The Montara Wake Up Call
We need only look as far as the PTTEP Montara Disaster of 2009 to understand the possibility for UnderSea Oil and Gas Extractive processes to depart drastically from their operational optimum performance, becoming a major threat to the environment in places which are exceedingly difficult to measure or mitigate.
The Premier's aggressive and intimidatory stance against the moderately controlled KLC mirrors the cavalier treatment of Peru's indigenous peoples rights by that countrys President Pinera, whose government used police to massacre indigenous protesters in Bagua Peru in 2009. Premier Barnett's publicly issued statement of intent to commence compulsory acquisition proceedings "because of the premiers frustration with delays" is typical of the jackboot diplomacy Australian colonial governments have applied to Australia's indigenous people since arrival, pushing them roughly aside to serve other interest groups.In the case of the James Price Gas Hub, the interest group is a consortium almost exclusively made up of perpetrators of among the deadliest and most destructive petroleum extractive disasters in the country.
Chevron is well known for its subsidiary Texaco's cavalier ecovandalism in Ecuador and under Chevrons stewardship the subsequent use of legal loopholes to delay the $US27 billion cost of remedial work. Chevron also has a long history of corporate piracy. Chevron is focussing much of its future growth expectation on the Western Australian Offshore Gas Fields.
Who can forget BHP-Billiton's OK Tedi in remote Papua New Guinea as a bright example of corporate responsibility. BHP-Billiton are another partner.
Do I need find links to BP Americas Deepwater Horizon Gulf Oilspill?? To their credit they continue to mitigate.The overall process however exposed multiple layers of inadequacy in corporate and government systems, with multiple points of failure identified.
Australia needs to take heed of the lessons of Montara, which was never properly mitigated. Government silence and exhaustive parliamentary inquiries miss the point that not one drop of PTTEP oil was spilt on the floor of their committee room, and they are highly unlikely to find contamination there. However, as with the Deepwater Horizon Oilspill, vast underwater plumes were found after the US Government had declared that all the oil had "disappeared. The US Government was forced to restate its position. Following the successful Capping of Montara all monitoring and remediation stopped. We simply said out of sight out of mind and left our mess there. The PTTEP drilling rig is said to have been a cheaper to use, higher risk 30 year old technologically superceded model, which the company perhaps even had a duty to their shareholders to use in preference to the safer later and more expensive options. They were certainly entitled to use this dangerous dinosaur rig because Australias lax legal regime permitted them to.
Companies such as Chevron target jurisdictions with the weakest compliance regimes worldwide as providing the most profitable extractive options. Australia fits the bill perfectly
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