Patagonia

Give or take, it’s the same area that was saved from the world’s largest seismic blasting program back in 2024. Huge public opposition at the time saw over 30,000 people lodge formal submissions against the plan, along with paddle-out protests on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road. When the proposal was scrapped in September 2024, locals were confident they’d sent a strong message that would prevent anything of this scale ever happening again.

But here we are.

When Labor won the federal election in 2022, it was hoped they’d put the brakes on new offshore oil and gas development as they steered Australia toward a renewable energy future.

But they’d also inherited a dysfunctional gas market, which prioritised gas exports over domestic gas. So dysfunctional was the market that Australia – one of the world’s largest LNG exporters – often had to import back its own exported gas back to cover local shortfalls. A saying developed: Australia doesn’t have a gas supply problem; it has a gas export problem. Australia produces three times more gas than we use, domestic gas use is falling, and yet we’re still running out of gas.

The result of all this? The domestic gas price has spiked, electricity prices have spiked, Australians have suffered and the government is under huge political pressure to develop new gas sources, especially on the east coast.

The timing of the announcement on December 12 was a classic case of “taking out the trash” just before Christmas.

It started the clock ticking on an eight-week public feedback period, most of which would fall while people were on their summer holidays. The closing date for public submissions against the Otway Basin expansion closes on February 6. The gas companies meanwhile have until June 30 to lodge applications for exploration permits, and the first exploration is expected to occur in early 2027.

Things are being moved along quickly.

The area of Southern Ocean being handed over to the gas industry is straddled between two marine parks – Nelson and Zeehan – and is adjacent to Victoria’s Great Ocean Road, King Island and the West Coast of Tasmania. It’s a vast area that spans a myriad of marine ecosystems, including southern right whale and pygmy blue whale habitat.

The area extends out into the abyssal zone, beyond the continental shelf and into waters over 4000m deep. It’s the same kind of depths that foreign oil companies were trying to develop and drill over in the Great Australian Bight a few years back, which highlighted the significant challenges and environmental risks that drilling at those depths create.

The government is also aware that public sentiment is very much against seismic blasting, the first physical step in the gas exploration process. Their messaging around these new titles has been around minimising seismic blasting where possible, but huge parts of these new titles have never been explored and will need to be blasted to locate any gas that might be there.

The government messaging has also made it clear that driving this expansion in the Otway Basin is a forecast domestic gas shortfall toward the end of the decade. But to develop offshore gas takes years – from seismic blasting right through to gas being piped to the cities. Even if they started tomorrow, little if any of this gas would flow to domestic markets in time to alleviate the shortfall.

Meanwhile, steps are already underway to address the shortfall without drilling for new gas.

The federal government has undertaken a review of the east coast gas market and is expected to force the big gas exporters to reserve gas supplies for the domestic market. The Victorian government meanwhile has approved a gas import terminal in Geelong, which is expected to come online in 2028. Drilling for new gas should be a last resort.

And the big picture here? That stretch of Victorian coast adjacent to these new gas titles has just seen the big picture over summer.

A few weeks back, the Great Ocean Road experienced flash flooding which tore through campgrounds, wreaking havoc. A couple of weeks later, Victoria broke heat records as a dome of hot air rolled across the state, and bushfires raged around the Otway forests. It’s been a stark reminder that we live in a changing world, with a changing climate. And the reason for that change? At points on the Great Ocean Road you can stare out toward the horizon and see the gas industry at work.

But all is not lost. We’ve been here before and we’ve stopped this kind of development before.

There’s still time to make a formal submission against the plan to hand the gas industry a huge swathe of Southern Ocean. Submissions close on February 6. You can use Surfrider Foundation's simple letter writing tool to have your say here.

And if you’re on the Surf Coast and want to join a show of local solidarity against this plan, Surfrider Australia are holding a community paddle out at Torquay Front Beach on Saturday January 31 at 10am.