Western Australia is as vast as western Europe, has fewer people than Wales and is one of the most remote places on Earth. Globally, it punches above its weight in mining and shipping iron ore and, increasingly over the past decade, fossil fuels. Specifically, gas.
WA exports more liquefied natural gas than every country bar the US and Qatar, according to government data.
The state is near the end of a low-octane election campaign that has struggled for public attention, largely because the result is a foregone conclusion. Labor has held 90% of seats in the lower house since 2021. The main question to be resolved when polls close on Saturday is how big a majority it will retain.
If there is an issue that has brought spark to the lifeless campaign, and WA’s last four-year parliamentary term, it is the climate crisis, especially the future of the gas industry. The fight over it has national and international implications, and is set to spill into the upcoming federal election.
At stake: whether to give the green light to a 50-year extension for the North West Shelf LNG development on the Burrup Peninsula, 1,500km north of Perth, so that it can continue operating until 2070. If approved, the North West Shelf would require the opening of large new gas basins to feed it.
Upper estimates suggest operations on the peninsula could lead to between 4.5bn and 6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions being pumped into the atmosphere. Most would be released overseas and not treated as Australia’s problem under global emissions accounting rules. But the total would be far more than what scientists say is a fair “carbon budget” for Australia, if it is serious about limiting global heating in line with the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
The gas industry and most WA MPs have a contrasting take – that gas is necessary to support renewable energy, and boosting WA LNG production is good for the climate as it displaces coal power in Asia, lowering global emissions. No evidence has been released to prove this.
‘Utterly captured by the gas industry’
The extent to which the gas industry is embedded in the WA community is apparent on a drive across Perth. The headquarters of Woodside Energy, Australia’s biggest oil and gas company and the operator of the North West Shelf plant, sits high above the central business district. In late January, electronic billboards in the CBD and at Perth airport ran Woodside ads that framed the company as working to address the climate crisis, declaring: “Support renewables by backing them with gas. Challenge accepted.”
The company’s sponsorship is visible at the University of Western Australia, at the state’s art gallery and on the jumpers of AFL club the Fremantle Dockers. WA junior life-savers are branded the Woodside Nippers. The company, and the gas industry as a whole, enjoys robust political and media support.
The state minister for energy, environment and climate action, Reece Whitby, began the election campaign by telling the Australian Financial Review – in what the newspaper described as a “pragmatic” approach – that he saw no conflict between his support for a long-term expansion of fossil fuel developments and his responsibility to oversee cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
“Right now, gas is good,” he summarised. “I’m convinced one day we will be fossil-fuel free in our energy system. But this is not the end, this is the beginning of the end of the transition, and it’s going to play out over decades.”
He gets no argument on this point from the Liberals. “Gas is absolutely the transition fuel and we need a lot more to see us through,” Steve Thomas, the party’s energy spokesperson, tells Guardian Australia. “I expect gas will go longer than I do – another 40 or 50 years at least.”
The premier, Roger Cook, has at times gone further. Speaking shortly after taking on the role in 2023, he suggested it was reasonable to increase local emissions as it would trigger a “dramatic reduction in global emissions”, and said he was more worried that people overseas could run out of energy and die if they did not get “clean” WA gas than about the effect of climate-fuelled extreme heat.
Perth’s daily newspaper, the West Australian, is aggressive in its pro-gas stance, routinely boosting gas industry positions and being sharply critical of those who might stand in the way of its expansion. It is also conflicted in a way it rarely acknowledges.
Last month it was announced that a decision by the federal environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, on whether to approve the North West Shelf extension had been delayed until late March. The paper ran a headline quoting the head of Beach Energy warning that a “horrific scenario” was looming if the proposal was not quickly given the green light, as it might leave the decision at the mercy of Green and teal independent MPs in a future hung parliament.
The story did not mention that Seven Group Holdings, the biggest shareholder in the company that owns the West Australian, is also the largest shareholder in Beach Energy.
The Perth-based scientist and chief executive of the global thinktank Climate Analytics, Bill Hare, describes the state of debate over gas in WA as a “catastrophe”. He contrasts the teeth-gnashing over a brief delay in approving a gas proposal with what he says was a relative lack of concern over the die-back of WA forests during a record hot and dry period last year, or the severe coral bleaching of the Ningaloo Reef last month. South-western WA was one of the first places on the planet where scientists documented a clear climate change signal linked to rising greenhouse gas emissions, with rainfall having reduced by 20% since the 1970s.
“I don’t think people in the eastern states understand just how bad it is here,” Hare says. “I don’t think there was ever a state government so completely and utterly captured by the gas industry. Miners always have a big say in Western Australian but the capture is almost complete in a way now.”
WA stands alone in its rising emissions
Hare and others point to a list of decisions over the past parliamentary term, when Labor had a majority in both houses of parliament, to support this claim.
WA is the only Australian state without a 2030 emissions target and the sole state in which climate pollution has increased over the past 20 years, largely due to expanding LNG exports.
The state has no climate change legislation. The government promised it would introduce a bill to address this, setting a net zero target for 2050, starting a process to set a target for 2035 and requiring a cut in pollution from government operations. Legislation was introduced but then shelved without being debated. Cook says it will be reintroduced if Labor is returned to power.
The government did push through laws changing the operation of the Environment Protection Authority, reducing public appeal rights and removing a requirement that all board members need experience in environment legislation. Late last year it changed regulations so the EPA would also no longer consider climate pollution when recommending whether developments should go ahead, reasoning that a contentious federal policy – the safeguard mechanism – was onerous enough. Woodside applauded the step and urged other states to follow suit.
On the national stage, Cook has fostered an image of being able to call the PM to heel on environmental issues, particularly federal Labor’s promise to create a national EPA as a step towards bolstering conservation laws, that everyone agrees are failing. As Cook tells it, WA industry groups and big business wanted the EPA stopped, the premier made a call and the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, intervened to stop a deal between Plibersek and the Greens.
These events happened as the expansion of large-scale renewable energy on the Perth grid stalled. Rooftop solar panels are being installed at an extraordinary rate and now provide nearly 20% of the state’s electricity, but a confidential document seen by Guardian Australia showed officials had warned that the rollout of wind and solar farms needed to meet a planned 2030 shutdown of state-owned coal-fired power plants had “stalled to date”, in part due to delays in building new transmission links.
The state’s sole Greens MP, Brad Pettitt, says there is no large renewable energy currently under construction in the Perth power grid, a situation he describes as “radical at this point in history”. The pro-renewables organisation Sustainable Energy Now says there will be a greater reliance on gas-fired power, and higher emissions, without faster large-scale change.
Gas not driving coal away
Whitby was not available to be interviewed for this story. He said in a statement the amount of renewable energy on the state’s main power grid had more than doubled since Labor was elected in 2017 and that there were “scores of major wind projects under development”.
On exports, Cook has acknowledged what the gas industry doesn’t – that the claim that WA LNG is displacing coal-fired power in Asia is “anecdotal”. He says there is significant pressure from Japan in particular – a country with few homegrown energy options – for an indefinite gas supply.
“Our friends in Japan look us in the eye and say ‘we need your gas if we’re going to get out of coal’. They are blunt and they are impolite,” he says. “They say … ‘don’t turn your back on us now just because you want to get out of gas’.”
According to Our World in Data, Japan’s share of electricity from coal-fired power has not decreased as gas generation has increased significantly, having stayed at about a third of total generation over the past decade. And a 2019 CSIRO report commissioned by Woodside suggested that, rather than supporting renewable energy, increasing Australian gas supply to Asia after 2020 could delay the shift to cleaner technology and lead to higher emissions.
A more recent US study found that exported LNG may have higher emissions then coal due to the climate pollution released during processing and transport.
Cook says the WA government has conducted studies that found turning off gas would result in its customers either using more coal or getting gas from somewhere else, such as Russia or the US, and Australia would lose out economically for no gain. He says it would also damage relationships with important partners, as the state was developing critical minerals industries needed in a low-emissions future, such as lithium and vanadium.
“They [Japan] would see it as a big FU from Australia to them despite the fact that they’ve underpinned our prosperity through strong trade relationships,” Cook says.
Asked for his response to critics who say WA is not serious about the energy transition, he says: “It’s an interesting debate, and it’s one which really requires you setting aside your emotional response and actually using your head.”
A question of timing
Some long-time observers of WA politics say it is difficult to overestimate the role of the gas industry in the economy and the depth of its links with state politics, including a widely acknowledged “revolving door” of senior staff moving between government offices, the gas industry and the media.
Perhaps the most important point to remember when interpreting WA politics is that no leader or MP has been punished for attacking Australia’s eastern states. This will be the backdrop as Plibersek weighs a decision on whether to extend the North West Shelf gas facility, which may or may not come before the federal election.
For now, a decision has been delayed until 31 March to give bureaucrats time to assess a report on the development’s impact on some of the world’s oldest Indigenous rock art on the Burrup Peninsula. Bizarrely, the climate crisis is not a decisive factor under national environment laws.
It means the discussion may play out without considering what campaigners say should be the central questions: how much gas Australia needs to produce, and what more it could be doing to help the world move more quickly away from it.
The director of Climate Solutions WA, Jess Panegyres, adds another question: what is the cost of opportunities that may be lost while the focus is on gas?
“There is a once-in-a-lifetime chance for WA to be a clean energy leader because we have this iron ore, all these minerals you can process with clean energy and this huge solar and wind resource,” she says.
“But you have to have a plan to get out of gas to do that.”
• Additional reporting by Dan Jervis-Bardy
