Oil and gas giant Inpex is emitting toxic chemicals into the air just four kilometres from the Darwin CBD, vastly exceeding estimates it gave the public and worrying experts who say the pollution is going unregulated and unchecked.
In 2008, Inpex submitted an environmental impact statement (EIS) for NT government approval of its Ichthys LNG gas facility on Darwin Harbour.
In it, Inpex estimated the facility would only emit 500 tonnes of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) annually.
But in 2023, it emitted 3,900 tonnes of VOCs — eight times the estimated amount.
The year before, in 2022, the Japanese gas company reported it emitted 11,000 tonnes to the National Pollutant Inventory.
That’s 22 times more than its original estimate.
Inpex senior vice president Bill Townsend said the spike in VOCs was due to a ramp-up in the facility’s gas production since it started operating in 2018.
But Kirsty Howey from the Environment Centre NT said that was not a good enough reason.
“You have to ask whether Inpex has misled the public and the regulator about the true extent of pollution that would be generated by their facility,” she said.
What are VOCs?
VOCs are colourless chemicals that are emitted as a by-product from the gas extraction process.
They include BTEXs, the family of compounds that includes benzene (a known cancer-causing carcinogen), sulphur dioxide (a chemical the US Environment Protection Agency says harms the respiratory system), and hydrogen sulphide.
Melissa Haswell, a professor of practice in environmental wellbeing at the University of Sydney, said VOCs are a concerning group of chemicals, and that people may be breathing them in.
“They’re carcinogens at low levels,” she said.
According to the National Pollutant Inventory, from its initial estimates, the gas processing facility has surged to become the fourth-largest emitter of VOCs in Australia.
In 2022, Ichthys emitted more toxic chemicals than the Gorgon project off the coast of Western Australia — one of the biggest gas fields in the world.
NT paediatrician Louise Woodward, from Doctors for the Environment Australia, said high levels of VOCs could cause headaches, dizziness, drowsiness, nausea, asthma attacks, and coughing.
“If people have heart disease or kidney disease and they’re breathing in this air pollution, it can make their chronic diseases much worse,” Dr Woodward said.
Experts call for ‘serious investigation’
Across Darwin and Palmerston, there are three sites that monitor air quality — but they do not detect VOCs, and Inpex’s licence does not require ambient air quality monitoring for air toxins.
“If we don’t have those measurements, and we know this is going into the atmosphere, then we have to assume until we’re proven wrong that this is a health risk,” Ms Haswell said.
“There needs to be a lot more attention to what’s going on in terms of the health of Palmerston people and Darwin [people], as these pollutants — some of them can travel long distances.
“The gap that we don’t know needs to be filled by independent and serious investigation.”
The NT government and NT Worksafe have told the ABC they are not investigating Inpex’s rise in VOC emissions.
Inpex reports ‘no discernible impacts’ to Darwin air
Since 2012, Inpex has been powering ahead with an ambitious plan to extract gas from an underwater basin north of Western Australia.
The gas is then piped via a 889km subsea pipeline to be processed in Darwin and shipped overseas.
In its 2023 environment report, Inpex stated that emission monitoring points had picked up “no discernible impacts” on the air quality of the Darwin region.
“We do not put people in harm’s way, and we comply with legislative requirements at all times,” Mr Townsend said.
“The Environment Impact Statement provided operational estimates based on the best available forecasting information a decade ago.”
‘This is human health we’re talking about’
Though a complex and expensive endeavour, VOC emissions are monitored by governments in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria.
Ms Haswell said as more research pinned “a whole array of health impacts” to people living in close proximity to gas processing facilities, it was especially important for governments to monitor emissions.
“We’re talking about protecting the population. This is human health we’re talking about,” she said.
A spokesperson from the NT Environment Protection Authority (NT EPA) told the ABC that Inpex’s operations had not exceeded national air quality standards, which are set by the National Environment Protection Council.
“Ambient air quality monitoring at ground level is currently conducted (voluntarily) by Inpex at their site boundary and Frances Bay and results provided to the NT EPA were well below health limits,” the spokesperson said.