John William Wentworth Butters, who died in June at the age of 80, came from a family in whom a tradition of helping to build Australia's national infrastructure ran strong. His father, John Henry Butters, was chairman of the Federal Capital Commission, which was responsible for building the city of Canberra from a green paddock in 1924 and the opening of the first Parliament House in 1927. He was also the founding engineer–in-chief of the Tasmanian Hydro-Electric Commission network. He was knighted for his work.

John W Butters headed a taskforce to design a pipeline to get natural gas from Moomba in South Australia to Sydney, a supply line which continues today.

Next Butters turned his mind to the Northern Territory's plan to construct a coal-fired power station in Darwin. He was appalled. Despite the fact that the project had been approved and the planning was well advanced, he lobbied the territory government hard, demonstrating that a power station using natural gas from central Australia was environmentally and economically preferable. Eventually his concept was accepted. He became chairman of the consortium that designed, constructed and operated the 1600-kilometre pipeline.

Then, through a Butters initiative, the Australian Gas Light Company was one of the first experimenters in extracting methane from Sydney coal seams. The idea was ahead of the available technology at the time but gas from coalmines is an important energy source today.

At Sydney University John Butters was the president of the Engineering Undergraduates Association and vice-president of the University Union. He played in the first XV rugby team and won an athletics blue for the shot put, breaking university, NSW and Australian records in 1948. On travelling to England, he spent a year of postgraduate studies at Birmingham University before returning and graduating as a master of engineering.

In 1954 he married Mary Davis, from Christchurch, New Zealand. They set up home in Wahroonga and had four daughters and a son.

Butters worked first for ICI and then from 1954 to 1960 at Petroleum and Chemical Corporation Australia. From 1960 to 1962 he was with Clyde Engineering, in 1963 at Borg Warner and, in 1964, he joined AEI Engineering, where he became managing director - a company at that time with six factories and 2400 employees.

After a takeover by the British General Electric and the subsequent merger with English Electric, Butters set up his own industrial consulting firm in 1969. AGL hired him in 1970 as general manager of development and engineering. This made him responsible for the initiation, design, construction and commissioning of the pipeline from Moomba to Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong, a distance of 1250 kilometres.

In 1983 he led an AGL team which carried out feasibility studies into the generation of electricity for the Northern Territory from natural gas sourced near Alice Springs. Butters chaired the consortium that built the pipeline, finishing four months ahead of schedule in 1986, and $50 million within its $250 million budget.

He retired in 1988 to become chief policy adviser to the NSW minister of minerals and energy and chaired various tariff inquiries as well as the State Energy Policy and Strategy Committee. He joined the board of Sydney Electricity in 1990 before retiring to Avoca, on the NSW Central Coast, in 1994. He is survived by Mary, their five children and nine grandchildren.

This is an edited version of the obituary first published in The Sydney Morning Herald on 29 November 2006.