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Santos Limited
Santos finds, produces, and sells natural gas and oil, mostly to customers in Australia and Asia.
Santos is one of Australia's biggest energy companies. It pulls natural gas out of the ground and turns much of it into liquefied natural gas, or LNG — gas chilled until it becomes a liquid so it can be loaded onto ships and sold across Asia. It also sells ordinary gas into pipelines for homes, factories, and power plants, plus smaller amounts of oil and condensate, the light liquids that come up alongside gas.
The money comes from selling those molecules. Its gas goes to Asian utilities and industrial buyers, and in Australia it supplies domestic customers and runs a stake in the massive PNG LNG project in Papua New Guinea. Santos owns the Gladstone LNG plant in Queensland and has interests in Western Australian gas fields, so it is both a producer and a part-owner of the expensive infrastructure that turns gas into shippable fuel. Customers choose it because gas is hard to replace for heating, power, and manufacturing, and long-term contracts make the revenue fairly steady. That steadiness is also Santos's vulnerability. Its fortunes swing with global gas prices, which spiked after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and then cooled, and its growth depends on big, costly projects that take years to pay off. It has spent heavily on new gas fields and carbon capture plans to keep production up and sell "cleaner" LNG. The company has also faced pressure from activist investors over climate strategy and questions about whether its expansion plans make sense in a world shifting toward renewables.
Santos uses its cash to pay dividends and fund those projects. A takeover approach from Woodside Energy in 2024 collapsed, and the company has since focused on cutting costs and completing its growth pipeline. It is, at heart, a company that profits from an essential fuel the world still needs — while betting that the transition to cleaner energy will be slower than many hope.
Saved answer · last researched 12 Nov 2026