The Texas oil man planning to frack the Kimberley

I'm Nicole Johnston and you're listening to seven AM. A battle's brewing in Western Australia's unique Kimberly region. Beneath its red dirt is a vast reservoir of onshore gas. Now an oil tycoon from Texas wants to get it out. The Kimberlee is at the center of a controversial proposal called Project Valhalla, to drill fracking wells across it. The community is divided, somewhat the royalties, others want to protect

Yeah.

So, the Kimberly region is renowned as the largest and most intact tropical savannah in the world. This is an area three times the size of England and almost half its residents are First Nations and this is important because there's an incredible intact culture with many traditional owner groups and their cultural practices have been intact for millennia, and the Kimberly catchment includes the Mattawara Fitzroy River.

One traditional owner.

I spoke with describes the river as a life vane where generations hunt and fish and she told me it's how our ancestors live back in the day. We still do that today. And other traditional custodian Albert Wiggan described the region as a garden of Eden.

It's quite simple. There's nowhere else like it on the planet. Literally, there is no place like the Kimbles on the planet.

And he described the song lines here as a kind of mapping flowing with the Fitzroy River and its tributaries and also its water holes and underground aquifers.

As indigenous people in the Kimbleis, we've always revered water as being the source of creation.

There's no other place like it on the planet, with not a single extinct local species.

And can you explain for us exactly what fracking is in really simple terms?

What does it involve?

So fracking involves rigs that drill down between two and five kilometers into the rock and then forces megaleters of water and sand and chemicals under high pressure into the rock layers to fracture them.

So this allows many gases to be.

Collected, and it also involves millions of liters of contaminated wastewater to be managed on the land and in this case near important tributaries of the Fitzroy River system. So what's been proposed is an exploration project of initially twenty wells, possibly with a view of up to forty thousand wells

Now, cath fraks been banned in Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia, and it used to be banned in WA as well, So why was that overturned.

Yeah, fracking was banned in Western Australia after a state inquiry in twenty and seventeen found the economic benefits were slight and it found the environmental risks were beyond regulatory scope, but that ban was lifted.

In twenty nineteen.

The WA government decided to lift a moratorium on fracking after an independent scientific inquiry declared the practice safe.

The West Australian government has said that it only opened up about two percent of the state to fracking, but frac three advocates say this is disingenuous because most of the state can't be fracked anyway, and the Project Valhalla itself covers roughly two percent of the state.

Kath what's been the reaction from people in Kimberly about this?

What are you hearing?

The resistance to cracking is very widespread and it seems to cross all ideological lines, and there are various surveys of residents' attitudes to cracking.

And these show that an overwhelming.

Majority of Western Australians oppose it. And the bodies opposing it include Environs Kimberly, whose director explained to me how residents have been defending the Kimberly from mining since colonization. Several indigenous land councils and farmer alliances like Lock the Gate and from the First Nation groups voices for Kimberly. One traditional owner, Albert Wiggin, told me that there's anxiety and mistrust and genuine.

Fear in Western Australia. There's such a mining orientated state, you know, and it has such a significant input into our national economy, and so it has a lot of influence and power, so to speak, industry and when it comes to what the future of Western Australia is going to look like.

And.

You know, for Indigenous people, I don't think our aspirations are necessarily on the cards as well.

And so but still, Project vel Hella has.

Secured land agreements with a couple of Indigenous communities and this influenced the EPA decision. Other Aboriginal communities in the lease area oppose Project vel Heller, especially downstream communities who say they haven't been consulted. And Albert Wiggin told me about the impacts to downstream communities beyond health and environmental risks. He said song lines would be disrupted and so would access for some of the traditional owners. He calls Project vel Haller the end of my people.

Really, it kind of defines that the end of my people and their ongoing connection, their ongoing relationship with this incredible environment.

So as you can imagine Nicole.

This has caused a split among First nation groups and also within families. Albert says some traditional owners are vulnerable to being exploited by promises of fracking royalties because they need the financial support that the company.

Is offering them in return for agreement.

Coming up the Texan oil man with the Kimberly in his sights, Kath, could you tell us about the company that is actually behind this project, Black Mountain.

Yes, so, Black Mountain is the company behind Project Valhalla. It's founded and chaired by Ritt Bennett, who is a Texan oilman in his mid forties who comes from a Kentucky coal family.

Originally from Kentucky, I grew up in coal country, so different part of kind of post fuels. But my family had had continuous coal mining operations since nineteen twelve.

So when the state lifted its fracking band, he bought an exploration permit over the Canning basin.

We can stand up twenty riggs and drill a boatload of all and gas wells within six months and really gross meaningful production and that responsiveness just doesn't exist the mining.

This seemed like a brave move because so far the Kimberly community has fended off al CoA origin Mitsubishi, but Red Bennett is persistent and Black Mountain has now spent around forty million on Project Veelhaller, much of it fighting through regulatory obstacles. For example, it managed to get an exemption to laws forbidding export.

Of inland gas.

It repeatedly deferred its required meant to conduct seismic surveys. The company claimed Project Valhalla would run with net zero carbon emissions, but in twenty twenty three ACID fined it for greenwashing and said its sustainability claims had no credible basis.

The Australian Securities and Investment Commission yesterday announced that it issued three infugement notices to Black Mountain Energy for greenwashing. The finds relate to AX announcement, including one which claimed greenhouse gas emissions associated with its Valhalla project I Fitzroy Crossing were net.

Zero, and then the Federal government's Independent Expert Scientific Committee also found the company's claim that downstream water resources wouldn't be impacted weren't substantiated, and it also found the company had not proved that vulnerable species weren't at risk. These include fish, lizards, and mammals that have huge significance to indigenous residents. And there's also Ret Bennett's eyebrow raising past comments that suggest a climate skeptic mindset.

Yeah, I guess there would have been volcanoes, et cetera. Just the natural cyclicality of the Earth, which I sometimes think we're presumptuous and thing like humans are driving kind of off every kind of climate event that occurs.

But after all these setbacks and regulatory roadblocks, the West Australian EPA found the risks from Project val Heller were insignificant and recommended it for ministerial approval with conditions that the company is happy with. So this suggests to some people that the company has friends in government.

The project.

It's now at this stage where it needs approval from both the federal and the WA Environment ministers.

Do you think that's looking likely? It's hard to tell.

There have been an unprecedented number of objections to the EPA's decision in the Kimberly community. Now that community consists of only around forty thousand people, but there were more than eight thousand formal objections appealing to the EPA. Many of these objections came from outside the state, and groups like Environ's Kimberly as saying that their campaign really needs nationwide mobilization.

Everyone understands how special the Kimberly is and it's completely unacceptable to have industrialization through oil and gas fracking.

I spoke with Environ's Kimberly director Martin Pritchard, who told me that people are absolutely aghast and that they see the Kimberly as a sacred cultural and environmental landscape and they can't understand how the EPA made this recommendation.

Today we've had the outrageous news that the West Australian EPA has recommended that fracking could go ahead in the Kimberley. This is the worst decision the EPA's made in years in Western Australia.

What is it that Black Mountain is promising to the local community in return for this access.

So, among other things, Black Mountain is promising a couple of traditional owner groups, possible royalties, football team sponsorship, laptops, community funding including science classes. Among people objecting, there's a strong belief that the bulk of financial benefits, though, would go offshore, especially as gas said sports are being taxed

And cas do you think that the community at the end of the day can actually win the fight here or the odds really stacked against them in terms of being able to defeat an oil company and possibly even the state government on this.

We'll have to wait for the appeals process to complete sometime this year to see if the state's Environment Minister, Matthew Swinburne will accept the EPA recommendation. But the interesting thing about this fight is that the majority of the labor government, the state labor government itself seems to oppose fracking.

Has become an issue.

Martin Pritchard from Environs Kimberly told me the safe Labor seat of Fremantle was nearly lost last election to an independent who took up the Kimberly fracking cause. And he also warned that the Labor Party suffered the near loss of its prize Kimberly seat in twenty thirteen to the Greens, and this was amid the fight against Woodside's proposed gas refinery.

Cath thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you, Nicole.

We'll be back tomorrow with an episode on the first e Safety report on the government's teen social media ban, with kids getting around it and reporting the same level of online abuse. The early results are not looking good.

I think it's a red flashing light for the policy. It confirmed how much circumvention there is of the ban. About seventy percent of them said they still had them after the ban. That is very, very widespread. They said their number of reports about cyber buoying and image based abuse on those platforms that have been banned from teens in the age group that were meant to be banned had not changed.

So is it a failure or is the government right to ask for more patients. I'm Nicole Johnston and this is seven AM.

Thanks for listening.