Gas is no longer a dirty word for Labor. Should it be?
Anthony Albanese's decision to stare down the Greens and back a four-decade extension of one of Australia's worst-polluting industrial plants will be the first of many steps he takes to lock in future supplies of natural gas.
It was a controversial call he didn't want to make before the election, and for an obvious reason: the fate of Woodside Energy's North West Shelf project – a series of offshore gas platforms and the Karratha gas-processing facility – had become the new front line in the long-running fight between the gas industry and Australians demanding faster action on global warming. So the government pushed back the deadline to the end of May.
Campaigners likened the extension plan to a 'carbon bomb' that would endanger climate commitments and lock in emissions equivalent to a decade of Australia's current annual total – if factoring in emissions caused by burning the gas overseas.
But back in power with an even larger majority, Albanese and his newly minted environment minister, Murray Watt, this week gave the provisional green light for the Woodside-led North West Shelf joint venture to keep producing gas for another 45 years, out to 2070.
In doing so, they also gave the strongest signal yet that Labor is prepared to support the ongoing need for more gas infrastructure and drilling programs across the country to keep pumping out supplies of what it considers to be a necessary 'transition fuel' on Australia's pathway to a cleaner economy with net zero emissions.
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'It's net zero, not zero,' Albanese remarked in the days before the decision. 'You can't have renewables unless you have firming capacity – simple as that.'
Make no mistake, the Albanese government is leading Australia through one of the fastest and most ambitious shifts to renewable energy anywhere in the world. Last year, wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric dams and big batteries supplied about 40 per cent of our electricity, and the government is trying to double that by 2030, with a target for renewables to meet 82 per cent of the grid by then.
But Labor has long been caught in a fight over the future of natural gas – a fossil fuel that burns more cleanly than coal but is still a main source of harmful greenhouse emissions that are overheating the planet.
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