Environmental groups have decried the first flows of fossil gas from the Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory, describing the project as reliant on “massive” subsidies that will detonate a “carbon bomb” should it ever proceed at scale.
The first gas will begin feeding into the NT’s grid this week from the project 500 kilometres south of Darwin, eight years after the territory lifted a moratorium on the fracking.
NT chief minister Lia Finocchiaro on Tuesday headed up a ceremonial ribbon cutting event to mark the flow of first gas from the Beetaloo Sub-basin, declaring the moment as “a win for all Territorians and a true turning point for the Territory.”
“This project means Territory gas powering Territory homes, businesses and industry,” the Chief Minister said.
The timing of the announcement is awkward on the diplomatic front, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese attending the Pacific Island Forum in Palau. Climate change is among the agenda’s main topics, with many Pacific communities particularly at risk from sea-level rise.
Global sea-surface temperatures last month hit record levels, according to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, and some commentators are predicting a record strong El Nino weather event in the Pacific have raised the odds that this year – and almost certainly 2027 – will melt annual global temperature records.
“Declaring the Beetaloo’s first gas flow a turning point is a sick joke,” said Amanda McKenzie, Climate Council chief executive, in a statement. “This is a climate bomb. Gas from the Beetaloo could unleash climate pollution more than three times Australia’s annual domestic pollution over the next two decades.”
Renew Economy contacted the NT government for comment. Its territory gas website claims the Beetaloo sub-basin “has enough gas to meet Australia’s energy needs for more than 150 years, providing critical energy security for the east coast as domestic gas shortfalls are forecast to impact electricity generation from 2028”.
The Environment Centre NT, however, said this week’s announcement about the first deliveries were a “PR stunt” that masked the Beetaloo “bleak economic prospects” and a lack of social licence to proceed. The initial deliveries were merely appraisal gas, and the overall project’s viability remained in doubt.
“Despite the spin about keeping the lights on, the reality is that fracking is propped up by huge
amounts of our money, secret deals behind closed doors, and inflated job figures,” said Bree Ahrens, ECNT’s acting co-CEO.
“The Territory is billions in debt yet taxpayer money is being wasted on bankrolling risky Beetaloo fracking.”
According to the environment group, successive NT governments had spent about $485 million in taxpayer subsidies on the gas industry.
“Earlier this year, ECNT identified a further $2b in subsidies and liabilities hidden in the 2025-6 NT Budget,” it said in a statement.
“Once subsidies and liabilities are combined, the NT Government is unlikely to ever recover its expenditure on gas industry subsidies and other support, even if the industry does eventually reach full-scale production.”
The viability of Beetaloo may hinge on whether the NT can combine energy-hungry data centres with the gasfields, a prospect that the Territory government claimed would be permitted after last week’s meeting of national cabinet.
Federal climate change and energy minister Chris Bowen, however, told Renew Economy that the territory would not access any special “carve-outs” and that renewables would have to be given priority when it came to powering data centres.
While politicians, energy companies and environment groups debate the prospects of Beetaloo, a study released by the United Nations on Tuesday, Australia time, reinforced the case for reining-in greenhouse gas emissions to halt dangerous climate change.
The study, released at the Palau gathering of Pacific leaders, found that rising seas were “no longer a distant threat: they are happening now, faster than at any point in recorded history, and the pace is accelerating, making sea level rise one of the most profound threats to populations around the world in developed and developing States alike”.
“The acceleration is driven primarily by melting glaciers and the thermal expansion of warming oceans as a direct consequence of human-induced global warming,” it said.
Between 2014 and 2023, global sea level rose by 4.7 millimetres on average annually, while in 2024, it rose by 5.9mm alone – the fastest at any time in the past 4000 years. That pace was expected to continue until at least 2050 because of the warming momentum already locked into the climate system, the report said.
Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare, who was part of an expert panel that presented the report’s findings, says the report has done an excellent job at illustrating the scale of the threat, as well setting out the various ways the global community needs to respond – and what not to to.
“Because of serial failures to reduce fossil fuel use by the world’s richest and biggest emitting countries, all coastal countries, and the small island developing states in particular, face a future of steadily rising climate impacts which in most cases they have done little to cause,” Hare told the Forum.
“Even in isolation this report would be a wake-up call to the leaders of major emitting countries that their failure to act is creating major risks for the future alongside the impacts we can already observe around us.
“But when those impacts are as tangible as they have been recently – many hundreds if not thousands dead from flooding in Nepal, tens of thousands from heatwaves across Europe, economic damages already estimated in hundreds of billions of dollars – the wake-up call is deafening.”
