As the news crashes in of oil and gas company Black Mountain’s plans to drill and frack twenty wells in the heart of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River catchment, we realise how the big end of town is corralling the West Kimberley into an industrial future.
The billionaire owner of the Texan fracking company, Rhett Bennett, wants to drill thousands of oil and gas wells but he’s just one in a conga line of industrialists who have their sights set on our region, one of the largest unspoiled on the planet.
The development ethic that arrived with lethal force in Alexander Forrest’s armed expedition through the Kimberley in 1879, prevails. It appears the colonial government mindset of Perth, the seat of power 2,000 kilometres away, is unable to fully grasp the value of the vast northern landscapes of intact nature, rich biodiversity and vast stores of carbon. This failure is fostering a blueprint that’s wreaking largescale havoc on our plants and animals and threatens to unleash a methane climate-change bomb, adding to the heating scenario that will render the Kimberley unliveable by century’s end, if we let it.
Oil and gas is being welcomed into Broome by the Shire and those with commercial interests who are here to make a fortune before taking it south or overseas to live a life of ease – caring not a jot for the damage they leave behind.
Inpex, Shell, Woodside, Buru Energy, Theia Energy, Rey Resources, Black Mountain Energy, Kimberley Mineral Sands, Kimberley Marine Support Base, Baker Hughes, General Electric, Schlumberger are here to industrialise. Supersized oil and gas helicopters wake the town at 5.45am and wreck the enjoyment of sunset over Cable Beach; 100-tonne trucks rumble through at 3am, soon to become several every hour. We’ve got to make a decision: how far does this go?
The industrialisation planning documents we have in our hands are for an oil refinery near Broome to process a deposit estimated to contain six billion barrels of oil (mentioned favourably in the Shire’s Local Planning Scheme), oil and methanol exports through Roebuck Bay, a mini-LNG refinery, a floating LNG refinery in King Sound, 50 Woodside oil and gas wells around Scott Reef, oil and gas wells by Inpex and Shell, an oil and gas pipeline from Scott Reef skirting the Rowley Shoals to Karratha, an oil and gas pipeline to the Pilbara from near Noonkanbah, fed by 2,000 gas wells, thousands of hectares of Bilby country in the sights of Kimberley Mineral Sands for bulldozing, bauxite mining near Kalumburu, mass landclearing near the Ord.
The situation looks overwhelming, so now we have no choice but to continue to defend the world’s most remarkable natural and cultural landscapes.
EK cannot do it alone; the community must mobilise. We’ve done it before — we can do it again.
Nowhere Else but Here!
Photo: Damian Kelly.
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