New gasfield approved near Twelve Apostles puts climate and ‘pristine’ ocean in jeopardy, environmentalists warn | Victoria
A new gas drilling project approved for Victoria’s Otway basin would “complicate the path to a safe climate” and put the “pristine ocean environment” at risk, environmental groups have warned.
On Thursday the federal and Victorian governments announced they had given the green light to a production license for Amplitude Energy’s Annie gas field project in the Otway basin, which is expected to start producing gas by 2028.
The project is located approximately 9km off the coast of Peterborough and Port Campbell on the Great Ocean Road, approximately 12km west of the Twelve Apostles, a popular tourist attraction.
The state’s Energy and Resources Minister Lily D’Ambrosio said the project had the potential to deliver up to 65 petajoules, or more than a third of Victoria’s annual gas use.
He said that while demand for fossil fuel “is decreasing as people move towards electricity”, the gas field will ensure “there is enough gas in the system for industries that cannot be electrified”.
This is the second major gas project for Labor to endorse the term and comes after the 2022 election, when then-premier Daniel Andrews campaigned hard to reinvigorate the State Electricity Commission to accelerate the renewable energy transition and hit a 95% renewable energy target by 2035.
Greenpeace Australia Pacific’s head of climate and energy, Joe Rafalowicz, said the Otway project “puts our pristine ocean environment and climate at risk”, while Environment Victoria’s climate campaign manager Joy Toose said it would “only set back progress on the state’s ongoing clean energy transition”.
“Projected emissions from existing and planned fossil fuel development have already exhausted the carbon budget to limit global warming to 2°C,” Toose said.
“Every new gas field approved makes the path to a safe climate more difficult and more expensive.”
Alison Reeve, director of the energy and climate program at the Grattan Institute, said the move away from gas made sense but “there is also an industrial base in Victoria that will be more difficult to do as we move away from gas.”
Victoria is Australia’s largest user of gas, used predominantly in the manufacturing sector and for heat production in industrial processes.
The Australian Energy Market Operator in March postponed its forecast for a peak day gas deficit in a year to 2029, citing new infrastructure, increased supply and reduced consumption helping to boost supply.
Thursday’s announcement comes after the Victorian Coalition said it would pause and review the state as well as all major transmission line projects connecting renewable energy to the grid if elected in November. renewable energy zones – six areas identified as ideal for hosting projects.
The opposition stall will include both VNI West, a 240km transmission line connecting Victoria to New South Wales, and the Western Renewable Energy Link, connecting Bulgana in western Victoria to Sydenham in Melbourne’s northwest.
National leader Danny O’Brien told reporters on Thursday that VNI West had “completely lost its social licence”, thanks in part to “draconian laws” last year that allowed government agency VicGrid and its contractors to access private land without the landowner’s permission.
Instead, the opposition proposes the creation of “urban solar parks” to encourage solar and battery installations on commercial and industrial rooftops across much of Melbourne.
“There are thousands of acres of rooftop space on warehouses, factories and buildings in urban areas where we can build solar farms with battery power and use the energy closer to where it is stored. This also reduces the need for additional transmission lines,” O’Brien said.
But increasing rooftop solar isn’t a viable alternative to building transmission lines, and adding solar to commercial buildings and warehouses is generally impractical because “those buildings are often not designed to have a lot of weight on the roof,” Reeve said.
“A resilient system has a mix of everything; you have wind, you have large-scale solar, you have small-scale solar, you have batteries, you have hydroelectric pump, you have some gas,” he said. “The thing that ties all of this together is transmission.”
Reeve said building new transmission lines from renewable energy sources (the cheapest electricity generation alternative to aging coal-fired power plants) is critical “so that the electricity can actually get to where the users are.”
Toose criticized the opposition’s plan, saying it would “stifle Victoria’s renewable energy industry and increase electricity bills for every household and business in the state”.
Commenting on both Labor’s new gas field and the Coalition’s transmission lines plan, Victoria Greens leader Ellen Sandell accused the major parties of choosing “their partners in fossil fuel companies over the future of Victorians and our environment”.
