Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

When will we get this information? When will we get an idea of what will be required in these bilateral agreements? Essentially what the government is doing today is asking us to take the first step towards helping facilitate the Barossa gas project by signing the London protocol. I don't understand how a geological formation which is a depleted oil and gas field, Bayu-Undan, is going to be used for CCS if it's in someone else's territorial waters. How will the Australian government have any jurisdiction over that project if it's in someone else's waters, particularly if that country hasn't signed onto the London protocol? You may have a memorandum of understanding, but under that memorandum of understanding will the Australian government, for example, have any kind of ability to audit whether that CCS project is actually working?

Senator Pocock has raised the fact that the Gorgon project, a $3 billion dud which was talked up all around the world, has been plagued with problems since it started. It is in Australian territory, underneath Barrow Island. It has failed to sequester more than a third of the carbon offset that was committed to. A very big multinational company has spent a lot of money on that and it hasn't worked anywhere near what was required or what was expected. We have to know this if we are going to be taking the first step before we get this legislation further down the track. This is the first time this has happened—that we are dealing with allowing Australian companies to pipe their pollution to another country's territorial boundaries. Why would we accept this first step if we don't actually know any of the details about what's to come? How does the Australian government, under the safeguard mechanism, audit whether a carbon capture and storage area in the depleted Bayu-Undan gas field in the Timor Sea in East Timor's territorial waters is successful? That's the first question. Can you deal with that one first, please, Minister.