As a shareholder of COP (and STO & COE on ASX), this is from their earnings call transcript last night about East Coast Gas supply intervention by Australian Gov't. I've bolded a couple of lines
Alan J. Hirshberg - ConocoPhillips
Yes, we've talked about that on the last few calls where the government has been working on considering export restrictions and using this basis of making sure everybody is a net dom gas contributor, particularly out in the east. And the decision they've taken recently that you would have seen in the press is they've decided not to restrict exports in 2018.
And what facilitated that decision by the government is that the three Curtis Island operators in Queensland that all have these similar coal seam projects have agreed that we will offer to the domestic market any spot cargos that we have planned next year, we'll offer that gas to the domestic market at an equivalent net-back price before we go to spot LNG sales. And so for us, from an economic standpoint of course, that's we're indifferent to things that bring us the same net back.
There's been some noise in the press about LNG operators selling spot cargos at net backs that are less than domestic prices. And obviously, you know us well enough to know we wouldn't do that. We're not in the business of selling our gas for less than whatever the best is in the marketplace. But we have also seen just here today in the press, where we announced our latest domestic gas sales, so this is an example of where we had some gas that could've gone spot and 21 petajoules of gas that we've just agreed to sell into the domestic market that would've gone to spot LNG, because we were able to sort of achieve those net-back objectives.
So with that sale being added on, we now are north of 180 petajoules of domestic gas that APLNG will be selling into the market next year. So in 2017, APLNG is supplying about 20% of the dom gas market in eastern Australia. And next year, with this latest sale, we'll be just shy. We're already just with what we've done so far almost up to 30%.
Paul Sankey - Wolfe Research LLC
That's interesting. I don't know if this is public or not, but can you talk about how you calculate the net-back comparability?
Alan J. Hirshberg - ConocoPhillips
Well, I mean it's reasonably straightforward. You know what all the pieces are. The piece some people sometimes miss when they just look at sales prices is there are significant transportation costs in Australia to get from the tailgate of our – to get from where we're producing the gas to the market to our individual customers. There's significant transportation distribution costs, so that's a big. And of course, you have the same thing on LNG, where you're paying to liquefy and to ship. And so it's just getting to the equivalent net back for us all the way back to the wellhead is the way we think about it.
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