Unexpected oil spill

While ethical CEO of an oil company is an oxymoron, credit where credit’s due to outgoing Woodside Petroleum head honcho Don Voelte who gets the gold medal for speaking the truth and making things difficult for your colleagues. (The silver medal goes to former Liberal leader John Hewson, and bronze to Opposition leader impatiently-in-waiting Malcolm Turnbull).

“Come back and check in four or five years from now. I think one of the greatest things that I’ll have achieved is not taking my company into coal seam fracking,” Voelte said. “I know exactly what happens with the water. I understand exactly what happens with fracking technology.

“I know I’m way on the bookend... but I’ll just say I’ll rest easy at night knowing I didn’t take the company there.”

So here is the CEO of a company that is prepared to ride roughshod over Timor Leste, construct floating LNG platforms off the Kimberley coast, partner up with the company responsible for Australia’s worst ever oil spill – and he still thinks CSG is a bad idea.

Let’s add to this the Arrow Energy (the Shell PetroChina subsidiary that has exploration licences in the Northern Rivers) well explosion in Dalby last week, where the farmers are nervous about contamination, and the waste-water leak in Campbelltown last week and the assurances from the gas industry that it’s safe and we have nothing to worry about are starting to sound more hollow than a big bass drum.

And then there’s the class actions in the US. One of the constant assurances from gas industry spokespeople has been that, while CSG is a newish industry in Australia, it’s been going for decades in America. Well in Arkansas, a significant number of people now believe those decades of fracking for shale gas (which, admittedly, is different to coal seam gas) have been causing earthquakes. Who would have thought that if you fracture geological strata, it affects the seismic activity?

My award this week for failing to see beyond dollar signs flashing in front of your eyes so brightly it blocks any claim you ever had to an environmental conscience goes jointly to winners Anna Bligh and Julia Gillard. Bligh and Gillard shared the spotlight opening a new gas processing plant in Curtis Island at the south end of the Great Barrier Reef without a word that it was in a declared dugong habitat – and that was despite two dead dolphins washing up in the harbour in the week prior and 22 dead turtles three weeks before.

Well, what’s a few dead sea mammals and reptiles worth when there’s billions of petrojules worth of money to be made ruining farming land and the water table in Australia so gas can be exported? According to the Queensland and federal governments, that collateral damage is worth the return. Ah yes, money. Something dolphins, turtles, dugongs and every other animal on the planet has no access to – they can’t afford to buy an advertising campaign to overthrow a prime minister, but Australia’s richest people can – and did. I wonder if that has anything to do with Gillard’s and Bligh’s selective blindness?