Northern Territory, Australia –
Riding along the coast on a small fishing boat, Paulina “Jedda” Puruntatameri gestures to the point where a long, pristine beach curves beyond sight, giving way to an expansive view of the Timor Sea.
“This is the home of the sacred sea serpent, Ampiji,” says the Aboriginal elder. Her people, the Tiwi, are the traditional owners of a group of islands of the same name that are part of Australia’s Northern Territory (NT) and lie 80 kilometers north of Darwin, the territory’s capital.
Ampiji, whose home is at Imalu Point on Tiwi’s Melville Island, is “the caretaker of this land and sea,” says Jedda.
It’s a role the elder has also embraced.
Together with other Tiwi, Jedda has been campaigning for years to stop Australian company Santos and its backers, including Japanese investors, from drilling for natural gas at the Barossa gas field — over 140 km offshore of Imalu Point — and transporting it to Darwin via an undersea pipeline that, at its closest, is 6 km from the Tiwi Islands.
Jera, Japan’s largest power generator and one of the biggest importers of liquefied natural gas in the world, owns a 12.5% stake in the project — purchased off the back of a $346 million loan from the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) — and several Japanese companies are contracted to buy LNG from it.
Despite islanders taking Santos to court twice — and winning once — to stop Barossa from going ahead, the plant is nearing completion, with gas production due to start this year. Jera did not reply to a request for comment.
Barossa has progressed even as Canberra has strengthened climate policies under the Labor Party government, such as the “safeguard mechanism,” which as of 2023 requires new large gas developments to be net zero from day one.
In parallel, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has supported the continuation of Australia’s fossil fuel exports — whose emissions are more than double all greenhouse gases produced domestically — with coal and natural gas, respectively, being the country’s second- and third-largest exports.
Since its reelection in May, the Albanese government has approved a slew of projects, including extending operations of the North West Shelf, the country’s oldest and second-largest LNG plant, to 2070.
“Australia’s trying to walk both sides of the street, so to speak, when it comes to climate change,” says Kevin Morrison, an energy finance analyst focused on Australian gas at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). “It’s trying to say it’s a good citizen” while maintaining its fossil fuel exports, in part to keep its “trading relationships intact.”
Of these, the ties with Japan are key.
Japan is Australia’s second-largest export market for energy and natural resources, and Australia is Japan’s single-largest supplier of energy — including of LNG, which Japan is growing less reliant on at home but increasingly reselling to countries in South and Southeast Asia.
Japan’s interests in Australian gas go back decades. It was involved in the North West Shelf project when this kicked off Australia’s LNG exports in the 1980s. Today, Japanese stakeholders are involved in all but two out of 13 LNG projects in Australia, with JBIC, the government’s export credit agency, engaged in nine of these, according to a recent report.
Pitjamirra beach on Melville Island in Australia’s Northern Territory.
| Paula Devora
“Japanese investment is a key reason why Australia has emerged as an unlikely gas export giant” despite remote and relatively small reserves, writes Wesley Morgan, research associate with the Institute for Climate Risk & Response at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney.
Therefore, Tokyo has a certain political weight when it comes to Australian energy matters.
“Any government in Australia … if they make any decisions that might impact fossil fuel supply or pricing, then Japan has a full-court press response,” allowing it to “secure various concessions” on several occasions, Morgan says.
Canberra is now bidding to host next year’s COP, the United Nations’ yearly conference focused on climate change, to signal its desire to shift from being a “fossil fuel heavyweight” to a “clean energy powerhouse,” Morgan states.
“The country in the world that most needs to get that message is Japan.”
Profits drive Japan’s interests
When it comes to energy, Tokyo’s No. 1 stated concern is security of supply.
Even Japan’s gas-related profits — which in fiscal year 2023 were comparable to those of the consumer electronics market — are explained in these terms: Japan overcontracts LNG to prepare for “fluctuating demand,” as stated by the economy ministry, reselling what it doesn’t need.
Australia was the source of 41% of LNG shipments that Japan sold to third countries last year and “the profit on those resales is likely a key driver for Japan’s interest in the Australian energy market,” according to IEEFA.
“It’s not clear that some of (Australia’s LNG) projects would even go ahead without Japanese concessional finance,” Morgan says, giving Tokyo significant political leverage.
On at least one occasion, Japan used its position to try and pressure Australia to refrain from tightening environmental regulations.
Pitjamirra beach on Melville Island, one of the Tiwi Islands in Australia’s Northern Territory
| Mara Budgen
In 2023, the Japanese government asked that Barossa be exempted from the safeguard mechanism’s new rules. The day the Australian Parliament voted to strengthen the climate policy, Japan’s ambassador to Australia accused Canberra of putting the “neon lights of Tokyo” at risk if it stopped supplying Japan with gas and coal.
Takayuki Ueda, the CEO of Inpex, Japan’s largest oil and gas exploration and production company, told lawmakers in Canberra the same day that their “quiet quitting” of LNG could threaten world peace. Inpex is part-owned by the Japanese government and operates Australia’s Ichthys gas field and LNG export terminal, the single-largest overseas investment ever by a Japanese company at the time of its approval over a decade ago.
While the safeguard mechanism wasn’t altered in response to Japan’s remonstrances, Australian officials scrambled to offer assurances that their country remained a reliable partner.
Some observers believe that Tokyo’s lobbying did, however, yield results in the November 2023 amendment of “sea dumping” laws to allow Australia to export carbon dioxide for capture and storage.
While the government says this change was dictated by international treaty obligations, opposition politicians accused it of wanting to salvage Barossa. For the project to meet the safeguard mechanism, in fact, Santos plans to separate carbon from the gas it extracts, which has a very high CO2 content, and export it to East Timor to be buried in the depleted Bayu-Undan offshore gas field — adding $1.6 billion to Barossa’s $4.5 billion price tag.
Offsetting culture?
Barossa is just one of the projects that the Northern Territory is banking on to continue expanding its gas industry. This is despite an assessment by Marcos A. Orellana, the United Nations special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, that oil and gas development “threatens to make Darwin and the region a climate change sacrifice zone.”
Many say that the relatively poor jurisdiction — which is saddled with debt and is the least populous of Australia’s states and territories — has much to gain from such large-scale energy investment. But less than 0.5% of the territory’s workforce is employed in oil and gas extraction, and foreign companies like Inpex pay little income tax and don’t pay any royalties to Australia on the gas they export.
The NT also has Australia’s highest proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, who make up about one-third of the territory’s population of 260,000. Many First Nations communities point to the huge detriment they have experienced as a result of fossil fuel production, which undermines their ancestral cultures in multifaceted ways.
Pitjamirra beach on Melville Island, one of the Tiwi Islands in Australia’s Northern Territory
| Mara Budgen
In 2022, drilling at Barossa was halted when a federal court found that Santos had failed to adequately consult with Tiwi traditional owners. Consultations followed, though several islanders say that the project’s impacts and risks were not properly explained. Santos did not respond to a request for comment.
A year after the case, another federal lawsuit was filed against Santos for not properly assessing Barossa’s negative impact on Indigenous cultural heritage at sea. This time, the judge ruled in the company’s favor.
Antonia Burke, a Tiwi resident and human rights advocate, points to the lack of engagement of traditional owners throughout the process. Exploration drilling off the Tiwi Islands began in the late 1960s, and by 2018, the Barossa project proposal had been accepted. However, most “Tiwi people didn’t know” what was going on until 2021, Burke says, when she found out about the project and informed her community.
“That’s decades worth of decisions being made without Tiwi people,” Burke says. “Every decision made without Indigenous people is an act of dispossession.”
The story of the Larrakia, the Aboriginal people native to the Darwin region, mirrors that of the Tiwi. Their cultural heritage has already been severely impacted by gas developments, says Larrakia elder and ethnobotanist Lorraine Williams, and could be further undermined by a proposed manufacturing, export and energy hub in Darwin Harbor, the Middle Arm Precinct.
Lorraine Williams in Darwin Harbor in Australia’s Northern Territory. Williams says Aboriginal cultural heritage has already been severely impacted by gas developments in the region.
| Paula Devora
Despite the NT government marketing this as a “sustainable development,” civil society groups say Middle Arm is anything but environmentally friendly. According to a report commissioned by the Environment Centre NT, the project could lead to a 513% increase in fine particulate emissions and three-quarters of the project site would be used by gas-fed industries, including the construction of a third LNG facility on a peninsula that already hosts the Darwin and Ichthys LNG export terminals.
Williams is deeply familiar with the area, home to the Larrakia’s only known petroglyph site and to several Aboriginal shell middens, some up to 10 meters high. The elder remembers fondly when she used to visit the peninsula to fish and gather shellfish, vital parts of Larrakia culture. “We see our (Larrakia) country getting destroyed, and it’s like your arm or your leg getting chopped off,” Williams says.
“How can you offset cultural heritage? Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”
Thrown in the deep end
As a source of toxic air pollutants, petrochemical plants have been linked to a range of negative health outcomes. A 2020 study found that people living within 5 km of such facilities have a 30% higher risk of developing leukemia. The city of Palmerston and central Darwin are 3 km and 10 km, respectively, away from Middle Arm.
Darwin-based pediatrician Louise Woodward points out that the area’s residents are already exposed to high levels of pollution: For example, Ichthys LNG has consistently emitted several times the level of volatile organic compounds that Inpex had estimated in publicly available documents. Volatile organic compounds are associated with damage to the liver, kidney and central nervous systems and some have been linked to cancer.
The company says these emissions “have consistently been within safe concentrations,” but Woodward doesn’t agree. “They are venting pollution … right in the heart of a city full of people.”
A recent investigation also revealed that neighboring Darwin LNG, operated by Santos, suffered from methane leaks for over a decade and that this was kept secret from the public.
Paulina “Jedda” Puruntatameri offshore of Imalu Point on Melville Island. The point is over 140 km from the Barossa gas field.
| Paula Devora
Furthermore, Middle Arm could become a key export hub for another large Northern Territory fossil fuel development, namely shale gas fracked 500 km southeast of Darwin in the 28,000-square-kilometer Beetaloo Sub-basin — where developers hope that two pilot fracking projects will lead to significant production.
In 2018, the NT government lifted a two-year fracking moratorium, saying that all 135 recommendations made by a scientific probe known as the Pepper inquiry would be met, including ensuring no net increase in lifecycle emissions from gas production.
Yet given the high levels of greenhouse gases expected, doubts have been raised about the feasibility of net-zero gas production in the Beetaloo Sub-basin — with similar issues swirling around Barossa as Bayu-Undan isn’t meant to start storing carbon until 2028, if significant financial and technical hurdles are overcome.
Residents are especially concerned about fracking’s impact on water, says Louis Boyle-Bryant, regional campaigner at community-based organization Frack Free NT, including the depletion of water sources and pollution from hazardous chemicals, with cases of contamination having already occurred in the Beetaloo area.
Paulina “Jedda” Puruntatameri displays her art.
| Paula Devora
Many are also alarmed by the lack of transparency around the project. Sam Phelan, a veterinarian and independent politician in Katherine — a town 100 km north of the Beetaloo Sub-basin — says that, where Aboriginal people have agreed to fracking exploration, they have often done so unaware that this would lead to operations with potential cumulative impacts normally associated with production — an issue also noted by the Pepper inquiry.
“Those signatures are still being used today to say to Aboriginal people, you can’t say no to these agreements,” Phelan states.
While such practices are seen elsewhere in Australia, the Northern Territory represents “a Champions League kind of performance of how terrible things are,” says IEEFA’s Morrison. Yet its government signed memorandums of understanding focused on energy development with both JBIC and the Japanese government’s Japan Organization for Metals and Energy Security in 2024.
This May, a former Inpex executive was appointed the NT’s first territory coordinator, a figure who can override territorial laws, including around the environment and cultural heritage, to advance designated projects. This “undemocratic” role “creates a situation where corruption can thrive,” comments Kat McNamara, a Greens member of the territory’s parliament. “We have a serious and ongoing problem with the revolving door between government and gas companies in the NT, and this is perhaps the most brazen example yet.”
Antonia Burke, a Tiwi resident and human rights advocate, says there has been a lack of engagement of traditional owners throughout the process of developing the Barossa gas field.
| Paula Devora
Pirrawayingi Puruntatameri, a former mayor of Pirlangimpi, a town on Melville Island.
| Paula Devora
Communities are also penalized by the approval of separate but interconnected projects without considering cumulative impacts. This is happening in the Beetaloo Sub-basin, says Boyle-Bryant, and with Barossa, which is just one of several oil and gas leases in the Timor Sea and the neighboring Arafura Sea, Burke points out.
“By the time something becomes a project and contracts have been made with other countries, it’s too late,” Burke says. “We (First Nations people) are thrown into the deep end, then called activists if we don’t like it.”
“If Japan just went away and stopped investing in (projects like Barossa), we might have a hope.”
Burke and her community have also pushed to take back control of the fight against fossil fuel developments in a way that honors Tiwi culture.
“Cultural authority is the strongest thing we have,” says Tiwi elder Pirrawayingi Puruntatameri, former mayor of Pirlangimpi, a town on Melville Island.
Fellow Tiwi elder Therese Wokai Bourke, who campaigns alongside Burke and Puruntatameri, agrees. “I don’t want us to end up losing our cultural way of life … It’s who we are, and you take all that away, then what are we?”
Part of the reporting for this story, specifically on communities impacted by gas developments in Australia’s Northern Territory, was funded by the U.S.-based nonprofit Oil Change International.
