Big Oil Big Bight
This map shows the likely trajectory of an oil spill on the southern Australian coast.
Oil exploration in the Great Australian Bight
A special investigation for The Wire
by Radio Adelaide
Producers – Tony Collins and Carmel Young
Executive Producer – Deborah Welch
The Great Australian Bight is a pristine marine wilderness area that encompasses some of the most unique ocean environments on the planet. There are countless species of fish, sea mammals, sponges and plant life that exist nowhere else on earth. Into this environment comes Big Oil, some of the largest and most powerful corporations in the world, including British Petroleum, Chevron, and Statoil, with Australia’s own Woodside, Santos and Bight Petroleum in tow.
The current proposals to drill exploratory wells 300 km south-west of Ceduna have been rejected twice by the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA). Late in 2016 BP announced it was pulling out of the Bight. Despite this, the Norwegian company Statoil is determined to push ahead with plans to start drilling.
In our special series of reports, Radio Adelaide investigates the history and context of the current proposals, the state of regulation, the environmental values and the potential risks associated with the proposed projects.
The Bight Basin stretches from Albany in Western Australia to Kangaroo Island, south of Adelaide. It has become a global hot spot for oil and gas exploration since the 2009 release, by Geoscience Australia, of information about rock samples it dredged from the slopes of seafloor canyons. Oil companies had always been interested in the Great Australian Bight but exploration had been sluggish since the first seismic tests in the late 1960’s. From the early 70’s only a small number of wells were drilled. The most recent, by Woodside in 2003, was abandoned in the face of a fierce weather onslaught straight off the polar ice-cap. With water depths in excess of 2km, its isolated location and the risk, for at least half the year, of destructive storms, the Bight has always been a precarious proposition, but when Geoscience Australia released its data suggesting major oil & gas reserves, it was like a goldrush.
By January 2011, with the world’s biggest oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico fresh in everyone's mind, Oil giant BP announced it had been granted four permits to drill in the Great Australian Bight. They were quickly followed by other global players including Chevron from the U.S. and Norway’s Statoil. Local players joined in too with Santos turning up with a lease and the small Adelaide start-up, Bight Petroleum jumping in. The eyes of the global oil industry are on the Great Australian Bight as we await the final verdict from NOPSEMA as to whether a deep sea oil field will be the future for this pristine marine environment.
Listen to Episode One here.
