Australian Oil & Gas Co. Wants To Destroy A World-Class Reef
Does that make you mad? Good. Here’s how you can save Scott Reef:
Want to save Scott Reef? Fill out the petition here.
Slightly less than 300km from Australia and slightly more than 300km from Indonesia lie the twin coral atolls of Scott Reef. Covering more than 600km², Scott Reef is Australia’s largest oceanic reef system, housing over 2000 marine animal species, dozens of them endangered, like the pygmy blue whale and dusky seasnake.
Apart from the occasional dive charter, and Indonesian fisherman plying their trade via traditional methods, Scott Reef, 24 hours by boat from Broome, has been largely left untouched by humanity. That status is also now endangered, with Australian oil and gas behemoth Woodside submitting a proposal to drill 57 gas wells into the surrounding Browse Basin, and a further seven carbon capture and storage wells into the seabed at the same time.
According to famed West Australian author and lifelong surfer Tim Winton, Scott Reef is Australia’s “last remote, unspoiled, undeveloped, clear water coral reef system”. It needs to be protected at all costs, and Surfers For Climate – who you might know from the crucial role they played in the Fight For The Bight, and having New South Wales’ controversial PEP-11 proposal rejected – are asking you to play your part HERE.
Although Scott Reef is tucked a long way north into the Timor Sea, it might be home to some of the best waves you’ll never experience. Surfers who’ve been lucky enough to sample the atoll’s numerous setups – lefts and rights, facing all directions – talk teasingly of their potential. Rising sharply from the seafloor some 500m below, swell is never an issue, the tricky part is landing light winds in a part of the world that alternates between the south-easterly trades of winter, and the storms and squalls of the north-westerly monsoon.
A pristine environment, extreme depth and unpredictable weather suggest an awful formula for safely drilling 60 wells into the seabed, and Western Australia’s Environmental Protection Agency confirmed as much in 2024, saying that the Browse proposal would have “unacceptable environmental impacts” for Scott Reef. Little has changed since then, apart from the federal government ignoring all the science and extending Woodside’s North West Shelf project for an unprecedented 50 further years.
The NWS extension has not only demolished any chance of Western Australia hitting its 2050 net-zero emissions goal and proven the state government’s environmental policies are theatrical devices at best, it has also ensured that Woodside’s Karratha gas processing facilities will keep operating until 2070, and given Woodside’s fresh incentive to chase their most far-fetched of projects, consequences be damned. Suddenly but not surprisingly, Woodside are keener to drill deep into Scott Reef than ever before, and are attacking the project with renewed gusto.
The Browse Project will be the emissions equivalent of building 12 new coal-fired power stations, and modelling from climate science expert Professor Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick states that those emissions would kill an extra 29 million coral colonies on the reef during every future mass bleaching event. To top it all, as Australians continue to pay more for gas, and more for the environmental fallout of fossil fuel usage, most of the gas from the Browse Basin will be exported overseas, royalty free.
In a nutshell, Woodside taps into Australian owned gas reserves, ships the gas to countries that are not Australia, and keeps all the cash for themselves. As Australian rugby hero turned political force David Pocock succinctly states, “Aussies pay more tax on beer than international gas companies pay on tens of billions of dollars worth of our offshore gas they export.”
Why should we care? Out of sight, out of mind would not be the case should a gas spill occur, with mapping showing the catastrophic effects would reach from Western Australia’s Kimberley Coast and World Heritage listed Ningaloo Reef, across the top end to Queensland’s identically World Heritage listed Great Barrier Reef, and all the way north to the Indonesian islands of Rote and Sumba.
An accident is far from a mere hypothetical, with 2009’s Montara oil spill happening in this exact body of water. Two-thousands barrels of oil per day spilled into the ocean for 74 days straight, leaving a slick that covered 90,000km² and caused over AUD300 million in damage. One of Australia’s worst ever environmental disasters, the Montara oil spill eventually led to PTTEP Australasia paying AUD129 million in settlements to Indonesians who had lost their livelihoods, on top of the AUD40 million they’d already spent on the cleanup.
Woodside isn’t owned by an oligarch, there’s no Clive Palmer or Gina Rinehart calling the shots, it answers only to its shareholders. Through no choice of their own, many Australians are investors in Woodside as part of their superannuation funds, and in the past few years Woodside’s AGMs have turned ugly, as shareholders push for change.
Worryingly, as the situation drags on in the Strait of Hormuz, rumours are surfacing that American companies are looking at diversifying internationally, and it seems that ExxonMobil might have their eyes on Woodside as a potential takeover target. ExxonMobil are, of course, the same guys who spilled 11-millions gallons of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound back in 1989. This is why we should care.
What about jobs? It’s cute to think that Chevron or Santos won’t replace a human the second a robot is capable of performing their role, but until that happens you’ll be hard pressed to find a FIFO worker who’s struggling to land a gig regardless. If anything, the renewable energy sector is being held back because the manpower needed to take it to the next level is currently all locked up on mine sites, or out at sea. If there’s a lesson to be learned from the current standoff in the Middle East, it’s that the sooner we can leave our oil and gas dependency behind and move towards renewables, the better.
As for the waves, John John Florence might sail past on Vela one day, and if Erik Knutson is manning his RED Raptor then even just the thought of an edit should be reason enough for the Scott Reef atolls to be defended without question. Beyond that, think of surfing’s bigger picture. As the world’s lineups get more crowded, people are going to keep hunting farther and wider. Insane waves breaking in the middle of nowhere, with nobody to be seen for miles, is every surfer’s dream. Who the hell are these guys to take away our dreams?
What can you do? For the first time under Australian law, the Federal Environment Minister,
Murray Watt, has to weigh up whether to consider what a gas project would mean for the climate before approving it. In Woodside’s case, that means answering what the emissions from its Browse Gas Project would do to the Great Barrier Reef, a World Heritage protected site whose health was listed as critical in 2020. In the Minister’s case, that means accepting individual submissions from the Australian population… you!
The good news is that surfers finally get to have a say on this matter, the bad news is that submissions close at midnight tonight, July 21. Surfers For Climate have created a form that takes less than 30 seconds to complete and which will be counted as its own individual submission to the Environment Minister. Please fill it out HERE, then keep your fingers crossed. Thank you.
Comments
Comments are a Stab Premium feature. Gotta join to talk shop.
Already a member? Sign In
Want to join? Sign Up