Cook not concerned by Japan on-selling surplus Australian gas
Cook has just returned from a mission to Japan where the country emphasised the need for a continued stable supply of Australian gas to stabilise its energy grid as it moved away from coal-fired power.
Cook met with senior Japanese bureaucrats and politicians, including Vice-Minister for International Affairs Matsuo Takehiko to discuss energy security, resources and decarbonisation.
In the face of criticism from environmental groups of Australia's fossil fuel industry, Cook has repeatedly pressed the point that Australia's LNG helps larger Asian economies reduce carbon pollution by moving out of coal.
'What [Japan has] said to us is that as part of that energy transition, they need our LNG to be able to assist them to pivot away from coal and towards renewables,' Cook said on his way home from Japan on Tuesday.
One of the biggest criticisms of that argument is that Japan, which is a big investor in Australian LNG projects, has been on-selling LNG because of a surplus of the fuel.
The latest estimate from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found Japanese companies on-sold between 11.3 to 14.7 million tonnes of Australian LNG, which equates to about 1.2 to 1.6 times the annual gas consumption on the east coast energy grid.
IEEFA suggests this gas is being on-sold to other Asian economies like Taiwan and South Korea.
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