Equinor's Green Light

An Equinor rig in the North Sea.

Despite a deceptive campaign against it, an application to explore for oil in the Great Australian Bight was today given environmental approval. By Fred Pawle.

Good news for believers in honest debate, human ingenuity, prosperity and environmental stewardship: one of the most misinformed Australian environmental campaigns of recent years ended in failure today.

The Fight for the Bight campaign, a loose coalition of surfing communities around Australia, spent all year exaggerating the risk associated with Norwegian oil company Equinor’s application to explore for oil 400km off the South Australian coast.

The campaign’s organisers also encouraged supporters to submit objections to the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority, which they did in their thousands, most of them based on incorrect assertions and emotional appeals in defence of an environmental wilderness.

NOPSEMA, however, is only required to assess applications according to an objective reading of the safety precautions and associated financial capabilities. Today, it gave Equinor’s environmental application the green light.

South Australian Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young immediately tweeted her response to the decision, echoing the catastrophic themes of the anti-Equinor campaign: “Foreign oil giant Equinor has just been given approval to drill in the Great Aust Bight. This is devastating for SA and our environment. It will put at risk 10s of thousands of jobs in SA and ruin our gorgeous beaches and coastline. We will fight this to the end!”

Hanson-Young is wrong on every point, including the assertion that Equinor has been “given approval to drill”. It hasn’t.

Equinor needs to submit two more applications to NOPSEMA, one for approval of the well operations and another regarding the rig’s safety for workers.

Hanson-Young’s disappointment is based on the fact that the best chance environmentalists had to stop this project was by convincing NOPSEMA that Equinor’s environmental plan was too risky.

They might have failed to convince NOPSEMA but the Fight for the Bight campaign did convince a lot of ordinary surfers that Equinor’s project would be a catastrophe for the environment, tourism and the planet. The campaign culminated in 57 co-ordinated protests around Australia last month.

Equinor’s submission included a diagram of all the areas that could be affected by more than 100 different worst-case scenarios. In a brazen misrepresentation of the diagram, Greenpeace, Patagonia and some surf journalists claimed that the diagram represented a single spill, and Equinor risked creating the largest spill in history.

Almost the entire surfing community fell for the claim that a spill would ruin surfing in Australia. High-profile surf journalist Nick Carroll said “a worst-case spill would put oil on every surfable coast of Australia south of 30 degrees S.” 

An open letter signed by 28 of Australia’s most famous surfers said a spill would mean the “southern coastline of Australia would never be the same”. 

For this to happen, Equinor would need to drill 50 wells and experience dozens of different weather patterns simultaneously. In other words, the scare campaign was based on an impossibility.

Besides, Equinor has been operating safely for decades in the North Sea, where waves are bigger than in the bight. Protesters also ignored a similar application by ExxonMobil that was even closer to a major surf centre.

If the next two stages of the application are approved, Equinor could be exploring for oil in the specified area 375km off Ceduna in November. The application only allows drilling to occur from November 1 to April 30, the least risky period.

The project would be subject to the Commonwealth Petroleum Resource and Rent Tax, which is structured to encourage companies to make the enormous investments required to operate in this speculative industry.

Equinor has estimated it will cost about $200 million to perform the exploration. The tax arrangements allow these investment costs to be offset against ensuing revenue. Once the project is in the black, the PRRT rate of 40 per cent kicks in.

The success of this project would be a benefit to the surfers who protested against it. Surfers, like everyone living in a modern society, rely on oil-based products to maintain their standard of living, as well as for transport.

NOPSEMA’s decision today should be celebrated by all those who were misinformed to protest against it.