Commercial fishers say seismic blast plans off Australia’s coast will devastate marine species and the fossil fuel sector is playing down impacts of the controversial practice.
Rock lobster fishers in Western Australia and the Surf Coast say the geological surveying technique is known to hinder reproduction of their catch.
“We know that it effects five generations of lobster, it will have an effect on the biomass and the reproductional recruitment to the fishery for four years after that”, Matt Taylor from the Western Rock Lobster Council says.
The WA industry is grappling with Woodside Energy’s latest blast plan in the search for oil and gas, for the massive Scrarborough and Burrup Hub gas projects off the Pilbara and Kimberley coast, that have been described as carbon bombs.
Included in the environmental concerns about the projects are impacts on marine life like mammals, such as whales are dolphins, given blasting in their habitat reaches decibel levels of 256; greater than that of rockets launching into space.
The Apollo Bay Fishermen’s Co-Operative is a noisy opponent of seismic blasting, and the federal offshore safety regulator that oversees the oil and gas industry.
“The whole process is just greenwashing, as far as environmental plans go,” the co-op’s chair Markus Nolle says of the latest blast plans in the Otway Basin.
The proposal from multi-nationals SLB and TGS is vast, covering 45,000 square kilometres of the southern ocean, that if approved would be the largest 3D seismic blasting projects in the world.
Mr Nolle has previously described the regulatory process as “pre-determined” and the project will inevitably get the green light despite what he says are evidenced based objections.
“For years the oil and gas industry claimed that the whole process was a benign activity. Scallop trawlers, the dredgers, said for years….if they went back a few months after there’d been a seismic survey, everything they brought up was dead, everything.”
A decision from the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) on the Otway Basin blast was expected weeks ago, around the same time a federal government MP on the coast called for a halt to the decision.
Corangamite MP Libby Coker cited local concerns from fishing and First Nations communities for her intervention, and she was among the thousands at a Torquay beach over the weekend that gathered to oppose the proposal.
Groups including the Surf Coast branch of the Surfrider Foundation have spent weeks building momentum for the paddle out Cosy Corner, where hundreds of people on Saturday gathered on boards in the water in a joint display of community solidarity.
“It was an amazing paddle out with a broad cross section of the community passionately coming together to oppose this destructive project,” the group’s secretary Darren Noyes-Brown said.
“But made even more powerful with Wadawarrung and Gunditjmara leaders joining forces to protect sea country….a real day to remember.”
As opposition around Australia grows to expansion of the fossil fuel sector – growth that has the bipartisan backing of Australia’s major political parties – coastal MP’s are uneasy about how that sentiment will play out in the looming federal election.
