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As the International Energy Agency has concluded, no more investment should be made in fossil fuel supply.
Once companies have been allowed to make such significant long term investments, there will be enormous pressure to allow the extraction to continue.
If the exploration is to proceed, two glaring holes in existing arrangements must be plugged:
1. Rehabilitation bond.
Australia has over 2,000 offshore wells, around 30 platforms, and thousands of kilometres of undersea pipeline around its Commonwealth waters. Many of these are coming to the end of their working life and will need to be rehabilitated in coming years.
The industry-wide clean-up bill due over the next 30 years is estimated at $60 billion. We have already seen one company collapse, without paying decommissioning costs, which are estimated at between $200m and $1bn. There is a risk that the taxpayer will be left to pay for future decommissioning costs.
2. Fugitive emissions
It is well proven that self-monitoring leads to woeful underestimates. Methane is such a powerful GHG that even 4% of fugitives makes gas worse than coal.
Emissions detection must be:
- performed by independent experts
- applied to all wells
- result in proportional and significant fines up to 2% and lead to operation shutdown beyond.
(Note: this comment obviously applies to all regions. I tried to click all those in the above list, but the page logic only permits one selection, and having selected one it is not possible to go back to none selected. Hence my selection of NT is arbitrary.)