Australia's shale players say they've learnt from mistakes made in the LNG boom

DARWIN, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Developers of shale gas in Australia's Northern Territory say they plan to replicate the liquefied natural gas boom in the state of Queensland, but without the duplication of infrastructure and overspending that occurred in the 2010s.

The territory's Beetaloo sub-basin was surveyed over 30 years ago but the first commercial volumes of shale gas were shipped only this week from Tamboran Resources’ TBN.N Shenandoah gas project.

Like Queensland's coal seam gas-to-LNG ambitions, Beetaloo shale aspirations have met with initial scepticism by many industry watchers. But the Sunshine State now supplies over a third of Australia's LNG exports and the nation is the world's No.2 exporter.

Beetaloo output is currently a modest 40 terajoules (TJ) a day, but producers ultimately envisage developments on par with the LNG industry.

"The learned experience of the coal seam rollout is that it's not in anyone's interest to go their own way," Beetaloo Energy CEO Alex Underwood said at the South East Asia Australia Offshore & Onshore Conference.

Shale developers hope that their gas will find multiple buyers such as LNG plants in Darwin owned by Santos STO.AX and Inpex 1605.T, possibly also to LNG plants on the east coast and potentially delivering power supplies for large data centres.

But in building out infrastructure, they are keen to avoid the lack of collaboration that resulted in too much duplication in the Queensland LNG industry.

Underwood said there had been "massive overexpenditure" on LNG infrastructure, including at Gladstone in Queensland, where there are three LNG plants.

"Ideally Gladstone would have one larger LNG plant with one big pipe coming into it, but there's multiple pipes, multiple LNG plants, which is not particularly capital efficient," he said.

Despite duplication worries, the big pipeline companies in Australia — Australian Gas Infrastructure Group (AGIG), APA Group APA.AX and Jemena — have said they believe there is space for all of them in Beetaloo.