Dispatch: The Fossil Frontier

Millions of eucalypts rise tall out of red, sandy soils; the forest floor morphs from open grasslands where kangaroos graze to a thick impenetrable scrub, a haven for native birdlife. This is the Pilliga, 5000 square kilometres of wilderness in north-western NSW, the largest native forest west of the Great Diving Range. It’s also the site of one of the most controversial fossil fuel projects in Australia’s history – the Narrabri gas project.

“For the Gamilaraay nation, it’s our umbilical cord, our cultural tether… every person on the Gomeroi nation knows about the Pilliga,” said Gomeroi activist Suellyn Tighe, as she guided me and eight other students through an Aboriginal cultural site in the forest, on a field trip last October.

Led by Suellyn, we spent the morning following a trail around the base of sandstone caves that were once a gathering place for her ancestors. The caves rested atop a knoll in the landscape, protruding from the ground like a rocky outcrop. Raised above the eucalypts with long sightlines, they were an obvious gathering place amongst the flat expanse of forest.

Santos, one of Australia’s largest oil and gas corporations, has federal and state government approval to establish a gas field nearby, across Pilliga’s eastern flank and into nearby farmland. They plan to drill over 850 gas wells deep underground to extract coal seam gas (CSG). Over its 25-year lifetime, the project will emit an estimated 100 million tons of carbon dioxide and release vast quantities of methane gas into the atmosphere as the gas is extracted.

The project ignores the many unanimous pleas from across the world – voiced by the United Nations, International Energy Agency, and the latest IPCC reports – to end fossil fuel expansion if humanity is to have any hope of avoiding the most horrific effects of climate change.

Santos says the project will secure domestic supply in a turbulent market, provide jobs to the nearby town of Narrabri, and only contribute to 0.1 percent of Australia’s annual emissions – although this figure is heavily contested. But to many farmers, environmentalists, and Gomeroi – the regions Indigenous peoples – the project spells disaster to their way of life, the Indigenous connection to the land, and the planet.

Suellyn is watching her land change. Flowers bloom earlier, the movements of migratory birds are more sporadic, and increasingly intense bushfires are transforming the thin canopy – climate change is the culprit. But now the land and what lies underneath it faces an even more imminent threat.

To extract the gas, Santos will need to clear 10 square kilometres of forest to drill through the Great Artesian Basin – an ancient underground aquifer system that stretches from the upper reaches of NSW and SA to Australia’s top end. It's one of the largest underground water systems in the world and is a crucial freshwater source for much of inland Australia.

Santos says that the drilling is highly regulated and safe and uses slick marketing videos to assure their sceptics. But for many farmers across the region, who for generations have thrived off the artesian waters that are their lifeblood in drought, drilling through the aquifer is a needless risk.

The science here is complicated, compromised by vested interests, difficult to validate and impossible to settle.

Yet what would the average punter make of, say, drilling through aquifers millions of years old to access an outdated fossil fuel to line the pockets of a billion-dollar corporation – that has paid just 2.36% of tax on their total income in the last eight years – while exacerbating the effects of climate change?

In fact, you needn’t imagine. In 2020, after over a decade of gas exploration in the region by Santos, and three years after Santos submitted a proposal to build the gas field, a public meeting was held. The forum – a government-appointed independent planning commission (IPC) – saw a record 23,000 written submissions from the public, 98 percent of which were against the project, and over seven days heard from 367 speakers, only six percent of whom were in favour of Santos. Despite this, the IPC ruled in Santos’s favour granted “stringent conditions” were met.

Back in the Pilliga, we came to the trail's end and had lunch quietly in the spotted shade of a gum tree. As we ate, Suellyn spoke about the Native Title Tribunal, which until recently, was one of the last major hurdles in the way of the project.

Last year the Gomeroi voted against the proposed project in the Pilliga East State Forest, which is on their sacred lands. Their statement, “Gamil”, meaning no in their traditional language, was clear.

But Santos didn’t listen. They took the Gomeroi to the Native Title Tribunal, a body that has overwhelmingly ruled against Indigenous people's native title rights. “[The tribunal] demonstrates that there’s a definite bias against Aboriginal people maintaining their connection to land and country,” said Suellyn.

In December the Native Title Tribunal ruled in Santos’s favour, stating that the Gomoroi’s concerns were “outweighed by the public interest”. The Gomeroi Native Title Group have appealed the decision.

With the tribunal out of the way, Santos is expected to make a final investment decision on the project by the end of this year. Considering they have already invested over $2 billion in the project since 2008, a desire to go ahead and turn a profit will leave few surprised.

“We’re on this slippery slope now… we’re looking at an economy where all of this infrastructure has already been put into place or is being set up [for the project],” said Suellyn.

Santos has already established over 40 pilot gas wells in the Pilliga and a small power station to burn the gas. While relatively small in scale compared to the planned 850 wells, these operations have caused 23 wastewater spills in the Pilliga over the last decade, including the release of waste containing heavy metals and excessive salt concentrations into the forest.

Santos describes these spills as “small” and says they have spent millions of dollars rehabilitating the affected areas.

In an imposing show of state capture, Santos has also employed significant political capital to get the project over the line. From the dubious gas-led covid-19 recovery plan that fast-tracked the project's approval to meddling in the Narrabri community, Santos has used its influence to push the project ahead. Not to mention their generous donations to the Labor party last election – who back the project despite their commitment to the Paris agreement and 2030 emissions reduction target of 43 percent.

As we drove through town on our way back from the Pilliga, this influence came into focus. Glued to goals posts, printed across full-page ads in the local paper, and plastered across their slick shopfront in the centre of town – Santo’s logo is hard to avoid.

And beyond their sponsorships and marketing tactics, they have used their influence to secure the support of the local council and the Narrabri Aboriginal Land Council; which any Indigenous person living in the area is entitled to join, unlike the native title applicant group, which requires Gomeroi ancestry.

As a teenager said in town on his way home from rugby training, “I love Santos. They pay for everything. They sponsor all the clubs and pay for all our footy gear.” As put by a speaker at the IPC, “the only people who want coal seam gas are the people with a vested interest in it.”

Much of the support for the project is driven by a promise of new local jobs in Narrabri – a regional town that is troubled by an uncertain future.

The project will employ an estimated 1300 people during the three-to-four-year construction phase, all of whom will be housed in Narrabri, but less than 10% of this workforce will be Narrabri locals. Once construction ends, just over 300 jobs will remain in Narrabri, although less than 100 of these are expected to be locally employed.

Surveys presented at the IPC found that twothirds of people in town and 90 percent of the wider community – many of whom are farmers concerned about groundwater contamination – are against the project.

One of these farmers is Sally Hunter, who lives and works on a large cattle farm half an hour out of town. Sally and her dachshund greeted us at the gate as we turned off the main road. It was our last stop on the trip.

Ready for a long day’s work in a wide-brimmed hat and fluoro blue shirt covered in cartoon pot plants,

Sally launched into a tour of the domestic side of the property. First, to her untamed, low-maintenance veggie garden that produces food for her family all year round; then a DIY chicken coop on wheels that doubles as a lawnmower; and finally, to her rooftop solar system, battery, and electric car.

As she grew up, Sally watched as her parents fought a losing battle against CSG on their family cattle property in western Queensland. In Queensland where the CSG has run rampant for years, hundreds of bores on properties have run dry and many more risk becoming contaminated. After holding out for years against CSG as they watched it contaminate their land, they decided to leave for good.

“It didn’t end well for my parents,” Sally said. “When we moved here, and we heard that there was gas development happening here, I was pretty interested in it and trying to think through the implications for the region and started to get quite involved.”

After moving to the Narrabri shire over a decade ago, heeding her parent's experience and concerned by expanding coal mines visible from the fertile plains of her property, as well as the Narrabri gas project, Sally joined forces with other farmers and started ‘People for the Plains’.

Set up to oppose fossil fuel expansion in the area to protect their land, the group has since become closely affiliated with Lock the Gate – a national grassroots landholder movement that opposes CSG. “It’s our belief that the benefits of the [Narrabri] gas field do not outweigh the negative impacts, especially if you are a local, a landholder, or if you care about the climate,” said Sally.

Wanting to do more, a few doors down from the Santos shopfront, Sally opened the doors of Geni.Energy – a non-for-profit that is supporting the growth of renewable energy in the community. Geni energy provides locals with advice on solar and battery installation and is hoping to support the installation of a community battery in town that Labor promised at the last election.

“We were just frustrated by the lack of renewables in the district… we knew this big transition was coming at us and we could see that if we weren't actively engaged in that transition, then we would just be left behind,” said Sally.

And this imaginative approach doesn’t only exist in Narrabri. While Santos may like to think that the Narrabri gas project is essential infrastructure, promising to supply all gas extracted to the domestic market, they fail to mention that Australia has more than enough gas for ourselves. It’s just that over 80 percent of Australian gas is exported overseas for corporate profits – which have skyrocketed since the war in Ukraine. We don’t have to bend over to polluting fossil fuel corporates, that exacerbate climate change, drain taxpayer funds in annual subsidies of more than $10 billion, and give back little to the economy. There is another way. Like Geni Energy, Australia – with a little ingenuity and grit –can use existing renewable technology to rapidly transition away from gas, and why not coal and oil while we are at it? This won’t only reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it will bring power bills down in the long term, prevent respiratory conditions caused by gas appliances in homes, as well as protect farmland and Aboriginal cultural sites from hazardous practices like CSG extraction.

The great electrification awaits, if only we had the political will to get on with it.

‘FARMS NOT COAL’ reads the side of a grain silo, as our van sped past on the New England Highway. The large red letters were impossible to miss as the road snaked down the Hunter Valley on our way back to Sydney, weaving its way through some of the largest open-cut coal mines in the world. As we drove, tall grassy berms appeared on each side of the road concealing the mines behind them, a strategy to keep them out of public view. Yet occasionally, over the tops of the burns, or through thick groves of eucalypts, the mines came into view.

From above (or a quick glance on Google Maps) their full extent is revealed – vast grey scars on the landscape – as if some celestial being, looking down from space, took a grazing swipe at the Hunter Valley’s rolling plains.

We stopped for fuel in Bulga, a town that is now just a few kilometres from the Warkworth mine open cut mine following its expansion. In the local Indigenous language, Bulga means ‘isolated hill’, and as we drove up its side that much of the town is perched on, orchards gave way to mountains of grey rubble extending to the horizon. Residents went to court and tried to block the mine expansion but failed. The expansion went ahead and now the noise of heavy machinery and dangerous coal dust blanket the town regularly; Voluntary acquisitions of some properties ensued, others who could afford to left, and those who couldn’t stayed.

Yet amidst the environmental destruction, the Hunter and its surrounding regions hold the key to defeating the Narrabri gas project. Santos needs to build a pipeline through hundreds of private farms to transport the gas from Narrabri to just shy of Newcastle – a proposal that landholders on the route overwhelmingly reject.

“The level of landholder opposition is overwhelming on a project like this,” said landowner Peter Wills, who has worked to organise more than 200 properties along the route to block the pipeline. “It's quite clearly showing in the numbers of landholders who have signed land access agreements. In the last three years…only 29 People actually signed land access agreements.”

Since meeting with Peter on our way back to Sydney, former NSW Energy Minister Matt Kean has given Santos means to force their way onto people's properties by issuing an Authority to Survey. Tense standoffs between Santos, police and landowners are expected to follow in the coming months.

“The question is, will Santos trespass on people's properties…that are owned by families, some for multiple generations, against our consent? That's the question at the end of the day,” said Peter.

The fossil fuel industry has already peaked in the Hunter. Coal-fired power stations are closing, and the mines slowly emptying. CSG may not be as visibly destructive as the monolithic open-cut mines of the Hunter Valley, but the consequences of the Narrabri gas project – its carbon emissions and the risk of groundwater contamination – may be just as devastating for the lands’ future generations.

As we take the M1 exit and head south toward Sydney, leaving the Hunter Valley, I wonder if its story foretells the fate of Narrabri, the Pilliga and the Gomeroi people. •