Carmen Lawrence: Woodside’s Burrup Hub no good for WA

By Carmen Lawrence AO

If you have walked through Yagan Square recently, or picked up a copy of your local paper, or read the news online, you will have found it hard to avoid the misleading claims from Woodside about their Scarborough gas project. 

This last weekend, you might have come across further nauseating Woodside self-promotion through their expensively crafted Sky News program in which they shamelessly congratulated themselves on 70 years of climate and cultural destruction.

Woodside are paying vast sums of money for an advertising blitz, part of an ongoing attempt to convince politicians, regulators and an increasingly skeptical Australian public of the need for their offshore gas projects. A 2023 Roy Morgan survey found that Australians are increasingly distrustful of corporate brands because of the ‘moral blindness’ displayed by many corporate leaders. 

Woodside’s wall-to-wall advertising shows that the company is aware of these trends and is worried that people do not trust them; they know that many are waking up to the fact that Woodside’s new projects, far from being good for WA, are positively harmful. 

Scarborough is just one part of Woodside’s Burrup Hub, the largest fossil fuel project in Australia and the biggest gas hub in the Southern Hemisphere. Like the other massive gas fields and processing plants that make up this mega-expansion, Scarborough isn’t quite finished, and doesn’t yet have all its approvals or finance locked in. That’s why Woodside are going gangbusters trying to get it over the line. 

If completed, Woodside’s Burrup Hub will emit more than 6 billion tonnes of carbon pollution over its 50 year lifespan to 2070. It’s a big part of the reason that WA’s overall emissions are set to hit record levels this year, a 20% increase over the past 20 years. While most of Australia and the world are trying to do the right thing for our children and grandchildren by cutting back emissions, Woodside is hitting the accelerator. 

What Woodside wants us to ignore is that the resources they are exploiting belong to us, not to them. Reading Woodside’s advertisements, it appears they think they are doing us a favour. They are not. 

For a start, almost all the gas produced from Woodside’s Burrup Hub is heading straight offshore, some to be on-sold at a premium by Japanese companies. WA gas companies are meant to reserve at least 15% of their offshore gas to keep the lights on here in WA. But a recent Parliamentary inquiry into WA’s domestic gas supply found that they are spectacularly failing to do this. 

And Woodside is one of the worst offenders. The Pluto plant, where all of Scarborough gas will be processed, contributes just 2% of its total output to the WA domestic market, according to the industry-run WA DomGas Alliance. There is also concern that the Woodside expansion will suck the domestic gas market dry, competing with local industry and driving up prices. What people may not realise is that the LNG facility is already a net taker from gas reserves and this will only grow if the expansion goes ahead.

What is more, over 90% of WA’s gas (LNG) is exported, with foreign-owned companies paying almost no royalties to WA., while the majority of Woodside’s dividends go to offshore shareholders. Contrary to Woodside’s claims about employment, the gas industry is actually the smallest employer by sector in WA. 

As well as adding to the serious problems we all face from climate change, the proposed expansion will increase the volume of acidic chemicals already seriously damaging the oldest, largest rock art site on planet earth - Murujuga. Corrosive damage to the stone carvings is effectively irreversible. 

The W.A. Government’s own monitoring data shows elevated acid levels – 100 times more acidic than baseline – across Murujuga. The Woodside LNG facility is the largest source of these acid gasses – Nitrogen and Sulfur oxides. The chemical emissions from the nearby urea plant which uses Woodside’s gas only add to the harm. 

It is especially worrying that Woodside has no plans to reduce its corrosive chemical emissions which have been shown by numerous peer-reviewed scientific studies to damage the fragile engravings of the world heritage-nominated rock art. 

Instead, Woodside and the WA government deny the science and persist in their tired old argument that there can be no conclusive evidence that the rock art is being damaged until their lengthy and expensive rock art monitoring program produces its final results in about 2027. 

None of this is good for WA. 

Murujuga could be the jewel in WA’s tourism crown – instead, it’s an industrial building site that threatens UNESCO world heritage status before it is even assessed. 

History will be a harsh critic of Woodside and the WA government if this application fails and allows them to continue their greedy exploitation of our gas resources, with minimal financial return to the WA people, and at significant cost to our unique irreplaceable Aboriginal cultural heritage. 

Woodside’s Burrup Hub is no good for our climate, no good for our precious, globally significant Aboriginal heritage, and no good for the people of WA.

Carmen Lawrence AO is the former Premier of Western Australia.