How long until Australia’s preeminent carbon criminal Woodside Energy and its American CEO Meg O’Neill decide the future lies in a split between Woodside’s historical LNG operations in Australia and a fossil fuel future in MAGAland?
The question arises from the company’s fourth quarter and 2024 full production and sales report to the ASX, which illustrates the contrasting fortunes of different projects on different continents.
As energy prices have fallen, Woodside’s share price has been in steady decline since the third quarter of 2023 — though even at the height of the energy price spike after the invasion of Ukraine, it struggled to match its 2019 peaks.
Its fourth-quarter result yesterday revealed a fall in revenue and production. It also forecast a dip in 2025 production to between 186 million and 196 million barrels of oil equivalent (MMboe), down from the record output of 193.9 MMboe in 2024. Average realised pricing for the year came in at US$64 a barrel of oil equivalent (boe), down 7% from the previous year.
The report also revealed the company’s total carbon and carbon-equivalent emissions increased — yet again giving the lie to the ceaseless tide of bullshit from Woodside that it is engaging in decarbonisation.
Woodside’s problem is that — despite controlling the Western Australian Parliament and being able to dictate federal taxation policy via rotten Labor governments — it won’t be able to cut costs in Australia to boost returns. Like all commodity companies, it is hostage to the price of oil and gas. And unlike smaller Australian-based resource companies, Woodside — like BHP, Rio Tinto and Fortescue — doesn’t have the protection of Australian dollar accounting, which makes the revenue and earnings look larger when the Aussie is low against the greenback.
But luckily things are looking up in the United States, where Donald Trump has just overturned restrictions on LNG imposed by the Biden administration. Woodside has invested more than a billion dollars in Houston-based Tellurian Inc., which has plans for a multi-train LNG project in Louisiana with an eventual capacity of 27.5 million tonnes of gas a year — larger than Woodside’s Northwest Shelf (around 16.3 million tonnes).
Woodside is looking for equity partners in the Louisiana project. Meg O’Neill said this week that the company “has attracted strong interest from high-quality potential partners” — no doubt helped by the return of “drill, baby, drill” in Washington. “It is encouraging to see the growing level of support for LNG opportunities in the US from capital markets, including the recognition of the potential additional value unlocked by strong marketing capabilities,” O’Neill said.
Trump isn’t just removing controls on LNG, he’s launching a war on federal funding of renewables projects — one that might upset even Republicans in Congress — by pausing further funding from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which provided subsidies for clean technologies such as hydrogen and electric vehicle charging (not to mention removing aspirational mandates for electric vehicle sales, despite Reichsleiter Musk’s views).
Woodside has decided to match Trump’s thinking — again despite the nonsense of its fake decarbonisation plans — revealing it is pulling back on plans for hydrogen and concentrated solar projects in the United States.
It is still pursuing what Woodside used to call a “clean ammonia project” in Beaumont, Texas, which it acquired last year before the US election. The project involves the fossil fuel industry’s favourite scam — carbon capture — “to mitigate emissions from gas-based hydrogen production”, aiming to, in the words of its former owners “reduce carbon emissions in hard-to-abate sectors, including existing markets in fertiliser and industrial sectors, as well as in new applications in power and shipping”.
Except, in MAGALand, any mention of “clean” or reducing emissions is verboten. So, demonstrating its willingness to align its values with the new era, Woodside changed the name in yesterday’s report. No more “Beaumont Clean Ammonia” — now it’s just “Beaumont New Ammonia”.
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