The $30 billion Woodside Petroleum development slated for James Price Point in the Kimberley has been allowed to go ahead on the condition it does not affect thousands of fossilised dinosaur footprints nearby – but at least one palaeontologist says damage to the ancient imprints is inevitable.
Western Australia’s Environmental Protection Agency has cautiously approved the gas port, which will be used to process up to 50 million tonnes of liquefied natural gas from the Browse Basin each year.
The EPA has set out 29 recommendations for the development. They include limitations on marine pile-driving and blasting to protect whales and the seabed at the western coast of the Dampier Peninsula, about 60 kilometres north of Broome. The environmental regulator has also proscribed any development within 900 metres of the dinosaur tracks, which are among the largest in the world.
The tracks include the footprints of as many as 15 types of dinosaurs, predominantly sauropods – Brontosaurus-type dinosaurs, including some that have not been recorded elsewhere in Australia. Experts say the intertidal area has preserved the pathways for 130 million years.
Steve Salisbury, a lecturer in vertebrate palaeontology and biomechanics at the University of Queensland, said that with the exception of a few fragments of bone, the tracks constitute the entire fossil record of dinosaurs in the western half of the Australian continent.
“Just in the short time I’ve been working up there in the past year, I’ve noticed that areas that were beach over the last summer have now had that sand stripped away and underneath you’ve got vast big platforms exposed with hundreds of dinosaur tracks on them,” Dr Salisbury said.
“So just because there’s an area now that doesn’t have anything obviously visible on it, it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
“However this gas port is proposed to go ahead, it still means that you’re going to have a massive industrial precinct straddling this coastline. They’ve recommended you can’t go within 900 metres of the tracks, but what we’re potentially looking at is having the port precinct right alongside a globally significant track-site area.”
Dr Salisbury compared the development to building alongside Uluru. “It’s like saying, ‘Well we’re not going to build on Uluru, we’re just going to do it next to it. That’ll be okay.’ Most people would see that’s not the point.
“I can’t see how they can build something at that scale right next to these delicate intertidal rock platforms and not have an impact. It clearly will.”
The EPA chairman, Paul Vogel, was the only board member to assess the project after four other members were ruled out because of conflicts of interest.
“Creating any industrial undertaking, particularly one of this magnitude, will have an environmental impact, however these impacts and risks can be managed to an acceptable level,” Dr Vogel said.
The Woodside chief executive, Peter Coleman, said he was confident the company could manage the social and environmental impacts of the development.
Steve Hindle
logged in via email @bigpond.com
It is a bit much to expect a major project to be cancelled because it is too close (900 metres away) to a section of dinosaur tracks that follow the coast for 80km (The 80km length should not have been omitted from your comments, especially as you use a very much shorter Uluru as an example)
As for the comment "So just because there’s an area now that doesn’t have anything obviously visible on it, it doesn’t mean it’s not there", what chance does that give any project?
This seems like an uncompromising ideological argument that does not fit in a world where realistic decisions have to be made. (The author does not say the project should be cancelled, however that seems to be the only way to interpret the comments).
Dale Bloom
Analyst
“The EPA chairman, Paul Vogel, was the only board member to assess the project after four other members were ruled out because of conflicts of interest.”
Disregarding the dinosaur tracks for one moment, I think the EPA should have been suspended and put on hold if there was only one person on the board.
"The Woodside chief executive, Peter Coleman, said he was confident the company could manage the social and environmental impacts of the development."
And what happens if they don't manage the social and environmental impacts of the development?
John Newlands
tree changer
I think this could backfire on the environmental movement if they become too strident. The WA coastline has nothing like the land and water use conflicts of other parts of the world. Ironically it is fossil carbon that creates the mobility that enables people to see these tracks even as sea level rise covers them over. Through depletion we must keep exploiting fossil carbon to maintain this mobility. Gas enables the intermittent wind and solar beloved of the green movement to meet demand. I suspect the whales will come back after the disturbance has settled as we see in Sydney Harbour.
Bernie Masters
environmental consultant at FIA Technology Pty Ltd, B K Masters and Associates
WA is such a small and incestuous place that it would be hard to find five experts potentially suitable for membership of the EPA board who don't have some relationship to Woodside. So the issue should not be not be the technical question of whether 4 of the 5 members of the board had a conflict of interest or not but whether that interest was likely to adversely influence their decision on the proposal. Two of the board members held shares in Woodside through their super fund. They were right to…
Read moreMichael Hay
retired
We cannot stand still and yet progress. Even a slow progression will have some effect upon somebody or something somewhere. If a couple of hundred metres of footprints are destroyed in maintain the nation's lifestyle, are there not enough left - without including the ones not yet discovered. We must reduce our argumentative natures to a point where decisions are actually made and adhered to. There will have to be compromise, as there has been for hundreds of thousands of years before our time. How is it that we should be different ? So: destroy some footprints, build the port, tax the gas and face the next problem.