Morrison had kind words to say of coal, which he mentioned six times in the address. “In Australia, you cannot talk about electricity generation and ignore coal,” he said reassuringly. “My government understands this. The fact that we understand it is important. So many of your livelihoods depend on it. And not everyone shares this view.”

But gas - which Morrison mentioned 55 times - was the true star of the show.

It was the government’s intention, said Morrison, to “get more gas, more often and more reliably - by resetting our east coast gas market, unlocking additional gas to drive recovery; paving the way, ultimately, for a world-leading Australian Gas Hub to support high-wage jobs, including and especially in manufacturing’’.

“We've got to get the gas.” he enthused.

What really shocked some observers though was not Morrison’s enthusiasm for gas, which has been long flagged, but his threat to have the government-owned Snowy Hydro power company build a gas plant should private enterprise not step in and do it themselves.

The second set of announcements had to do with the government bodies used to fund renewable energy technology development - the Australian Renewable Energy Agency - and commercialisation - the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

For this announcement Morrison travelled to the Bluescope Steel plant in Port Kembla along with Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor and the CSIRO chief scientist Cathy Foley.

There Morrison announced an injection of $1.9 billion into ARENA, whose funds had dwindled to just $70 million, a move welcomed and even celebrated by scientists approached by the Herald and the Age.

But even this announcement was not without controversy as Morrison also announced that the two bodies would now be freed up to more readily back non-renewable technologies.

This would include Carbon Capture and Storage, a technology seen by critics as a crutch with which to prop up fossil fuel at best, and an expensive failure at worst.

It’s (now) a gas gas gas

It is not clear when Morrison made his own transition from coal to gas but the nation learned of it most unequivocally during a speech he made at the National Press Club in January, as the COVID-19 crisis was slowly beginning to unfold but before its staggering ramifications were clear.

“There is no credible energy transition plan, for an economy like Australia in particular, that does not involve the greater use of gas as an important transition fuel,” said Morrison at the time, arguing that switching from coal to gas had helped other nations reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Gas would help the Australian grid absorb renewable energy by providing power when, as he keeps saying, “the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow”.

The government’s enthusiasm for gas was made even more clear in March when Morrison announced the creation of the National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission. Now more simply known as the NCC, the Commission, tasked with advising the government on rebuilding the economy, was to be led by Nev Power, director of gas exploration outfit Strike Energy.

The key to kickstarting the economy, Power told the ABC in May, was manufacturing, and manufacturing needed cheap power, and the best cheap power was gas. Soon the term “gas-led recovery” became common Canberra parlance.

In the background the gas industry was struggling around the world, struck by declining demand and a drop in oil prices, to which gas prices have been traditionally linked. In Australia Santos, which has been lobbying to open a gas field near Narrabri in north-eastern NSW for the past decade, had written down the value of its east coast coal seam gas and LNG assets by $7 billion since 2014.

Despite this Australian domestic and industrial consumers were paying through the nose for gas.

In August the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission chair Rod Sims said in a statement that the Queensland gas producers had exported 18 shipments of liquified natural gas - or about 10 per cent of annual Australian east coast demand - at below the prices offered to domestic users, despite the cost of liquefaction and shipping.

Apparently frustrated at this anomaly, Sims said it showed the “importance of our continuing work to understand the drivers behind the price levels we are seeing across the domestic market”. (Sims advocates increasing domestic supply to stabilise prices, though critics counter that on-shore projects like the Narrabri-play are inherently more costly than the offshore fields Australia tapped long ago.)

Further, in NSW the closure of the aging AGL Liddel power station in the Hunter Valley loomed and the government was determined not to allow it to prompt the same price shock caused by the closure of the giant Hazelwood plant in Victoria in 2017.

All of these imperatives appeared to play into Morrison’s announcement on Tuesday that if the private sector did not invest, the government would step in to support the construction of gas pipelines as well as a new 1000 gigawatt plant at Liddell.

The peak industry organisation AI Group was delighted, as was Andrew Liveris, another member of the NCC with a background linked to gas and heavy industry. “We now actually have a strategy to put at the heart of our recovery how to build an energy transition that includes natural gas that hitherto we've excluded,” he said in a speech the following day. “We need it tracked urgently, because Australia's energy transition is actually an advantage if we do it well and do it right.’’

But climate scientists and environmentalists, most of whom have not viewed gas as a transition fuel in a decade or so, were appalled.

Gas, which emits about half as much carbon dioxide as coal when burned to create the same amount of power, was first proposed as a transition fuel in response to climate change in a report to Congress by the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1990. But after 30 years of failure to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, climate scientists no longer view half-as-bad as good enough to address the climate crisis. The world now needs to cut emissions by half in the next 10 years and half again by 2040 if it is to come on track to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

Further, when gas - which is mostly methane - escapes unburnt into the atmosphere during extraction, transport, processing and use, it is around 80 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over a 10-year period.

Climate scientists no longer view half-as-bad as good enough to address the climate crisis.

Bruce Robertson, an oil and gas specialist with the pro-renewables Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, made his objections to Morrison’s announcement as simple as possible when he spoke with the Herald and The Age after the announcement on Tuesday.

“What we need is less gas, not more gas. More gas is not less gas,” he said.

Greg Bourne is a former president of BP Australasia and energy adviser to Margaret Thatcher and now a councillor on the Climate Council. He said given the global capital flight from oil and gas he doubted the plant would ever go ahead. Nonetheless he likened the announcement to a government backing the horse and cart industry after the rise of Henry Ford.

But nor was Morrison’s gas plan universally welcomed by industry. The Australian Energy Council’s chief executive Sarah McNamara said: “The sector is struggling to make final investment decisions in an environment of ongoing policy uncertainty.

“For more than a decade we have been warning of the dampening effect state and federal government interventions have on investor confidence.

“There are no material reliability concerns that would warrant this kind of interventionist approach, and there are already mechanisms in place to address any shortfall identified.”

The government’s response to the energy sector was the observation that it was in its interest to limit supply and to keep prices high, but there were other voices saying that a 1000gw plant was not needed.

Lisa Zembrodt, director of energy markets in the Pacific region for Schneider Electric, one of the world’s largest electricity technology companies, wrote in a note to clients - which include Australia’s biggest energy users - that the government’s own Liddell Task Force report said the infrastructure was simply not needed.

She noted that markets currently predicted gas prices would be lower after Liddell’s closure.

“In other words, market participants believe that prices will be lower in 2022 when the first Liddell unit closes than they will be in 2021 when all units are operating. The remaining three units are slated for closure in 2023,’’ she wrote. ‘‘Put simply, the generation capacity already committed is sufficient to keep price increases post the Liddell closure, ceteris paribus, to less than $5.”

She wrote that in an August report the Australian Energy Market Operator predicted no shortfall, and noted that its analysis did not even include a host of new battery backed renewable projects due to come online in the near term.

“The extra capacity mentioned above that is not accounted for in the AEMO modelling is like icing on the ‘we are ok’ cake,” she wrote.

ARENA, the CEFC and fear of CCS

Critics of the Morrison’s gas fiesta were even more agitated on Thursday after the announcement that the government's two vehicles for funding renewable technology would have their remit broadened.

“We can't have these funds constrained by what was put in place 10 years ago,” said Morrison in Port Kembla. “We need a fund that is going to invest in the technologies of the future today and tomorrow. And so we can't have these artificial constrictions, a closed shop, an ideological, frankly, closed shop on how ARENA works.

“What matters is lowering emissions. What matters is lowering costs. What matters is creating jobs.”

As he went on Morrison confirmed that targets for funding might include both hydrogen and carbon capture and storage (CCS). To some analysts this made the announcement the bookend to Tuesday’s gas announcement, because both hydrogen and CCS can be used in conjunction with gas.

Put simply CCS describes capturing carbon released in an industrial process and preventing it from escaping into the atmosphere. It is mistrusted by some climate scientists and environmentalists because it is seen as a crutch to carry the fossil fuel industry into the future, which drives up power prices and diverts funding from renewable technologies which are proven to drive them down.

According to an analysis by the think tank The Australia Institute, state and federal governments have already spent more than $1.3 billion of public money on CCS at the urging of the coal industry without the development of a single viable commercial project.

Morrison’s mention of hydrogen energy here is significant too, because it is an emerging technology that might one day be used domestically and for export, and which emits no carbon dioxide when burnt.

The catch is that hydrogen needs to be produced. That can be done using renewable energy, causing no emissions, or using gas, which would require the use of CCS to remain carbon neutral.

Professor Frank Jotzo, director of the Centre for Climate Economics and Policy at the Australian National University, explains that at present these two nascent processes are in competition.

Richie Merzian, climate and energy director with The Australia Institute, says he fears the government is seeking to the tip the balance in favour of gas and CCS.

Jotzo is less concerned. He is thrilled that ARENA’s funding has been recharged, though he wishes it was more, and he believes it is useful for it to explore CCS technology, particularly for its use in key industrial processes that cannot yet be decarbonised, such as cement production or aluminium smelting.

As long as the government opposes a pricing mechanism such as a carbon tax, he says, energy production with CCS will never be viable.

Another leading Australian renewable energy expert, who asked not to be named, broadly agreed with Jotzo on that assessment.

ARENA and CEFC might be freed to fund CCS projects, but they would still only do so if the projects were viable and bankable.

“You can say you want to send monkeys to the moon, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get funding for it.”