I have been watching APA for an entry for 5 years and probably missed some good entry points. Valuation is different for different people, even using same methodology.
I have interacted with APA professionally for 20 years and found them very ethical and proficient. Very open to new ideas and almost never saw people with bad attitude.
Of course engineers love to spend money, but APA seems to spend it wisely at least in terms of what I was supplying to them. Hard to be objective thus.
IMHO some parts of the business might be spun off to Jemena, as with DUETs Dampier to Bunbury pipeline, CKI would be moving the vast majority of gas around.
However, the emergence of LNG import terminals will curtail the future growth of pipelines, since it it is relatively easier to move methane as a liquid, (lot less friction). Users of LPG know this, and I recent years the metallurgy and mechanical engineering has been done to make handling LNG a lot easier than it was.
You like to run the liquefaction plants (WA, NT and Qld at full rate) but can divert the tankers from Asian routes to south eastern Australian routes, to match the seasonal demand. Gas consumption also drops off on weekends as many industrial users are not 24/7 users.
CKI are smart and should have awareness of this.
From national security point of view, gas transmission pipelines are not like power transmission lines.
If a rogue state was to stop all the compressors and shut the valves there is a reasonable time during which the state could assert control of the pipelines and put a few hundred relatively unskilled people in key locations , communicating by satellite phone, one could operate the pipelines and compressor stations manually.
OTOH Power grid interruption has an immediate and economically and psychologically powerful impact.
Loss of power to Sydney and Melbourne at the same time would cripple our country and lead to panic.
Victoria lost almost its entire gas supply when explosion occurred at Longford, but life went on mostly as normal, with the exception of cold showers and disruption to restaurant and fast food business.
WA had a big gas outage on at least one occasion and I am confident Australia would function reasonably well with severe power restrictions on the remaining coal, hydro and if cooperative, renewable electricity sources.
It is likely we would be able to get gas to at least some of the gas fired plant that presently compensated for the variability of renewable energy supplies, and transmit power over long distances.
Also fibre optic communications are run over the HV transmission circuits and as well as coordinating the operation of the network these carry certain critical data streams that may impact defence and core financial sectors. This doesn't happen with gas pipelines which use diverse mix of cable, satellite and mobile communications for coordination.
So I don't see rejection of CKI bid for TRANSGRID deal as being directly comparable.
Of course the political side is very hard to predict, and governments will be keen to be able to justify whatever decision they come up with.
Will be fascinating to watch this one.
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(20min delay)
