One of Australia’s biggest gas projects has received a $3 billion boost to continue development of a major gas field off Western Australia’s north-west coast.<\/p>\n
Gas giant Chevron has announced the final investment decision of stage 3 of the Gorgon gas project which will connect the Geryon and Eurytion gas fields from the Greater Gorgon Area to Chevron’s existing infrastructure on Barrow Island, about 50 kilometres off the Pilbara coast.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Chevron processes gas from its Gorgon Project onshore at\u00a0Barrow Island. (Supplied: Chevron)<\/p>\n
The investment would see additional infrastructure, including six new oil wells drilled 100km off Barrow Island, and create 800 jobs during construction, installation and commissioning.<\/p>\n
The backfill fields will maintain current production with domestic gas output of 300 terajoules a day.<\/p>\n
Data released by the state government showed WA produced nearly 12 per cent of the global liquid natural gas (LNG) supply in 2024.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Chevron’s Gorgon project on Barrow Island. (Supplied: Chevron)<\/p>\n
Maintaining WA’s gas dominance<\/p>\n
UWA Business School Professor Allan Trench said he was optimistic about the development but the investment was incremental.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
UWA Business School Professor Allan Trench.\u00a0 (Supplied: UWA)<\/p>\n
“$3 billion, regardless of the currency, it’s very much just incremental investment for the oil and gas field,” Professor Trench said.<\/p>\n
“The normal label it’s given is as a transition fuel, so it’s the least of evils on the transition to clean energy.”<\/p>\n
WA Nationals leader Shane Love welcomed the investment.<\/p>\n
“I think it’s pretty clear that without gas into the medium term we’re not going to be able to meet our net zero targets,” Mr Love said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
WA Nationals leader Shane Love welcomes the investment. (ABC News: Courtney Withers)<\/p>\n
Mr Love said it was important the economy remained strong and provided jobs in the transition to net zero.<\/p>\n
“We need to be able to make those changes in a cost effective way to actually bring down greenhouse gas emissions, rather than trying to strangle industries and kill off jobs,” he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ongoing concerns<\/p>\n
However, the decision has drawn criticism from environmental groups.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Piper Rollins says Chevron’s Gorgon project will continue to impact the environment. (ABC News: Courtney Withers)<\/p>\n
Australian Conservation Foundation climate campaigner Piper Rollins said there was ongoing impact to the environment.<\/p>\n
“Barrow Island, where Gorgon is, actually used to be a Class A nature reserve. There’s a number of direct environmental impacts,” Ms Rollins said.<\/p>\n
“Gorgon is a gas export project, that gas contributes a whole heap of climate pollution that makes the bushfires and the floods and the heat waves that folks are experiencing right across Australia much worse.”<\/p>\n
Australia Institute principal advisor Mark Ogge said gas should not be considered a transition fuel.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Mark Ogge says Western Australians will see little benefit from the Chevron investment. (ABC News: Peter Drought\u00a0)<\/p>\n
“The idea that somehow gas is good for tackling climate change is entirely untrue and just a just a very disingenuous argument,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I’m sure Chevron and its joint venture partners Exxon and the like will make a huge amount of money out of this if it goes ahead, but it’s important to realise that Australians will get very little.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of Australia’s biggest gas projects has received a $3 billion boost to continue development of a major…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":328963,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[64,63,50362,99,184301,6828,184302,184298,19232,19225,184300,45,184299],"class_list":["post-328962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-barrow-island","tag-business","tag-chevron-pilbara","tag-energy-transition","tag-gas-investment","tag-gorgon-gas-project","tag-lng","tag-natural-gas","tag-pilbara-lng","tag-wa-news","tag-wheatstone-gas-project"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/328963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}