MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA—Woodside boss Peter Coleman got fired up Monday during the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association (APPEA) conference, telling the industry that it will miss out on future opportunities in the oil and gas space if it doesn’t start to think outside the box and challenge conventional methods of operating.

Flanked by Shell Australia and New Zealand vice president Andrew Smith and Deloitte US oil and gas lead vice chairman John England, Coleman said the industry shouldn’t automatically expect the next wave of industry investment to occur in brownfields operations.

“The discussions around expansion and brownfield developments… I think we need to be careful about those discussions,” he said. “I think it will come if we earn it.”

Smith emphasized that Shell’s analysis of market forces indicated that natural gas would fulfil 2-3% of energy demand per annum for the next 20 years, with demand predominately stemming from Asia.

However, Coleman stressed that Australia’s proximity to Asia would not be enough to secure lucrative opportunities in fulfilling this demand.

“We can’t sit here with our projections and think simply, just because energy demand growth is going up, that we have the right to fill that demand growth. We have to earn it by making sure we are competitive in our cost offering.”

With Australia well on its way to becoming a LNG force to be reckoned with, Coleman said the challenge for Australian LNG was the ability to shift from a project constructor and builder to a LNG “trader, marketer and producer.”

He posed the question to a full house at the Melbourne Convention Centre on the first day of the 2015 APPEA conference and exhibition.

“We [Australia] are moving beyond being a constructor, developer. Are we ready as a country for that and as companies for that?” he said.

While low oil prices were forcing some companies into hibernation and cost conservation mode, Coleman stressed that investment in the sector was still pushing ahead and reiterated that Australia was competing on a global stage.

“If we get stuck in this mode of ‘well we wouldn’t invest so nobody in the industry will invest’ and we come to conferences and talk about how we won’t invest. That’s great. The Cheniere’s in this world go out and invest. The Freeport’s go out and invest.”

Earlier this week, Woodside finalized terms with Cheniere Energy relating to its purchase of gas from the Texas-based Corpus Christi liquefaction project after a positive final investment decision on the two train project..

Coleman stood his ground and urged the industry to challenge itself more often.

“We missed the shale gas boom because we had a conventional way of thinking. We were building import plants in the US to bring it [oil] out of the Middle East. That was our insight, that was our foresight and that’s how good we were at planning,” Coleman told delegates.

“We absolutely messed it up and missed it and then we went and missed it again because those who had those import terminals went and turned them into export terminals,” Coleman said.

A fired up Coleman urged the need for thinking outside the box.

“My point is we keep trying to predict the future as being something that is rational and stable. The reality is the industry has a history of about every ten years fundamentally changing the business model. Whether that is deepwater, or 3D seismic or shale gas.

“I think we need to look forward and really challenge ourselves and say ‘we really don’t know what the future looks like but do we need to play?’”

Lauren Barrett, associate editor for Hart Energy's Oil and Gas Investor Australia, can be reached at lbarrett@hartenergy.com.