In the latest plea from a senior manufacturing leader to address spiralling gas prices, Orica chief executive Alberto Calderon said on Thursday the current "ridiculous" situation represented a "crisis point".

Mr Calderon said Orica was an energy-intensive business and had faced exponential increases in energy costs that meant prices in Australia were more than double of what was being paid in China or Japan.

"What is happening today is myopic and unsustainable, cornering domestic markets with prices so much higher than the international prices will eventually lead to a bad outcome, price ceilings or other non-market measures," said Mr Calderon, a former chief commercial officer at BHP.

"In other words, it is wrong to have local prices higher than what the producers can get overseas. There is no other commodity in Australia where this happens; not in iron ore, nor oil, nor coal, nor copper, nor bauxite, nor any other.

"It is the gas price of desperation, not the fair tradeable prices that Australia should have."

Mr Calderon said the domestic market was unbalanced as gas was exported to fulfil large contracts to offshore buyers used to bankroll multi-billion dollar processing plants in Queensland.

There was no financial reason, Mr Calderon told Fairfax Media, why an Australian producer could not fulfil those contracts by buying gas from America and then free up domestic gas to sell at the same profit margin.

"In a fully tradeable market environment, the producer would be able to sell this tonne into the Sydney market instead, obtaining the same profits," he said.

"As long as the profit to producers is at least equivalent for both export and domestic sales, they should be indifferent to which market they supply. It should be: 'I'm going to deliver the quantity of gas from any source as long as it is the same quality'."

Mr Calderon said there was no shortage of gas available globally to fulfil those contracts and it should not breach undertakings given to gas company shareholders.

"What they didn't tell the shareholders is 'my costs are very high, we are not going to make that much money from Japan, I'm just going to make it back from Australian manufacturers'," he said.

Mr Calderon said his proposal was less intrusive than domestic reservation schemes that have been mooted and are under consideration by the federal government.

He said the situation had become so extreme it would be cheaper for Orica to stop producing ammonia at its plant.

"It would be better for us to resell the gas [we have bought] and import ammonia from a country that is buying gas from Australia at half the price," he said.

Meanwhile, Santos chief executive Kevin Gallagher said his company's efforts to lower costs would allow it to increase supply to the market.

"In the coming months, Santos expects to announced further domestic supply contracts to support the federal government's efforts to deliver affordable and reliable energy to households and industry," he said.

Santos unveiled a headline loss of $US506 million ($641 million), partly due to writedowns of its Queensland gas plant.

The company posted an underlying profit of $US156 million but will pay no dividend as it looks to pay down debt.