Coal seam gas bonanza ...

Excerpt from Sydney Morning Herald:

Gas bonanza

7 June 2008

Long the Cinderella of the energy sector, coal-seam gas has suddenly emerged as the hot industry every big global player wants to be in - and NSW is the next frontier of the great gas rush.

It has been a long, hard slog for members of the Australian coal-seam gas industry to be taken seriously.

David Casey, the managing director of the NSW hopeful Eastern Star Gas, would know. He went into coal-seam gas research straight after graduating from university in 1991, and has since faced plenty of sceptics.

"They didn't believe in the sector," he says. "It was a novelty, and we were always seen to be the poor cousin [to coal and conventional oil and gas]."

And when Queensland Gas's managing director, Richard Cottee, joined the Brisbane company in 2002, his first order of business was to ensure its survival by signing as many preliminary supply contracts as it could.

"That was a fairly difficult and mean experience," he recalls. "You were sitting there with [the ill-fated Papua New Guinea gas pipeline project] hanging up over your heads like a dangling bag of swords."

But in the past few weeks, the scepticism which has long clouded the Australian coal-seam gas sector has all but disappeared.
...

See - Sydney Morning Herald - Gas bonanza.