Take your seats, ladies and gentlemen, for Australia’s annual gas pantomime, guaranteed to scare the wits out of struggling consumers.

Every year it’s the same tired script, where the villain is cast as the hero, and crisis is averted in the nick of time. Hurrah! The heating stayed on for another winter. Standing ovation.

Frack that

On Thursday, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) releases its annual gas statement of opportunities, GSOO as it’s affectionately known. Cue scary headlines and claims of a looming “gas shortage” and a “catastrophic supply shortfall” unless we let the gas cartel unleash more fracking and mining of the fossil fuel.

For media companies, GSOO is manna from heaven — almost guaranteed to deliver a “warning” that, framed a certain way, can scare the bejesus out of people and pull in a big audience. For the gas industry, it’s an opportunity to demand more and more gas expansion and to castigate any government concerned about climate change and the environment.

Nothing short of bull

As Public Enemy sang, don’t believe the hype. There is no gas shortage. Australia has an abundance of gas. It is the third largest exporter of liquified natural gas in the world. Each year, giant gas companies ship offshore far more of the fuel than Australian businesses and households could possibly use. The gas industry uses more of it to liquify the gas for export than Australia’s entire manufacturing industry consumes.

To the extent that it does exist, any risk of a shortfall in Australia is only a misallocation of resources, given that so much of Australia’s gas (up to 80%) is exported. It could easily be addressed by requiring gas companies to reserve enough to meet domestic demand before they sell it offshore.

The other thing to keep in mind is that when it comes to the “gas shortfall”, AEMO is a bit like the boy who cried wolf. The “risk” that it talks about is a worst-case scenario: freezing winter weather coinciding with extreme peak demand for gas-fired power. Even then there are better ways to manage it than cutting the heating and the lights.

One day a shortfall may happen, maybe even this winter, but AEMO habitually overestimates demand and has a track record of forecasting risks of a shortfall that doesn’t happen. Analysts have questioned the demand assumptions built into the modeling AEMO relies on — not that you’d know that from most of the reports in the Murdoch press or the Nine media.

Hairy headlines

AEMO is not simply a government-controlled agency. While federal and state governments are represented, most of its members are energy companies, including gas companies like Santos, Origin and AGL. The gas industry’s membership is rarely if ever mentioned in media coverage of the GSOO.

In a new study, The Australia Institute has analysed media coverage of last year’s gas statement. You get a sense of who’s who in the GSOO, so to speak, by looking at which voices are privileged in the media reports.

The study uses a “scare scale” to rank media coverage based on the ratio of scaremongering words — including “fear”, “crisis” and “catastrophe” — in each report. No prizes for guessing that the Murdoch media, a tireless barracker for fossil-fuel interests, dominates the list. It produced six of the top 10 articles on the “scare scale”. Nine was right up there, rounding out the list with four of the top 10.

Dig, baby, dig

Outside the major commercial media outlets, coverage was more nuanced and balanced. The ABC ran with the scary headline and lead paragraphs but also spoke to analysts critical of AEMO’s report and its tendency to overstate risks and demand for gas. Reporting in Guardian Australia and RenewEconomy was balanced and appropriately sceptical.

Gas industry executives and lobbyists got prominent coverage in the major commercial outlets — an opportunity to demand more and more gas exploration and exploitation. Climate policy advocates, energy analysts, consumer interest groups and environmentalists featured far less, if at all. Alternatives such as curtailing exports to ensure domestic supply were scorned by gas industry bosses. Yet it is one of many ways to address potential risk.

Mind the store

Australia could upgrade pipelines used to shift gas from the north of Australia to markets in southern Australia. It could require gas companies to shift more gas when pipelines are not being fully used and build storage facilities for this gas. Australia could increase the pace of electrification so the nation is less reliant on the climate-polluting fossil fuel. It could reward industrial users and households that cut back gas consumption at peak times.

Government could finance the installation of “smart technologies” that allow gas suppliers, or utilities burning gas to create electricity, to turn off appliances for short periods when demand is very high, under voluntary contracts which provide energy bill rebates to customers who agree to do this.

The GSOO, in fact, advocates many of these measures. But again, you might not know it watching the annual gas pantomime: full of sound and fury — and a lot of hot air.