Key Points
- Australia’s climate pollution laws do not manage most of the Browse gas project’s climate pollution. Development of Browse Basin will result in up to 1.6 billion tonnes of climate pollution. More than 80% of these are untouched by Australia’s climate pollution laws as they ignore the end use of Australia’s exported fossil fuels.
- Woodside’s Browse gas project is the largest new fossil fuel project under development in Australia. The scale of climate pollution from the project will make it one of the country’s largest industrial polluters. In an average year, emissions just from extracting and processing the fossil fuels produced in Browse Basin will be equivalent to Qantas and Virgin’s entire domestic air fleets combined. Peak years will be higher still.
- The laws holding new facilities to more onerous emissions allowances were put in place precisely to manage the impact of mega-projects like Browse, but these rules have been incompetently made and applied. Most fossil fuel projects currently seeking approval can avoid being deemed new by claiming to be part of an existing facility, often on tenuous grounds.
- Browse is further from the LNG terminal that it will supply than Melbourne is from Sydney and has different owners. A loophole in the laws means that it may be deemed part of that LNG terminal for the purpose of our national climate laws. Our climate laws are blind to reality. Under the current rules, Woodside may decide – at its own initiative – to integrate the new operations into the far-flung LNG terminal to shirk its responsibilities under the law. This bad situation is made worse by arguably unlawful interpretation of relevant laws by the Clean Energy Regulator.
- By claiming Browse operations are part of the 40-year-old Karratha Gas Plant 900 kilometres away, Woodside will be able to avoid hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of offset requirements. This loophole will save Woodside in the order of $210 million in offsetting requirements between the start of production at Browse and 2050.
- While the global fossil fuel company has announced plans to capture and store carbon dioxide produced at Browse, these plans remain speculative with no identified timeframe. They cannot be trusted. The ongoing failure of Chevron’s Gorgon CCS facility to deliver as promised and as legally required shows that existing governance arrangements in Australia are not sufficient to protect against such failure repeating over and over again.
Treatment of emissions from Woodside’s Browse Gas Basin under Australia’s climate pollution laws
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