'Golden age of gas' delivers everything, except cash for Australians

"Mind boggling" amount of money have
transformed Barrow Island.

The once-in-a-lifetime liquefied natural gas boom off the coast of Western Australia will not deliver any significant royalties to the federal government for at least two decades, according to an analysis prepared for the state's government.

One of the companies involved in the boom, Chevron, will in effect be able to pump and sell about 300 million tonnes of Australian LNG before paying any royalties.

The bleak assessment of the $90 billion offshore LNG industry's contribution to the national wealth can be revealed as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Resources Minister Josh Frydenberg tour Western Australia trumpeting the coming "golden age of gas".

Read Heath Aston’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “WA gas boom 'will not boost national wealth for decades’.”

(Barrow Island when I was there in the early 1960s was just that, an island rich in it flora and fauna and home (temporary in this case) one fellow who operated a navigational beacon.

You see, as a young man, I worked for the dark-side and the navigational beacon, one of two that located sea-going boats (about 30 metres long) used by a geophysical company that was searching the area for oil and gas. We were dropping supplies off to the lone fellow who manned and maintained the beacon.

That search was obviously not fruitless and now Barrow Island, which has been the place from which Australia has drawn much of its oil, is the focus of what the Australia’s Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and his Resources Minister, Josh Frydenburg, are calling our “golden age of gas”.

The numbers about what is happening on the island are in the billions (and that’s dollars) and yet it has been revealed that Australia will not see a cent of any royalties from what is happening there for decades.

Should that be true, and it is according to an analysis prepared for the Western Australian Government, then Australia’s governance is in serious disarray and illustrates again that those from the big end of town know which strings to pull to avoid contributing to the public good.

Those extractive companies happily continue to source even more fossil fuels and further put the stability of Earth’s climate system under additional pressure and so worsening the likelihood of humanity escaping catastrophic climate change, and all along, it seems, we allow them to do it, for free, beyond some vague and unsubstantiated promises – Robert McLean.)