By Jonathan Moylan
Some news that broke in recent weeks prompted me to write a story – a true story, a now story, a story whose ending has yet to be written, and one that has been retold by many over many years, usually with the best parts left out, and one with enormous consequences for all of our futures.
In the past week there have been media reports that the CEO of Santos has suggested that the Narrabri Gas Project could be put on ice indefinitely as a consequence of the domestic gas reservation policy. I’m going to explain what both of those things are, to set out why that’s such a huge deal – while adding that it is definitely not quite game over because Santos has *still* not cancelled a coal seam gas project that has been hanging over thousands of people’s heads now for over fifteen years. Take note though because Santos haven’t drilled a well in the Pilliga for well over a decade.
The Pilliga is an enormous forest in North-West NSW perhaps most famous for the partial telling of its history in Eric Rolls’ 1981 book “A Million Wild Acres”. Look it up on Google Maps and you’ll see how important it is in the landscape for species that require large ranges, for habitat connectivity and as a climate refuge. Even better go and visit it and take in the awe of its abundance of birds, bats and lizards – you can even join the grey nomads who soak up the warm and sulphurous waters of the Pilliga bore baths fed by a natural spring from the Great Artesian Basin below. The Pilliga is in fact the southern recharge zone of the Great Artesian Basin, which many plants and ecological communities depend on to grow and farms in the region depend on for water.
The Narrabri Gas Project is often brought up in national media as a potential source of gas supply, but what is usually missing from the story is the damage that would need to be wrought in order to extract the gas. In 2010, when Santos was a minority shareholder in the company conducting exploratory drilling in the Pilliga, there were 16 spills of contaminated saline water – some severe enough to have killed kangaroos and destroyed large patches of vegetation in the forest – Santos bought out the project completely in 2011. Since that time, they have been taking plans through the NSW assessment process for up to 850 wells that would be drilled vertically and then horizontally into coal seams at multiple layers – a drilling technique that it has never attempted before. By the company’s own assessment, this would lead to a depressurisation of part of the target aquifers of up to 153 metres at the wellhead, with two aircraft hangar loads worth of toxic brine brought to the surface. More worryingly, there is a low level of scientific understanding about the level of connection between the highly saline aquifer that sits above the coal seam Santos is targeting and the Great Artesian Basin, with risks of contamination to the GAB if something goes wrong.
Unsurprisingly, the local opposition has been fierce, determined and unrelenting ever since, in particular from Gomeroi people whose history, present and future is enmeshed in the Pilliga, and have led landmark litigation on how the climate impacts of the project would harm their native title interests, as well as from farmers who have refused access agreements along the length of hundreds of kilometres of pipeline that could contaminate their land along multiple potential routes, as well as broader support from people across NSW and nearly every trade union in the state.
In addition to people power, the other thing that has prevented Santos from carrying out their extraordinary threat so far has been Santos’ own resistance to making environmental impact assessments, management plans and potential alternatives available to state planning authorities in a timely manner. A while ago I listened in to a webinar by gas market analysts (not people who are famous for worrying about biodiversity or climate impacts), who held the Narrabri Gas Project up as a case study in the entire Asia-Pacific region of a project that was unlikely to proceed soon because of a “failure to secure social license” – which I think is a good kind of failure in relation to a project that carries such an insane level of risk, but also a huge testament to the will of the community to stand up to Santos.
So, what does any of this have to do with the domestic gas reservation scheme and what on earth is a domestic gas reservation scheme anyway? Domestic gas reservation is a policy that has been pushed hard by Australian manufacturing companies to tackle a problem that was originally caused in 2015 by – you guessed it – Santos.
Prior to 2014, there were no gas exports from eastern Australia, so all of the gas extracted on the east coast was used by Australian businesses and households. Between 2014 and 2015, three LNG terminals were built on Curtis Island, connecting Australia’s eastern gas market to the international market for the first time – this included Gladstone LNG, owned by a Santos-led consortium. (LNG terminals are also by far Australia’s largest *users* of gas – the gas burnt to chill gas to make it dense enough for export from Australia exceeds the gas consumption of the *entire* domestic manufacturing industry). To finance the construction of the LNG facility, Santos entered into long-term gas contracts with overseas buyers, but in an eye-watering act of hubris, contracted out more than a third more gas than they actually had access to in Australia. Once the terminal was built, they met their export contracts by outbidding domestic manufacturers, forcing up the price of gas to nearly triple what it was before. This drove a lot of manufacturing businesses to the wall or close to the wall and caused a huge amount of pretty understandable anger. It also drove your gas bill up (if you use it), and unless you’re self-sufficient, your electricity bill as well (because of the way electricity prices tend to be set). The solution was domestic gas reservation – legally compel gas exporters to sell gas into the domestic market first, at a fair price. (I should add here that there is some valid debate about whether domestic gas reservation is actually a good thing from a climate point of view because it can delay the electrification of everything that we need to get off fossil fuels, but from a “let’s not cripple manufacturing on the way” point of view it makes complete sense).
SO – it is significant that Santos now accepts that unless it can charge exorbitant amounts of money for the gas it will extract by fragmenting the Pilliga with 850 wells, pipes and access roads, risking the Great Artesian Basin, steamrolling over Gomeroi and landowner opposition by fighting native title claimants and forcing access onto unwilling landowners’ properties, the project doesn’t make sense commercially. The high CO content in the target resource is highlighted in the linked Lock the Gate report and NWPA dived into this issue and raised it at the AGM a few years ago.
It is time for Santos to wave the white flag and leave the communities it has targetted alone.
The reason I’ve written this article (and thank you if you’ve made it this far!) is that the lead and the headline in the media is usually the one that Santos’ PR team trots out – that the Narrabri Gas Project is being held up by politicians and it’s time to get the gas flowing. That narrative is garbage – firstly because politicians do not typically involve themselves in the details of project assessments (and nor would we want them to), but more importantly because the Pilliga and surrounds have been protected so far thanks to the relentless, determined and heroic actions of Gomeroi traditional owners, farmers, community members and trade unions. Put another way, it has been held up by people power. David can beat Goliath.
The other lead and headline that is distorting the truth is the idea that projects like this have been held up by green lawfare. The Narrabri Gas Project and associated pipelines have faced a lot of lawsuits – not led by ENGOs, but rather led either by Gomeroi traditional owners seeking to protect their native title interests or by directly impacted community members. Access to the courts to resolve a dispute is the way society is meant to function. Unfortunately, for the most part there is no ability for directly affected community members or any other public interest litigant to test the merits of a decision in the courts because politicians have specifically changed laws to reduce community access to justice at the behest of mining companies. What that means is that usually the way these things have to be litigated is to argue that a decision-maker has not complied with the legal requirements for environmental decision-making. That does *not* mean any judgment in a judicial review is based on “technicalities”. What it usually means is that the relevant government Department did not take into account a factor that the Parliament has obliged it to take into account, and if it had taken it into account, it may have resulted in a completely different decision. As we all know, processes can and do determine outcomes.
One dark part of the otherwise silver lining around the cloud I have painted above is that Santos is now threatening an even more controversial and risky plan to frack for shale gas in the Northern Territory through Australia’s second-largest (but just as vital!) aquifer – the Cambrian Limestone Aquifer – and probably at an even greater cost than Narrabri. Again, it’s a plan that has faced a wall of local opposition and has been a threat for very many years. The moral of the story here is to never give up.
When I was younger, I learnt about the myth of the Great Man view of history – the bias in a lot of historical accounts claiming that big events are due to the actions of a single person acting alone. It’s not just a fallacy in our history books; it’s also a fallacy in our current affairs. What we read about in the media is an argument between a guy called Kevin and a guy called Chris and a guy called Anthony. What is far more powerful than any of those three guys are the thousands of people who have decided to take action together – not because they have much in common with each other, but because the stakes are so high. As I said at the start of this article, this is an unfinished story and Santos has not yet given up – neither has the community. If you choose to become part of that story at this stage, then who knows – you just might be the straw that broke the camel’s back!
Jonathan Moylan is a Hunter resident who has spent many years supporting communities in the North-West to protect land and water at risk from mining.