The Kurri Kurri Gas Fired Power Station In 2020, the Morrison Government threatened to get their state owned power company, Snowy Hydro, to build a gas fired power station at Kurri Kurri in the Hunter Valley of NSW if private companies didn’t build one first.  We set about investigating who was behind these proposals and set to benefit from the Government building a new gas-fired power station in the Hunter. 

Gas-tastrophe: the climate impact of the Government’s strategic gas basins In 2020, the Morrison Government set out their plans to spend millions of dollars accelerating the opening up of five new gas basins across Australia as a key element of their plan for an economic recovery from Covid-19.  While they talked up the potential – and questionable – benefits of this approach, they failed to mention the massive climate impact that this move would have.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is pushing to open up new gas basins by subsidising the development of five strategic basins with an allocation of $28.3 million for the Beetaloo, North Bowen, Galilee, Gunnedah and Perth basins. These are significant gas basins, containing large volumes of gas, spread across Australia. This analysis shows that if the gas from these five basins is extracted and burnt it will:

• Cancel out the emission savings from the Government’s flagship climate policies five times over.

We are almost at the end of this year of fires, storms, and a global pandemic, and I hope you are having some time with loved ones to rest and relax. At 350.org our small team of staff and big grassroots movement has worked hard to keep up the momentum for climate action.

The gas industry has grown into Western Australia’s (WA’s) largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Five facilities in WA have been a key driver of rising carbon emissions nationally, while the overturned state-wide fracking ban could drive up further emissions. All this in a critical decade for climate action when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned of the need to drastically reduce emissions in order to avoid tipping over 1.5