I got fascinated by the Woodside story because of the emphasis really that the climate movement decided to put on Woodside.
Marion Wilkinson has been reporting on climate and energy policy for decades and has recently turned her attention to Australia's fossil fuel giant Woodside. Last year, the government approved Woodside's plans to keep its Northwest Shelf project producing gas out to twenty seventy We've.
Always said with Australia's fossil fuel exports, whether they're coal or liquid natural gas LNG, that that's the responsibility of our customers under the Paris Agreement, and in fact I heard Murray wat just talking on your podcast about that.
I guess the way the world has approached dealing with climate change and greenhouse emissions, particularly through the Paris Agreement, is to say that every country who's a signatory to that agreement needs to reduce the emissions that it emits in their own country.
But things are different now. The climate emergency is such that we actually need to seriously examine what we're doing about our customers emissions when we send out all these fossil fuels to the rest of the world. That's why I was interested in the Woodside story.
I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to seven AM today walk the award winning journalist and author of the quarterly essay Woodside Versus the Planet, Marion Wilkinson on how one company captured the country and convinced us that gas is necessary as the world transitions away from fossil fuels. It's Thursday, January eighth, and this episode was originally published in September. Marian, this is a pivotal moment for the energy giant Woodside, and I want to start by talking about the company's
recent annual general meeting. You were there, so what happened?
Well, it was it was a bit of surprise because I did know that the annual general meetings of Woodside had been quite fraud affairs for the last few years. The level of security really surprised me. Around the Crown Casino ballroom area in Perth, which is where it was being held, there was security guards absolutely everywhere. It was like going to the airport, you know, bags checked the
whole box and dice. Nevertheless, the climate activists came in there no doubt on proxies from other shareholders blowing very loud whistles, which they later said was blowing the whistle on Meg O'Neil, the climate criminal.
It's very childish to stand up and shout, but having a few people stand up and tackle and blow whistles doesn't change our resolve. It doesn't change our beliefs.
But what I was particularly interested in was whether, in a broader sense, the shareholders were still questioning the leadership of Woodside on their climate plan. And I think some of the heat has gone out of the shareholder concern about fossil fuel businesses. And I think there's a feeling, certainly in financial circles that the Trump administration has given the industry a big break, But I don't think that actually changes the long term outlook for companies like Woodside.
I think they are still going to be under enormous pressure because at the end of the day, you cannot get around the science of climate change.
You mentioned Meg O'Neill's, so she's been the CEO of Woodside for the past four years. During that time, the company got approval to expand its gas production out to twenty seventy so it seems like mag O'Neill is doing quite a good job of what she's being paid to do.
Would you say, I think she's doing a very good job at the moment for what the board wants her to do. If we look at what's happened in the last four years. She's managed to ram through the Scarborough Project. It's meant expanding their Pluto gas processing plant on the
Barrett Peninsula. She's got both the WA government and the federal government on side with the extension of the big gas plant up there, the Northwest Shelf plant, and she is now plowing on with trying to feed gas into that Northwest Shelf plant from an expansion with some new gas fields in what's called the Brows Basin up there. So I think you'd have to say in the short term she's been very successful.
Yeah.
Can you tell me a little bit more about her rise to that job or where did she come from? How did she become the CEO.
Well, she's basically been an eggs On person all her life. But the part of her career that really interested me was that she went to headquarters around the time of the Paris Agreement, which was twenty fifteen twenty sixteen, to work for the eggs On Chief Executive and I think she would have been there right at the time of one of the biggest original shareholder revolts internally against eggs On by climate activists.
A climate activist group has targeted Exon Mobile with a shareholder resolution calling for deeper cuts in its carbon emissions. Dutch group followed this has urged the US energy giant to publish targets for a gause in greenhouse gas emissions and the burning of fossil fuels sold to customers.
So she really knows the mo of climate activism and climate shareholder activism.
And you got an interview with her recently. How hard was it to secure that and how did it go?
Look, she was quite forthcoming in the end, and I think she was very keen to put the line of the company. She is absolutely determined, I think, to press the case that the Wa Labor government and the federal Albanesi government are pressing that what Woodside is doing by exporting LNG is helping to decarbonize our Asian neighbors.
And we should not be regressing. We should instead be extending access to electricity to the hundreds of millions of people in the developing world who still live about it. To do that. We need new supplies of affordable and reliable energy, but we also need to decarbonize.
It's a claim that's been running for well over a decade since the Paris Agreement was struck, but it is now a claim that a lot of countries and companies are hanging their hats on.
And so does it hold up.
I think it's getting really questionable now. On the one hand, we're seeing this rise in renewables, and I think that the instinct of the company's like wood Side, will be to try their hardest to hold onto their market share and to hold on to their customers, and that means that they're going to be really pressuring governments like the Australian government to stand by this thesis that they're helping carbonize the world, when really we want to look at
whether that amount of LNGG going into the market at the same time of the really rapid rise and renewables that actually the grab the market share by the gas companies will hinder the transition rather than help it.
Coming up. What the government gets out of its friendship with Woodside.
The Australian government has stated its support for the gas industry and it has provided strong reassurances that Australia is not quietly quitting its LNG industry. Woodside is certainly not quietly quitting. We are deliberately delivering.
So Marian, I want to drill down a bit more on the relationship between Woodside and both the federal government and Wa state government, because it seems like the government's rhetoric on gas and the approvals that they're granting they are all in line with Woodsides ambitions as a company. So what did those governments get out of this relationship.
I think the success of Woodside is inherently baked into the psyche of Australia's main political parties. I think it was an unbelievably ambitious, important project right at the beginning when it started in the nineteen eighties. I mean, it was Australia's first LNG plant. It opened the door for the other big LNG players to come to Australia. Certainly in its original thinking, the domestic gas it supplied for Wa was very important to that state, both the industry
and for the public. So on a simple level, there is a bit of tax and export income. Critically for both governments, there's jobs and that is a huge issue in WA. That means seats, electoral seats, that means political support in the Labor Party in the unions. That is a really big deal. It's backed by Kerry Stokes, who's
the most important media proprietor in WA. So on so many different levels, both the state and federal governments, whether they're Liberal or Labor, they are intimately tied up with the future of Woodside. But neither the company nor the governments want to look ahead to what is actually happening in the energy transition. So we hear about the vital critical minerals industry all the time. These are the minerals
that are going to help build the energy transition. And there's been a sleight of hand that somehow these critical minerals projects are going to be fueled by green energy. But if you spend any time in Western Australia, people talk largely about gas fueling that industry. And this is why Western Australia's emissions should be allowed to go up, so they can help with the critical minerals industry and so they can help decarbonize the world. Even though that
state's emissions are going up. To me both the government and the gas companies in Wa. They're a million miles away from what the climate movement is thinking, and that gap, I think is untenable.
Yeah, do you think that is a problem for the federal government because it seems like staking its reputation and being a gas export and also investing in things like critical minerals is one thing. But is that enough of a benefit for the federal government to justify continuing to support woodside in the way that it does.
I think that's the really critical question, And I think the problem is we're trying to answer that question without realistic data about what is going on in the decarbonization of Asia. So I keep hearing this mantra from the companies and from the governments that we're decarbonizing Asia, therefore we're helping decarbonize the world. Once you start picking this apart, the arguments become a lot more complicated. If you look
at a country like Japan. Japan is and has been since more or less the time of the Paris Agreement building its own gas endpire to re export gas around the world and to trade gas around the world. So I think a lot of Australians believe we're exporting to Japan so they can keep the lights on in Tokyo and keep Japanese people warm. But actually Japan is also
becoming a major global gas trader. And also if we're saying, well, we're going to let our customers deal with the emissions from burning our gas, Japan might have a net zero by twenty fifty target, But does Cambodia, does the Philippines, does Vietnam. So the minute you start opening up this question, it becomes quite messy and quite complicated. And I guess if this is going to be the rationale, let's get some real information on it that is not just the information put out by the gas companies.
And so, given the international energy market, the changes you're describing there, and the growing climate protest movement here in Australia that is becoming more focused on Woodside, how secure do you think the company's future is.
I think in the short term, mego'neil's future is very secure, and I think the board is backing her. I think while the climate movement's actions against Woodside have pretty much been unsuccessful in actually stopping the projects to date, I think a far bigger question is the global pressures that will be on Australia one from the speed of the energy transition, but I think probably more importantly it's going to be the pressure of the pact of climate change
on Australia itself. From the current global emissions. We are now looking at serious problems for the great barrier of survival in our lifetime, and I think in the shorter term there is a serious campaign that will happen around the overhaul of Australia's environmental laws. I think a lot of people in the climate movement are saying there has to be a climate trigger in those laws, and I think the reason they have to be on the table is that Australians know that it's not just the emissions
at home that impact their lives with climate change. They know what is impacting their life is the global emissions. You can't just deal with your emissions at home and say that you're a responsible climate actor if at the same time you are trying to have your industry's profit from fossil fuel exports without saying we're going to take on the hard yards, which is how we provide affordable renewable energy for industry that works.
Well.
Marion, thank you so much for your time Thanks Ruby. You can read Marion Wilkinson's quarterly essay Woodside Versus the Planet at Quarterlyessay dot com dot au. Thanks for listening. Tomorrow,
I'm bringing you a two part series about crocs. Darwin's crocodile farms supply some of the world's most exclusive fashion houses, but what's behind this booming, one hundred million dollar industry is shocking animals being kept in cramped conditions and being killed in drawn out processes, Indigenous people who say they're being ripped off for dangerous work, and claims of conservation
by a scientist with assorted criminal history. It's a story that has stayed with me since we first published it last year. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. Thanks for listening.