Sail for four days off Australia’s westernmost coast and you’ll find the rich, biodiverse Scott Reef, a key migratory route for pygmy blue whales. But it’s also home to abundant gas and oil reserves. Jock Serong dives into the threats it’s facing, and what Greenpeace Australia Pacific is doing to prevent them.
Australians are good at protecting the natural assets we can see. If they’re right up under our noses—the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru, Cradle Mountain, K’gari/Fraser Island—we’ll try and keep them safe from exploitation, well-signposted and studied. We’ll take international dignitaries to these places and lead them around like we’re proud householders showing off the Good Room.
But a continent of this size has its blind spots. Australia’s wild places retain their primordial wonder precisely because they’re out of reach. The Great Sandy Desert, the Bight, takayna (The Tarkine), the Otway Basin—these places are collecting points for the vulnerable creatures we’ve hounded to the margins. And that invisibility, that difficulty of access also makes them targets for corporate pillage.
Once such place is Scott Reef.
Scott Reef is a complex of coral atolls about 400 kilometres north of Broome in the Timor Sea. The atolls—Ashmore Reef, Seringapatam and Scott Reef, and the Rowley Shoals—are the remains of a vast ancient barrier reef that are in fact closer to the Indonesian island of Rote than they are to Broome. There’s no water out there, no shade from the fierce tropical sun. There’s barely any ground above the high tide line. Getting there, and spending time there, requires preparation and a wealth of equipment.
If we zoom in on Scott Reef, we see that it’s actually two formations: The circular North Scott Reef and horseshoe-shaped South Reef. Just off the northwest tip of the southern reef, there’s a tiny sliver of sand, drolly named Sandy Islet. Its lunar surface is stippled with small craters. We’ll come back to those.
Like any natural feature in an open expanse of ocean, the reefs are teeming with life. They function not only as a localised ecosystem, but as a waypoint for migrations. Here, in staggering abundance, are 29 species of marine mammals, 41 species of birds and almost a thousand species of fish. There are sharks, rays, corals, sea snakes, and sawfish. Many of the creatures inhabiting these reefs exist nowhere else on Earth.
Each autumn, thousands of pygmy blue whales migrate north along the Western Australian coast, travelling from the cool waters of southern Australia to the Banda Sea in Indonesia. In spring, they migrate south again. The whales’ migration path takes them right past Scott Reef. Along these massive journeys, a handful of locations have been identified by scientists as Known Foraging Areas. One of them is the Scott Reef complex.
Without these places, the migration collapses.
Deep under the coral lies a huge deposit of oil and gas. Woodside have dubbed the deposit ‘Browse’, as if fossil fuel extraction is as banal as leafing through a catalogue.
Back to Sandy Islet. Each year, up to a thousand endangered green sea turtles—a genetically-distinct subspecies—cram themselves onto this sand spit, less than half a kilometre long, to lay their eggs. Their patient digging accounts for the pock-marked surface of the islet. Adult sea turtles are migratory, swimming thousands of kilometres to make that nest in the sand. It’s exhausting business, and the nutrient-rich waters of the reefs are crucial to its success.
Wendy Mitchell, a dive instructor, photographer and activist based in Exmouth, has spent more time than most underwater at Scott Reef. She documented it for Greenpeace’s WA gas campaign, using drone, underwater and topside filming. “Isolation’s the big problem with Scott,” she says. “Ningaloo is so loved, has so many eyes on it. It’s so lucky because of its location—you can swim off Exmouth and you’re among so many species of fish and whales. Scott Reef is just as incredible, maybe more so, but being so far offshore, you have to have a very self-sufficient boat.
“There’s so much life out there—there’s sailfish and big dogtooth tuna,” says Wendy. “We saw female green turtles hauling themselves out of the water to nest. They’re actually nesting almost year-round, a continuous cycle of females coming in.”
Even the reef itself, perched on the edge of the continental shelf, is a source of wonder to her. “It’s stunning: Lots of really large barrel sponges that can be hundreds of years old, a metre wide and high. There’s hard corals, sea fans and soft corals, which give the reef its colour. The upwellings from the shelf provide nutrient-dense water, the sea fans filter it and capture food… it’s a highly productive area.”
When she spoke to Adventure.com, Wendy had just seen a pod of 20 pilot whales off back of the reef. “They’re probably diving off the slopes for squid.”
All of these phenomena, the migrations, the cycles of feeding and gestation, are held in robust, intricate balance when left alone. But the dead weight of human consequence renders them fragile. Even when we’re not there, plastic pollutants, acidification, climate change and creeping sea levels are our silent emissaries.
And lately, boats have been turning up. Uninvited, going against the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change whose ultimate aim is to prevent “dangerous” human interference with the climate system. So, whose boats are these?
They belong to Woodside Energy, there to exploit an unseen dimension of Scott Reef. Deep under the coral lies a huge deposit of oil and gas. Woodside have dubbed the deposit ‘Browse’, as if fossil fuel extraction is as banal as leafing through a catalogue.
Standing between Woodside and the polite horror of ‘Browse’, is Greenpeace.
“Woodside wants to drill up to 50 wells to develop ‘Browse’,” explains Geoff Bice, Greenpeace’s WA Campaign Lead and the person in charge of the Save Scott Reef campaign. “They’ll pump the gas hundreds of kilometres to be processed onshore and mostly exported overseas.”
Woodside’s “dirty gas” as he calls it (the term ‘natural gas’ was the creation of marketers, not scientists) could spell disaster for Scott Reef and the wildlife that depends upon it. In Bice’s reckoning, it would turn the pristine reef and its waters into “an industrial gas zone blighted by seismic blasting, flaring, drilling and pipe laying.”
Woodside openly admits that extracting gas from directly under the reef will trigger subsidence, which will cause erosion of Sandy Islet, affecting the turtles. They claim that reef re-growth will offset that subsidence. (In an email responding to this story, a Woodside spokesperson wrote that “no drilling would occur on Scott Reef, in the North/South Scott Reef lagoons or the Scott Reef Channel” and “Woodside’s closest activities for Browse would occur multiple kilometres from Scott Reef.”)
Greenpeace argues the state government is “way behind the eight-ball” in developing renewables, despite WA being self-evidently one of the sunniest, windiest places on Earth.
These immediate effects only paint part of the picture. The massive addition of fossil fuels that the deposit represents would contribute to ocean warming and subsequent coral bleaching, acidification and sea level rise. These are the inevitable downstream effects of industrialising the deposit.
Then there are the non-inevitable, but possible, effects. If one of Woodside’s wells suffered a blowout, far from the people and equipment needed to intervene, the consequences are unimaginable.
As with all conservation struggles, there’s the science and the commerce, then there’s a third corner: The politics. Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek will soon be reviewing Woodside’s plans.
As Geoff Bice explains it, both Federal and state approval processes are running simultaneously. They’re complex and contingent on each other. Plibersek can’t make a decision until the WA state process on the North West Shelf extension has run its course. That process concerns the 900-kilometre pipe which would bring the gas along the Kimberley coast, cutting down through the Rowley Shoal and marine parks, all the way to Dampier to come ashore.
Part of the ‘Browse’ proposal necessitates extending the life of the Northwest Shelf Venture, Australia’s largest resource project, scheduled to end in the 2030s. The extension Woodside seeks is a breathtaking 40 years—to 2070.
Woodside is heavily invested here. Australia has a huge abundance of gas for domestic needs, but this gas would all be exported.
The other part of Woodside’s Burrup Hub mega-project is Scarborough Field, off Ningaloo Reef. That field is further advanced—they’re already laying pipes—and the majority of that gas is already allocated for the Perdaman fertiliser plant. “It’s a chicken-and-egg thing domestically,” Bice explains. “New industries want gas supply, they set up shop, and then Woodside can argue ‘Hey, we’re short on gas!’”
In September this year, the Cook state government allowed onshore producers to export up to 20 per cent of their output, aiming to encourage gas development. This meant lifting a ban on local producers exporting any of their gas. (Meanwhile, new peer-reviewed research in the US has found that the export of gas for burning elsewhere—far from being a transition fuel, as is often claimed by its proponents—is more emissions-intensive than burning coal).
Jess Beckerling, executive director of the Conservation Council of WA, told The Guardian: “Gas is not a transition fuel, it’s a fossil fuel that’s diverting investment away from renewable energy,” and that the changes “would benefit fossil fuel giant Woodside, which was trying to secure more gas for its export projects in the North West Shelf.”
Greenpeace argues the state government is “way behind the eight-ball” in developing renewables, despite WA being self-evidently one of the sunniest, windiest places on Earth. “We’ll continue missing out on green industry opportunities like exporting green hydro, ammonium or iron,” says Bice. “That global transition will miss WA if we don’t get on board. But we keep relying on gas supply—we just open another field.” It’s a dilemma he calls “the incumbency of gas.”
Waiting for the resource laws to grind their gears might not be the only political solution. As Bice points out, “there’s existing tools in (Minister Plibersek’s) toolkit under the EPBC [Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999] law regarding impacts on species like the pygmy blue whale and green sea turtles.”
“The Woodsides of the world might put expensive ads everywhere in WA, splashing cash on footy teams and lifesaving clubs, but at the end of the day, people can see through it—they want to know there’s going to be special places for their kids.”
- Geoff Bice, Greenpeace WA Campaign Lead
The Dusky Sea Snake, recently listed as endangered, could trigger the EPBC laws. The only known remnant population of the sea snake is at Scott Reef. Because it’s been listed, the Minister can consider it, but perversely, because Woodside submitted their application before the listing, they don’t have to take it into consideration. They are, in any event, supremely confident: “No activities or planned impacts are expected to affect the type of complex reef habitats that are the primary habitat of the dusky sea snake,” they assert.
It’s well known that meeting IPCC (the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) emission targets requires every nation to stop opening new fossil fuel projects. But rather than accept that as an absolute, Australia finds ever more inventive ways to call a spade a banana lounge. Scott Reef would not only generate plenty of Scope 1 (direct) emissions, but also Scope 3 emissions (emissions further down the value chain, or offshore) which apparently aren’t our problem. So we devote our genius to funky maths around offsets, and ineffectual mitigation measures. Woodside defends its Scope 1 emissions by saying it will build a carbon capture and storage facility (CCS) as part of ‘Browse’: A quick Google will reveal how far CCS has got us.
Greenpeace says the entire Burrup Hub will produce 6.1 billion tonnes of emissions over its lifetime, a figure Woodside contests. If Greenpeace is right, the climate environmental impacts cannot be understated.
Along with the perspective and the language of an activist, Geoff Bice speaks with the proud parochialism that has always defined Australia’s west.
“As a West Australian, I find it frustrating because I know West Aussies are nature lovers,” he says. “We’re forever driving around to reach these hidden places. Even people who work in the resources industry aren’t necessarily supportive of what the companies are doing.”
Does conservation in the west have any big interests on its side? He sighs. “The media landscape here, God…” The West Australian, owned by Kerry Stokes, Australian businessman and chairman of the Seven Network, one of Australia’s largest broadcasting companies, is openly defensive of resources industries. Last year, the paper elevated an opinion piece by Woodside CEO Meg O’Neill to front-page billing, adding a stand-alone news story and an editorial chaser. No-one was invited to provide balance.
Bice mutters the word ‘Twiggy’ (the nickname for billionaire Andrew Forrest, former CEO of the mega-mining company Fortescue Group), like it naturally carries a question mark. “He’s trying to put his money where his mouth is. He’s got a number of proposals for large-scale renewables on the cards, but he isn’t reaching the initial investment decisions to get them started.”
The commitment to wean WA off coal power is a positive to Bice, especially the heavy investment in battery energy storage systems (BESS) in Collie and Kwinana, spurred by rooftop solar’s popularity.
Fossil fuel development in Western Australia is hidden from national view by what might be termed ‘eastern seaboard apathy’. Scott Reef is an impossibly long way from Canberra, where the scale of the gas industry and Perth politics are not well understood. “There’s a misperception that Woodside’s gas might alleviate the supply crunch for gas on the east coast,” says Bice. “It’s simply not so. There’s no pipeline, and shipping it over east would be bizarre and inefficient. It would wind up exported to Japan or somewhere like that, and then re-imported to eastern Australia.”
Greenpeace have collected almost half a million signatures on a giant petition which they’ve presented to the Federal minister. “That’s pretty powerful,” says Bice. “The Woodsides of the world might put expensive ads everywhere in WA, splashing cash on footy teams and lifesaving clubs, but at the end of the day, people can see through it—they want to know there’s going to be special places for their kids.”
“I’ve worked the last 10 years in marine tourism and I’ve seen a lot of incredible wild places. But they’re all slowly, surely changing. And putting such pressure on Scott will affect it, and the wider effects on climate will have huge effects on reefs globally.”
- Wendy Mitchell, dive instructor, photographer and activist
Scott Reef is full of sea snakes. Wendy Mitchell says that often she jumps into the water and they come right up to her. “They’re very curious,” she says. “They’ll wrap your leg. One of my favourite shots I’ve ever taken is two sea snakes entwined, mating.”
Wendy tries to explain the experience of being there, among these other-worldly creatures, so far from the familiar. “It’s a large area,” she says. “It’s similar to the Exmouth Gulf in size. That’s significant for a reef system. It took us four days of continuous sailing to arrive. The first thing you see as you get in closer is the breaking waves on Hook Lagoon. Inside, you get this really protected ecosystem. My favourite area is Seringapatam—the biodiversity is incredible. It’s rare to see really rich tropical reefs in WA, because the Kimberley is a turbid zone.
“What’s sad about Scott is all this oil and gas under it—it’s probably the reason it was never protected. The Rowley Shoals and Ashmore are protected, and Mermaid Reef, the northern atoll, has full marine park protection. It’s a no-take zone, thriving with life. But Scott missed out.”
“It’s Tanya Plibersek’s decision when it hits her desk,” says Bice. “She needs to knock this back, both the Browse and Burrup Peninsula aspects of it. Ideally, the state government should do it, but given the scale of what’s at stake, it needs to be done federally.”
Woodside maintains that it has contributed money and research to ensuring its effects at Scott are minimised. A spokesperson told Adventure.com: “(Our) programs have resulted in over 70 peer-reviewed publications in international journals on the environment and species of the Browse region… Scott Reef has one of the most intensive long-term monitoring programs of any Australian reef system.”
Down the phone line from somewhere at sea off the back of the reefs, Mitchell is blunt. “I’ve worked the last 10 years in marine tourism and I’ve seen a lot of incredible wild places. But they’re all slowly, surely changing. And putting such pressure on Scott will affect it, and the wider effects on climate will have huge effects on reefs globally.”
Greenpeace are getting out and talking to people in Broome and Exmouth, and across Perth, and according to Geoff Bice, those people are fed up. “We’re in a climate crisis and Woodside wants this massive fossil fuel development. And not only that, but at the site of this amazingly biodiverse, fragile reef system. It’s just outrageous.”
Stop Woodside now
We must act now to ensure Environment Minister Plibersek saves Scott Reef from Woodside’s dirty gas—visit Greenpeace to take action.
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Jock Serong is a journalist, screenwriter and the author of seven award-winning novels; most recently Cherrywood. He is a senior writer with Surfing World magazine, the founding editor of Great Ocean Quarterly, and a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Monthly, Patagonia's Roaring Journals and other publications. He is a board member of Melbourne's Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas, and lives on Victoria's far west coast.
