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The Albanese government has already approved 31 fossil fuel projects, and more than that are waiting, even as renewables overtake coal as the top source of electricity. By Mike Seccombe.

Labor’s slate for fossil fuel approvals

Environment Minister Murray Watt during Senate estimates this week.

Credit: AAP Image / Mick Tsikas

Before it won the 2022 federal election, the Labor Party promised stronger action to curb climate change. Since then, it has approved coal and gas projects that will emit a cumulative 6.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.

That is an amount roughly equal to 15 years of Australia’s total current annual emissions, according to recent analysis by the Climate Council.

In total, 31 new projects or extensions of existing projects have been waved through: 27 by former environment minister Tanya Plibersek and four by the man who replaced her, Murray Watt.

There are even more in the pipeline. In addition to those 31, the Climate Council report released a few weeks ago identifies another 38 new or expanded coal projects seeking federal government approval. Collectively, they would produce more than 5.7 billion tonnes of coal over their lifetimes, equivalent to more than 14 years of current production. In some cases, they are planned to continue operation well beyond 2050, the date by which Australia is committed to achieve net zero carbon emissions.

One project now part-way through the process of assessment under the current Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, an extension of the huge BHP/Mitsubishi Peak Downs mine in Queensland, aims to continue operations for almost another century – out to 2116.

By the calculations of its opponents, including The Australia Institute and activist group Lock the Gate, the open-cut mine would produce some three billion tonnes of climate pollution – carbon dioxide and methane – as well as more than a billion tonnes of coal.

Another BHP/Mitsubishi mine in central Queensland, Caval Ridge, won approval last December to continue operations until 2056. The Climate Council report lists the emissions from Caval Ridge as “unknown”; Lock the Gate says 438 million tonnes.

Yet another of the joint venture’s projects, Saraji, would produce the equivalent of 300 million tonnes of CO₂ over its extended 20- to 30-year life.

If Peak Downs’ existing plans were to be green-lit, the collective emissions would be almost as big and damaging as those from Woodside Energy’s recently approved extension of the North West Shelf Project. That gas venture is planned to continue operations until 2070, well beyond the notional net zero target date of 2050.

The Woodside project gained significant attention due to the potential threat it posed to more than one million ancient Aboriginal petroglyphs – thought to be the world’s largest collection of rock art, some dating back 50,000 years.

When she was environment minister, Plibersek put off making a decision on Woodside’s application to extend the project. A cynic might think the deferral was politically advantageous, allowing the Albanese government to maintain the focus on the Coalition’s wildly expensive and impractical nuclear power plan, rather than on the incongruity between Labor’s own words and deeds relating to the climate crisis.

Once the election was won, Watt wasted little time lighting the fuse on Woodside’s carbon bomb. He granted the 40-year extension sought by the company, albeit with conditions intended to protect the rock art.

The greenhouse gas emissions went unabated. By Woodside’s own estimate, the project will pump 3955 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, more than nine times Australia’s current annual total emissions.

A couple of fig leaves cover the nakedness of the government’s position. The major one is that most of the climate damage that will be done by emissions from the project will not be done here.

More than 85 per cent of the gas is exported, mostly to be used in Japan, China and Korea. Which, according to the way these things are accounted, makes it their problem.

It’s just a technicality, of course, because greenhouse gases don’t respect national borders. The burning of fossil fuels heats the planet just as much, regardless of where it takes place. But Australia’s governments, Labor and Coalition, state and federal, generally ignore that fact.

Their argument is that if Australia doesn’t provide the gas and coal used in other countries, they will get it from somewhere else, therefore we will keep selling it for as long as they want to buy it. To this end, they keep on approving new coal and gas projects and extending existing ones.

The second fig leaf is that under the government’s safeguard mechanism, major producers of greenhouse pollutants are required to progressively clean up their acts, by either reducing their on-site emissions or offsetting them through the purchase of carbon credits.

The problem with that, as we have explored previously in these pages, is that there are well-founded doubts about the integrity of many of the means by which those carbon credits are generated and whether or not they result in real additional sequestration of carbon.

As The Australia Institute showed in a report released in May, before Watt granted the extension, Woodside met its 2023/24 safeguard mechanism target entirely through the purchase of carbon offsets. It was second among the 20 biggest users of offsets, most of which were mining and resources companies.

Whatever the merits or otherwise of the offsets regime, it is not deterring fossil fuel companies from bowling up new projects or project extensions. Indeed, says Alison Reeve, energy and climate change program director at the Grattan Institute, they are rushing to “make hay while the sun shines”.

It doesn’t look as if the sun will shine for much longer on the fossil fuel industry.

For one thing, courts are increasingly inclined to insist that the impact of climate change be factored into the consideration of project approvals. New South Wales coordinator for Lock the Gate Nic Clyde cites, for example, the recent case involving Mach Energy’s application to extend the Mount Pleasant mine out to 2048, and to extract an additional 444 million tonnes of coal.

In July, Supreme Court Justice Julie Ward, in the state Court of Appeal, overturned a decision by the Independent Planning Commission approving the extension, finding the IPC had not considered the impact on global climate.

The case will now proceed to the Land and Environment Court for a decision on whether the approval should be reversed.

“The Indonesian company that owns the mine has sought leave to appeal to the High Court, but we won’t know whether the High Court will hear that case, I think until next month,” says Clyde.

Similarly, a big Narrabri coalmine has bounced back and forth between regulators and the courts since 2022, over climate issues. It was approved, overturned and approved again.

Clyde notes it has now been appealed for a second time and will be heard in the Federal Court in Brisbane on November 25.

His colleague Carmel Flint, the Lock the Gate national coordinator, notes various jurisdictions, including Western Australia, the Northern Territory and NSW, have responded to the legal challenges by altering their planning regimes or otherwise making it harder for fossil fuel opponents, through a “systematic overturning of climate protections and … basic community involvement in decisions around developments”.

Regardless of the abovementioned cases, and government attempts to nobble opposition, though, the approvals process brings cost and delays to the proponents. All the while, renewable alternatives continue to become more prevalent and competitive.

One day last month there was a brief period in which renewables met almost 80 per cent of electricity demand in Australia’s main grid – a new record driven in large measure by rooftop solar. On another day, South Australia generated 155 per cent of state demand.

This week, the global energy think tank Ember reported that in the first half of this year, renewable energy overtook coal as the world’s biggest source of electricity.

The reality is that renewables plus storage are rapidly reducing the demand for fossil fuels. Demand for gas is expected to decline more slowly than coal, partly because of the – contested – claim it is a cleaner alternative, and gas generation can be ramped up and down more quickly than coal. Moreover, gas has other industrial uses, such as in fertilisers, plastics and other manufacturing.

The writing is on the wall, though, so large that even the government can read it. Treasury modelling released last month predicted the value of Australia’s fossil fuel exports would plunge by as much as 50 per cent – about $60 billion – over the next five years.

So why the flurry of proposals for further extraction, and why does government continue to entertain them?

Reeve suggests it’s because “the thinking among those [proponent] companies is that they will be the last ones standing”.

Inevitably, she says, there will be lots of stranded assets a few years down the track.

“Governments are saying, ‘Well, if the private sector wants to build a private stranded asset, then it’s private capital. Why do we care?’ ”

Maybe it would not matter, she says, “if we could be sure that all of the mines would have put in enough of a deposit to fully cover their clean-up costs. Then you could probably feel a lot more at rest about it.”

Climate councillor Greg Bourne, whose previous jobs have included working for former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher as an energy adviser, and as head of BP Australasia, also worries about those clean-up costs.

“There’s 80,000 unremediated mines in the country now – lots of them small, but there also are large, open-cut coalmines,” he says.

He suggests that, in many cases, the miners are seeking to extend projects so they can put off the costs of remediation and fool shareholders into thinking they don’t amount to a big expense when amortised over decades.

He doesn’t believe many of those projects will last the distance. The financiers will kill them off early.

“A project that’s going on for 20, 30, 40 years will have to think about refinancing every five, 10, whatever years.

“And we are moving into a very, very different social and environmental world, where many bets are off the table.”

If demand evaporates, he says, it matters not if a company like Woodside can sustain the supply of fossil fuel out to 2070.

“Their ability to get finance to do it is going to be much trickier than it was before. Much, much, much trickier,” Bourne says. “That’s good news.”

The bad news?

“This is also ‘walk away from your remediation liabilities’ country.”

Which is why it’s past time for the government to put a stop to new developments, to “face down” the industry and dare it to campaign against them.

That would require a degree of courage that we have not seen to date.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 11, 2025 as "Project runaway".

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