The environment minister, Murray Watt, has given the green light to Woodside Energy’s application to extend the life of one of the world’s biggest liquified natural gas projects from 2030 to 2070.
Watt said he had told Woodside he planned to approve the life extension of the North West Shelf gas processing plant, on the Burrup peninsula in northern Western Australia, with “strict conditions” relating to local air pollution. Woodside has 10 days to respond.
The proposed approval has come despite some experts raising concerns about the impact of local pollution on a globally significant collection of rock art in the Murujuga cultural landscape, which includes the Burrup peninsula, and accusing the WA government of misrepresenting and tampering with pollution data.
Their concern was backed by Unesco, which – in an unrelated report – said industrial facilities should be removed from the region if Australia wanted to win world heritage listing for the area’s more than 1m rock carvings, some nearly 50,000 years old.
Scientists and activists also said the life extension could be linked to up to 6bn tonnes of greenhouse gases being emitted in the decades ahead, mostly after the gas is shipped and burned overseas. They said it made the development a “carbon bomb” that would help put the goals of the landmark Paris climate agreement beyond reach.
The decision is Watt’s first since being appointed environment minister after the 3 May election. His predecessor, Tanya Plibersek, had delayed making a call on the life extension before the poll.
In a statement, Watt said the decision followed “the consideration of rigorous scientific and other advice, including submissions from a wide cross-section of the community”.
He said he had been required to consider the potential impact of the plant on the national heritage values of nearby ancient rock art, and economic and social matters.
While gas is a fossil fuel, he was not required to consider the impact of the project on the climate crisis. Climate change is not grounds to refuse or limit a development application under Australia’s national environment law.
The decision came despite a highly contested argument over whether local emissions from the plant will irreparably damage Murujuga rock art, which is thought to include the earliest known depiction of a human face.
The WA government and the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation, a body established by the state government to represent traditional owners, on Friday released a rock art monitoring report prepared last year. In a summary, they said there had been historic damage to rock, but linked it to air emissions from a power plant in the 1970s. They said key pollutant levels had declined since 2014 and there was no evidence that acid rain was affecting the art.
But Benjamin Smith, a professor of archeology and a world rock art expert at the University of Western Australia, said while the science in the 800-page report was sound, the government has badly misrepresented what it actually suggested.
He said it showed that local pollution was four times higher now than in the 1970s and that “if we allow what is happening to continue we’re going to very quickly lose the rock art in Murujuga”.
‘Unacceptable interference’
The ABC reported that the chief statistician who worked on the monitoring report, Adrian Baddeley, had expressed “grave concern” about “unacceptable interference” by WA government officials in removing some information from a graph in the report summary. He said the summary had incorrectly stated that the research showed current pollution levels were “lower than the interim guideline levels”.
He said, in reality, the five monitoring sites closest to industry were experiencing pollution levels about the guideline level.
In a complaint email to the state environment department, Baddeley reportedly wrote: “In my opinion, this constitutes unacceptable interference in the scientific integrity of the project.”
Before Watt’s decision was announced, the WA premier, Roger Cook, told the ABC’s Radio National that some scientists were engaging in a “political frolic”. “We have to strip away the background noise and rely upon the reports to make good decisions on behalf of the people of Western Australia,” he said.
On Tuesday, Unesco revealed it planned to defer a decision on a government-backed world heritage bid for the Murujuga cultural landscape due to the impact of local industrial developments, including the North West Shelf.
It planned to refer the application back to the Australian government, and to ask it to “ensure the total removal of degrading acidic emissions” affecting the petroglyphs and to develop a decommissioning and rehabilitation plan for the industrial facilities.
Watt said the government was disappointed with the Unesco decision and would “work constructively with the World Heritage Centre to ensure the factual inaccuracies that influenced the draft decision are addressed”.
