Gas is now flowing from the Beetaloo Basin, a vast onshore fossil fuel project located roughly 500 kilometres southeast of Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory. The basin, covering 28,000 square kilometres between Katherine and Tennant Creek, is one of Australia’s largest onshore gas reserves — larger by some measures than Western Australia’s North West Shelf project, which alone accounts for more than 40% of Australia’s oil and gas production. Proponents say the Beetaloo could generate more than A$17 billion and support 13,000 jobs over the next two decades, and there is already talk of using cheap shale gas to power energy-hungry data centres. For climate scientists and environmental groups, however, the milestone represents what many are calling a “climate bomb.”
The NT government estimates the basin is capable of producing 430 trillion cubic feet of gas, and the federal and territory governments have invested heavily to bring it to this point. At least $220 million has come from the Commonwealth, while the NT government has underwritten a $7.5 million loan to developer Tamboran Resources — a company a 2021 Senate inquiry found had at that time paid no tax in Australia. Another developer, Beetaloo Energy Australia, received $15 million in taxpayer funds in 2024 alone. A federal report released only under freedom of information laws found that the economic benefits for Traditional Owners in the region are “uncertain and variable,” casting doubt on the project’s most prominent social justifications.
The consent of Traditional Owners has also been a point of contention. The Beetaloo Basin sits across pastoral leases and various forms of Aboriginal tenure. While some land falls under the NT’s Aboriginal Land Rights Act — which provides relatively strong rights for Traditional Owners — most Aboriginal title in the basin is federal native title tenure, which does not allow Traditional Owners to veto resource extraction. Developers including Beetaloo Energy, Tamboran Resources, and Santos have reached agreements with Traditional Owners, but critics argue the Native Title Act’s structure effectively pressures Aboriginal groups into acquiescing rather than genuinely consenting.
On the climate side, researchers warn that fracking in the Beetaloo would produce the equivalent of up to 49 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year — approximately 11% of Australia’s total emissions in 2021. Gas projects in the basin are currently required to offset only 5% of their emissions through carbon credits, a figure scientists say falls far short of what would be needed to mitigate the environmental damage. Analysts also caution that global demand for liquefied natural gas is projected to decline as early as the mid-2030s, raising the prospect that Beetaloo infrastructure could become a stranded asset before governments recoup their investments. Climate projections suggest that without significant emissions reductions, large parts of the Northern Territory itself could become unliveable within decades due to extreme heat.
The start of production at the Beetaloo Basin crystallises a tension playing out across many resource-rich nations: the pull of short-term economic development against the longer-term costs of accelerating climate change. Whether Australian governments can square that circle — or whether they are, as critics argue, simply delaying an inevitable reckoning — remains an open question as the first gas begins to flow.