Queensland has ramped up its push to create an oil industry in the state to secure Australia’s fuel supply, demanding the Albanese government fast-track environmental approvals for a prospective oil field.
Major energy company Shell has begun producing 200 barrels of oil a day capable of domestic use from the Taroom Trough, about 300 kilometres west of Brisbane.
But experts say full-scale production from the enormous pool of oil would be costly and complex, given the resource sits below rock between three and four kilometres underground and would be accessed by horizontal drilling and fracking.
On Wednesday, Premier David Crisafulli revealed the state would build roads and trunk infrastructure as part of a new development plan to service the proposed oil field.
He also called on the Commonwealth to tap into new federal environmental laws that speed up approvals for projects of national interest.
“It’s there, now it’s up to all levels of government to get it flowing,” Crisafulli said.
“Never again should we be left without the ability to generate domestic fuel supply. This is a generational opportunity to ensure we’re not left at the end of a global supply chain.”
Federal Environment Minister Murray Watt said there were mechanisms to simplify approvals for oil and gas projects but dismissed the state’s request, saying national exemptions were not available for fossil fuels under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation laws.
“David Crisafulli should be focused on how he can help people with the cost and supply of fuel now, not just in 10 years’ time,” Watt said in a statement to this masthead.
Tony Wood, a senior fellow at the Grattan Institute, said analysis suggested liquid resources from the area could be used to make petrol, diesel, and aviation fuel – a rare benchmark for Australia.
“That’s really important because what’s happened over the last 25 years is that, even though we do still produce a lot of crude oil in Australia, it’s of a nature that’s not very good for producing, in particular, diesel,” the energy expert told this masthead.
“It’s one of the reasons why we export almost all that to South-East Asia, and then we import the refined product into Australia.”
Wood said the “prize is very big” but warned the complexity of the proposed drilling operation was unforeseen.
“What we’re facing here is a resource that’s older, it’s deeper, and it’s more impervious for the purposes of traditional extraction,” Wood said.
This would include a fracture stimulation process, known as fracking, which extracts oil, gas and coal from rock structures deep underground.
Richard Cottee, the chair of Elixir Energy which owns an interest in the trough through Omega Oil and Gas along with Beach Energy and Shell, said the scepticism towards the project reminds him of the early days of the gas industry in Queensland.
The gas pioneer, who managed the Queensland Gas Company’s rise from a $20 million company to a $5.7 billion acquisition, told this masthead he was confident in overseas technological breakthroughs in horizontal drilling.
He also dismissed criticism from the federal Labor government that onshore oil projects were typically economically unviable.
“I am buggered to understand how anyone could say with the Taroom Trough, something that probably needs less than 500 to 800 meters of new pipeline at $106 a barrel, will not be paid back,” Cottee said.
“Everything can be economic if it’s either large enough or close enough to infrastructure – how someone can talk about the economics of a yet-to-be-discovered something is beyond my experience.”
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James Hall is the News Director at the Brisbane Times. He is the former Queensland correspondent at The Australian Financial Review and has reported for a range of mastheads across the country, specialising on political and finance reporting.Connect via X or email.