Two governments, one gas industry, and a public purse thrown open

Last week, Woodside’s Browse to North West Shelf project got bigger. Not in reality, just in terms of government-sponsored spin. 

The WA government granted Browse ‘State Significant Project’ status, a designation with no legal weight but plenty of political theatre, while the state’s independent Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) is still deciding whether Woodside should be allowed to drill for gas directly beneath Scott Reef.  

It is a cynical attempt to pre-empt that process. There is nothing of substance in this announcement for Browse itself. Its only real function is to pile pressure on. The EPA has already told Woodside its project poses an unacceptable risk to whales, turtles and the reef itself. That process needs to be allowed to run its course without external interference, and on everything already put before the EPA, it is unthinkable that the state government would allow an unique reef system like Scott Reef to be turned into a gas extraction and carbon dumping site. 

The cost of getting this wrong falls squarely on all Australians, not on Woodside. It’s not just the damage to Scott Reef and the climate. Browse would see WA gas exported overseas largely royalty free, and currently free of a 25% export tax.  

As IEEFA analysis shows, the Browse proposal is so carbon-intensive and costly that it risks pushing up WA’s own domestic gas prices by as much as four times. And this is happening in a state that is already one of the world’s largest gas producers and exporters, with more than enough supply to see it through the energy transition. There is no domestic case for a project this destructive. There are only Woodside’s profit motives.

In the fortnight before this announcement, more than 70,000 Australians made submissions to the federal government demanding greater scrutiny of Browse. The WA government’s answer to that scale of public concern was not to submit to more scrutiny. It was to secure a status upgrade that suggests the project already has government backing, before the regulator has ruled. 

There is a second layer to Browse worth understanding properly: the carbon dumping, carbon capture and storage (CCS) component built into the project’s approval case.  

Gas companies like Woodside are not proposing carbon dumping via CCS because it works. They are proposing it for offset boondoggles. 

Chevron’s Gorgon project, the biggest CCS operation on the planet, has spent years missing its own storage targets and has had to buy carbon offsets to paper over the shortfall. What CCS does for a project like Browse is generate the credits and offsets it needs to look compliant under the Safeguard Mechanism, the scheme meant to force big polluters to cut emissions.  

As Australia Institute analysis shows, the Safeguard Mechanism as designed lets gas companies buy their way out of genuine reduction by allowing 100% offsets. Using a carbon trading system so dysfunctional it is closer to a laundering exercise than a climate policy. Browse’s viability depends on this offset economy exactly as much as it depends on Scott Reef’s gas and an export market. 

That is precisely why the Bonaparte carbon dumping CCS proposal matters here too. Bonaparte. Jointly owned by Inpex, Woodside and TotalEnergies, it exists to bury carbon dioxide from Inpex’s polluting Ichthys LNG plant off Darwin. It generates no energy of any kind. Yet federal Industry and Innovation Minister Tim Ayres granted it Major Project Status and folded it into a suite of announcements he called “renewable energy” initiatives. Clean energy analyst Tim Buckley called that framing “a seriously dangerous error,” and he’s right: when a minister can’t or won’t distinguish generating clean renewable power from dumping a gas plant’s pollution under the ocean. This is what carbon capture of government looks like. 

Both status upgrades do the same job at zero cost to the companies involved: manufacture legitimacy before assessment is complete, make subsidies easier to garner, and make rejection look harder than approval. Meanwhile, the same governments won’t ask gas companies to pay their way.  

The Australia Institute’s Gas Giveaway Tracker shows Australia has missed out on (at time of writing) over $74 billion dollars by refusing a 25% gas export tax since July 2022. Every week that we don’t have a 25% tax on gas exports, we lose out on $348.9 million. Australia Institute research shows we could be an estimated $17 billion a year better off. Instead, Australian governments spent $16.3 billion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2025 – 26, which these major project status announcements will help these projects access. 

None of this changes where gas demand in our region is heading. Australia’s biggest trading partners in Asia are moving away from gas. Browse and Bonaparte are being built for a shrinking market, propped up by a broken offset scheme, with every risk of becoming stranded assets that taxpayers, not Woodside or Inpex, will be left holding. 

Status announcements don’t create gas demand, and they won’t create it for Browse or Bonaparte either. What they do is tell us plainly who state and federal governments are working for. It is not the reef, it’s not for the benefit of Australians, and it is not to grow the public purse.