The context of my remarks was LNG, and more than half of the world's LNG projects today, development projects, are currently in Australia. Australia is forecast to be the world's largest supplier of LNG by 2020, in other words, by the end of this decade. It will overtake the state of Qatar by 2020 in terms of LNG supply.
The problem that Australia is facing is the huge development cost of getting to that point. They have about a dozen different LNG developments, and the cost of those, because of labour prices and material prices, is going through the roof. What Australia is finding, and this is a concern which I think we should have for the northern British Columbia projects, is that ultimately, if the costs of those developments are not sustainable in terms of the price you can sell the LNG at long term, then we may have to come up with another option. One of the projects that was cancelled last week and semi-reinstated this week is one where instead of having a shore-based development, it's actually a liquefaction plant.
One of the large projects in Australia is based on construction of what will eventually be the world's largest floating object. It's a liquefaction plant for liquid natural gas. It's called the Prelude project, in Western Australia. Shell will actually pump the gas to a floating liquefaction plant rather than build an on-shore installation because the economics are driving that. The development costs are about half of what they would be in the event you tried to create the same logistics on the shore as opposed to a floating platform.
Going forward we have to be very careful as a country not to cook the goose before it's even in the oven, because there are some really difficult economic decisions being taken.
As a final comment, let's remind ourselves that no final investment decisions have been taken on any LNG project in British Columbia yet because there are some difficult decisions ahead.