reducing electricity price spikes and lowering the risk premium that is currently built into power bills.”

But now we find that the real cause of the scarcity of gas was the Canadian Methanex plant which, now that it has about to close, has magically made available bounteous volumes of natural gas for the same New Zealand businesses who told us the world was ending and it was all Jacinda’s fault for stopping new oil and gas exploration, for years on end.

No one in business or in government was prepared to say that New Zealand’s remaining natural gas supply was obviously being choked off by a Canadian company who simply had a long historic contractual right to it.

And we also find that, surprise surprise and completely unrelated on the same day, Genesis Energy has now secured all the gas it could possibly wish for. 

This acquisition changes the strategic outlook for the Genesis Huntly Power Station and the corrupt cartel of generators who got the Commerce Commission to agree to stoke it with coal forevermore. Genesis had recently been reviewing the potential offshore sale of its 400 MW Unit 5 gas turbine due to shrinking domestic gas roles. Having guaranteed fuel makes maintaining flexible units at Huntly structurally more viable, which aligns with the Energy Minister’s preference to keep the turbine in New Zealand.

Genesis instigated the coal cartel to the Commerce Commission last year, and now at the drop of a hat and without apology everything is fine.

There is no doubt there is no equivalent Taranaki employment for those at Methanex who will lose their jobs. Agree that is tough. To be really honest those who can on that scale of gas industry salary for so many years will retire, and others will quickly relocate to the Australian and Kazakh fields, as has been long common practice.

The Business Energy NZ Council hyping up the apparent cataclysm of gas loss, should actually have pointed out that the best way to solve the gas scarcity was to kill off Methanex. 

So Methanex have just exposed that logic: perversely, just one business failure solved everything. It would have been so good if any of those cowards on that Council had spoken up about the Methanex stranglehold when throughout 2024, 2025, and 2026 our gas powered mills just died and took the workers and families of whole small towns down with them.

But no apparently the fault was apparently Jacinda.

Every single one of the businesses, politicians, and public servants who manufactured this crisis and manufactured massive solutions to solve it, has been talking straight lies.