Santos has received federal approval to commence production from its Barossa offshore gasfield off the coast of the Northern Territory.
The National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (Nopsema) decided to accept the environment plan for the project’s production operations. It marks the final approval required for the project, clearing the way for the gas giant to extract and pipe the gas to Darwin.
The Barossa field is known for its 18% carbon dioxide content, which is a higher concentration than other Australian gasfields.
The development is projected to add more than 270m tonnes of heat-trapping CO2 to the atmosphere over its life once the gas is sold and burnt overseas.
“This is Australia’s dirtiest gas project and it should never have been given the green light,” said Gavan McFadzean, the Australian Conservation Foundation’s climate change and clean energy program manager.
“Barossa is a massive climate bomb that will produce more climate pollution than usable gas.”
McFadzean said despite repeated requests by ACF, Santos had not properly explained how the project would comply with Australia’s safeguard mechanism or provided a “proper assessment of how the greenhouse gas emissions from Barossa will affect Australia’s environment”.
“Barossa remains on track for first gas in the third quarter of 2025 and within cost guidance,” a Santos spokesperson said in a statement provided to Guardian Australia on Tuesday.
Kirsty Howey, the executive director of the Environment Centre NT, said: “It is unfathomable that it has been approved in 2025, when the climate science is clear that we can have no new fossil fuel projects if we are to avoid dangerous global heating.
“This approval, in the middle of an election campaign, just goes to show the failure of climate policy in Australia to ensure the necessary phase-out of fossil fuels,” she said.
“If Barossa was a litmus test for the reformed Safeguard Mechanism, that policy has failed,” she said.
The Greens environment spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young, said if Labor was re-elected at the forthcoming election, the Greens would be “essential” in the new parliament to “ensure real action is taken to address the climate crisis”.
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“If the Albanese government wanted to, they could have worked with the Greens in this parliament to stop climate bombs like Barossa by putting a climate trigger in our environment laws,” she said.
“Instead, on the eve of an election, Santos has been given the green-light to produce some of the dirtiest gas in Australia.”
A Labor campaign spokesperson said the Albanese government was “working to put downward pressure on energy prices and emissions after a decade of delay, dysfunction and denial” and “focused squarely on transitioning our energy system”.
“The Barossa Gas Project is subject to the Albanese Government’s strengthened safeguard mechanism, which requires major emitters to reduce or offset their emissions over time, in line with net zero by 2050 targets,” they said.
They said that technical regulatory decisions about offshore projects in Commonwealth waters “are a matter for the independent expert regulator Nopsema”.
Approval of the production plan follows legal challenges to other components of the Barossa project, including unsuccessful proceedings related to submerged cultural heritage that were launched by the Environmental Defenders Office on behalf of three Tiwi Island claimants over a proposed export pipeline.
The federal court ordered the EDO to pay Santos’s full legal costs late last year.
