Barnett – following his meetings with government and utility company officials in China and Japan last month – told a business leaders’ forum in Perth last week that an increasing reliance on gas was good news for Australia’s explorers and producers.

He feared the Japanese government was relying on the United States’ much-touted shale gas revolution – a belief that he said local utilities shared – and that it would inevitably need to seek out conventional and unconventional gas from “safe” destinations such as Australia.

Prior to the 2011 Fukushima disaster that caused Japan’s energy crisis, it had 50 nuclear power stations operating, providing about 30% of its electricity. Since then, just two of these nuclear units have been re-established.

Barnett said local sentiment appeared to be that Japan’s imminent audit of all its nuclear reactors would be long and tedious. It was unlikely to recover more than half its previous nuclear-powered electricity.

“The view of Tokyo Gas and Tokyo Electric is the audit of all nuclear power plants will be a slow and tedious process,” Barnett said.

“At best, two to four nuclear units might come back each year. The consensus was at the very best Japan will only get back half of its nuclear capacity, maybe 15 per cent.”

This was exacerbated by widespread public opposition to nuclear power, and local governments were simply not approving restarts or making land available.

“Japan can place no real reliance on nuclear for its future,” Barnett said.

In China, gas makes up 5% gas of its overall energy use, while most developed countries are at least 20-30%.

Barnett said China’s policy decision was to progressively replace coal with gas, which meant 10% gas as a share of energy by 2016 and 15% gas by 2020. That means a 170% increase in natural gas usage in China before the end of this decade – “a huge policy task”

“Some of it will be pipeline gas from central Asia, but a significant part will be liquefied natural gas which has implications for both conventional here [Australia] and coal seam and shale gas projects in the future,” Barnett said.

Nuclear makes up 2% of China’s power generation. The target is to reach 6% by 2020, the equivalent of another 28 nuclear power stations, which Barnett said was still small compared to coal and gas.

“So the emphasis is going to be buying gas wherever you can get it and long-term contacts,” he added.

It was the Japanese government’s under-estimation of the US’ need for energy independence that most alarmed Barnett.

“What I found surprising was that, in my interpretation, there seems to be a view in the Japanese government that ‘we’ll be ok because the US has all these shale gas deposits and gas is only $US4 per unit in the US and we’ll be able to buy shale gas and turn it into LNG’,” he said.

“My summation from US leaders is that for the first time in about 100 years the US is heading towards self-sufficiency in energy. I don’t think any US president is going to compromise giving that up. Yes, there will be some LNG export out of the US, but it will be comparatively modest.

“My fear for Japan is that it’s just sitting there on a wing and a prayer, hoping it will come through. I don’t think it will, and indeed I detected a fair degree of scepticism among the energy utilities that this is getting quite precarious.

“The implication is they will go for gas. The limitation is gas prices in Japan are significantly higher than here or the US or Europe.”

The good news, at least for Australia, is that while Japan has had eight prime ministers in seven years, and 20 years of recession including four “formal recessions” since 1990, and average growth of 0.9% over that time, Barnett is seeing more optimism in Japan than he has seen in a “long, long time” with last year’s growth at 2%.

“A lot of credit is being given to electoral change, the return of a Liberal Democratic government, particularly new Prime Minister [Shinzo] Abe is taking a strong hand in economic policy,” he said.

Barnett said the aim of what had been called ‘Abe economics’ had three focuses: bringing down the yen, which has been done; increasing public expenditure, which was in the process of happening; and more business spending.

He said that while the latter had not yet occurred, he was told by Japan’s banks that most major Japanese enterprises had little or no debt.

“So you will see more spending, and there is an appetite in Japan to invest overseas, in particular in a safe place such as Australia,” Barnett said.