Australia's biggest gas plant was approved to 2070 with 48 conditions, and is now in court

On 12 September 2025 Australia's Environment Minister, Murray Watt, gave final approval under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 for Woodside Energy to keep operating the North West Shelf gas processing plant on the Burrup Peninsula in Western Australia until 2070. The approval was not a bare yes. It carried 48 conditions, and the reasoning the minister published rested on those conditions rather than on any finding that the project's emissions were acceptable in themselves. In the last week of July 2026 that reasoning was argued over four days in the Federal Court of Australia before Justice Catherine Button, who reserved judgment. As at 17 August 2026 no judgment has been published.

The conditions reported by the ABC on the day of the decision include a 60 per cent reduction in nitrous oxide and volatile organic compound emissions by 2030, a requirement to reach net zero by 2050, additional monitoring of air emissions near the adjacent heritage precinct, and measures to avoid and mitigate damage to the Murujuga rock art. Watt also issued a partial heritage declaration over the Murujuga site. His stated logic was containment: the project, he said, would be operated in a way that does not cause unacceptable impacts to the rock art, including by restricting emissions. He framed protection of the environment, First Nations cultural heritage and jobs as things that did not have to be traded against one another.

The figures put on the decision do not agree, and the disagreement is worth stating plainly rather than resolving. Greens deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi put the project's lifetime emissions at 6.1 billion tonnes on the day of approval. The Australian Conservation Foundation, one of the applicants, used a figure of about 4 billion tonnes when it filed in October 2025, and the ABC used the same 4 billion tonne figure in its July 2026 explainer. Nothing in the material this masthead was able to open reconciles the two numbers, and both are estimates of a lifetime that runs 44 years beyond the decision.

The challenges were filed on 13 October 2025 by the Australian Conservation Foundation and by Friends of Australian Rock Art. The ACF's public account of its own case, published on 28 July 2026, puts the central legal question as whether the minister erred in deciding that the project's greenhouse gas emissions would have no impact on a range of matters protected under the Act. That is a question about statutory construction rather than about the merits of gas. Woodside said after the filings that it would vigorously defend its position, noting the project had been under assessment for seven years. Watt has defended the decision publicly, saying the conditions he set, together with those set by the Western Australian government, were designed to prevent significant damage to the rock art.

One feature of the hearing has no Australian precedent. The United Nations special rapporteur on the right to a healthy environment, Astrid Puentes Riaño, was accepted by the Federal Court as an amicus curiae, which the ABC reported on 4 June 2026 as the first time an Australian court had admitted such an intervention from a UN special rapporteur. Her submission argues that the climate assessment underpinning the extension was inadequate. Woodside opposed the intervention on procedural grounds. The submission sits against the International Court of Justice advisory opinion on the obligations of states in respect of climate change, delivered on 23 July 2025 in case number 187 on the Court's docket.

The same minister now has a second decision in front of him. Woodside's Browse proposal, a roughly 30 billion dollar development off Western Australia with a 900 kilometre pipeline near Scott Reef, has been under assessment for eight years. The ABC reported on 8 May 2026 that the department expected to deliver its recommendation to approve or refuse in mid to late 2026, and put the project's annual emissions at 6.4 to 6.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, which it characterised as about 4 per cent of Australia's emissions by 2035. Woodside has argued that new gas supply is needed to protect jobs, underwrite industry and provide energy security. It has already appointed engineering contractors.

What is not known is substantial. Justice Button has given no timetable for judgment. The department's recommendation on Browse has not been published, and no decision on it has been announced. This masthead could not open the minister's full statement of reasons for the North West Shelf approval, the Western Australian Environmental Protection Authority's assessment report, or the text of the ICJ opinion, because those servers refused or timed out on the day of writing. Every claim above rests on pages that were opened.