Save us from Woodside!
Written by Ben Boyang
May ’25
The newly minted minister for the Environment, Murray Watt, has a very important job to do. It may well turn out to be the most important job he ever has, deciding on Woodside’s application to extend its North-West shelf gas project to 2070. The decision must be made by May 31st.
Gas lobbyist Roger Cook, also moonlighting as Premier of Western Australia, has already given the massive project his imprimatur. If this project goes ahead as planned, it will reduce our chances of achieving net zero emissions to, well….zero!
Independent environmental assessments have calculated the project would produce around 4.3 billion tonnes of emissions over its lifetime. That’s nearly 100 million tons per year for 45 years. To put that in perspective, Australia’s total emissions in 2023 were 465 million tonnes, or 17 million tons for every man, woman and child. So if Woodside’s emissions were counted as Australian emissions, which they are not, it would mean an extra 4 tons each per year, for the next 45 years. That is like every single person flying to Bali every year for 45 years, making us THE most polluting nation on earth! To extract 100 million tons of carbon from the sky we would have to plant 10 billion trees every year for 45 years. (1 tree can extract about 10 kilos of CO2 from the sky every year) Australia has cut down 3 billion trees since 1788. So as you can see, there is no room to plant the number of trees required to sequester the CO2 from this project for even 1 single year.
Also, our emissions are going down, and ideally, should cease in another 25 years, while Woodside’s emissions will still be 100 million tons per year in 2050 and beyond.
If we look at the global CO2 reductions needed to keep global temperatures from going even further beyond 1.5 o than they already are, we must reduce our emissions by 1.5 billion tons, or about 4%, every year for the next 25 years.* If we add Woodside’s emissions alone, that is 1.6 bt. Unfortunately, global emissions are still going up at an ever steeper rate.** So even if we achieve our yearly goal, which we are obviously not doing, we must do even better the following year, just to keep our heads above water….. and so it goes. If we achieved this herculean task it would be a miracle, and God has not performed a miracle since biblical times.
Ben Boyang May ’25
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