“The power, natural gas and coal markets ... have experienced such unprecedented price gyrations and counterintuitive role reversals that demand us to rethink how we analyse markets.”

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The prospect of oil and gas producers losing further access to capital comes after a growing number of institutional investors have been increasingly querying the role of gas in the clean-energy transition and accelerating their withdrawal from the sector. The trend triggered a wave of merger-and-acquisition activity last year, including between Santos and ASX-listed Oil Search, which told shareholders that gaining greater size and scale would be key to funding future projects as climate pressure continued to sharpen.

Mr Gallagher, speaking on the panel alongside Federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor, IEA director Fatih Birol and Shell’s global chief executive Ben van Beurden, called for greater collaboration around the world between governments and industries to work on incentivising ways to deploy carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. He said the approval of CCS technology for federal carbon credits in Australia had enabled Santos to sanction the world’s second-largest CCS project at Moomba, South Australia.

CCS, which injects and traps carbon dioxide emissions underground – has been a divisive policy area, and faces ongoing doubts about its ability to function at scale after Chevron’s CCS project in Western Australia is still not at full capacity six years after launching.

Mr Gallagher told the panel CCS was a necessary and unavoidable tool required for the world’s decarbonisation goals to avoid the worst and most immediate impacts of global warming by 2050.

“Unfortunately, there are only 40 CCS projects around the globe, and we need that to grow 100-fold to meet our net zero aspirations for the future,” he said.

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