Clean energy, they reckon. Transition fuel. Essential for our energy security.

Bollocks.

Call it what it actually is: the biggest corporate three-card trick in Australian history. And we keep falling for it like mugs at the Melbourne Cup.

While the rest of the world races toward genuine emissions reduction, Australia’s gas giants are running a protection racket dressed up as climate policy. Santos, Woodside, Origin. The whole rotten crew. They’ve looked at net zero by 2050, nodded thoughtfully like they’re considering a wine list, then quietly opened the chequebook to expand the very projects that make the target impossible.

This isn’t incompetence. It’s strategy.

The Clean Energy Lie

Start with the foundational bulldust: gas as “clean” energy. This fairy tale has been so successfully embedded in Australian politics that even progressive MPs mouth it without wincing. Natural gas. Clean gas. Transition fuel. The language does the heavy lifting while the methane does the damage.

Methane is 80 times more potent than CO2 over 20 years. And it leaks like a Commodore with 300,000 k’s on the clock. Wellheads. Pipelines. Processing facilities. The industry’s own figures, when you can pry them loose, consistently lowball these fugitive emissions. Independent measurements tell a different story.

But why let physics get in the way of a marketing campaign?

Santos has been particularly shameless. While publicly committed to net zero by 2040, they’re simultaneously championing the Barossa gas project off the Northern Territory coast. This isn’t just expanding existing operations. It’s opening entirely new fossil fuel reserves that will pump emissions into the atmosphere for decades. The cognitive dissonance would be impressive if it wasn’t so catastrophic.

Then there’s Narrabri. Santos again. A proposed gas project in the Pilliga forest in New South Wales that would industrialise 95,000 hectares of critically endangered woodland and threatened groundwater to extract coal seam gas. The same company with the net zero commitment. The same company talking about climate leadership.

You’d reckon someone might spot the contradiction. A net zero commitment while opening new fossil fuel reserves. Climate leadership while industrialising endangered woodland.

Nobody blinks. Because apparently we’ve all agreed to pretend corporate doublespeak is just how grownups talk now.

The Carbon Capture Fantasy

When pressed on how expanding fossil fuel production aligns with net zero commitments, the industry reaches for its favourite get-out-of-jail card: carbon capture and storage.

CCS is climate policy’s equivalent of a mate who’s always about to pay you back next week. Always promising. Never quite delivering. But handy enough as an excuse that governments keep believing him.

The theory is elegant. Capture carbon dioxide from industrial processes, pump it underground, problem solved. In practice, it’s enormously expensive, energy intensive, and has a track record of failure that would embarrass a suburban footy team.

The Gorgon project in Western Australia, operated by Chevron, was supposed to be the showcase. Five years behind schedule. Captured a fraction of its target emissions. Cost blowouts that would make a defence procurement look frugal.

But it bought Chevron something priceless: permission to keep extracting gas while claiming climate credentials.

This is the pattern. Promise carbon capture. Get approval for expansion. Underdeliver on capture. Shrug and keep drilling.

It’s the climate equivalent of “the cheque’s in the mail.” Except the planet doesn’t have a collections agency.

Blue hydrogen is the latest iteration of the same con. Take natural gas, reform it to produce hydrogen, capture the carbon released in the process. Except the capture rarely works as advertised, methane leaks throughout the supply chain, and the whole exercise uses more energy than it produces in usable form.

But it sounds futuristic and keeps gas in the energy mix, which is the point.

Government as Accomplice

None of this happens without government blessing. The Morrison government’s gas fired recovery. The Albanese government’s Future Gas Strategy. Different rhetoric, same outcome: public support for an industry that should be in managed decline.

The Future Gas Strategy is particularly galling. Released in May 2024, it explicitly supports gas production through to 2050. Not as a genuine transition measure with strict limits and sunset clauses. As an ongoing pillar of the energy system.

The document reads like it was written by the industry itself. Probably because industry had extensive input while community groups and climate scientists got the polite consultation theatre.

Labor spins this as pragmatic. Being sensible. Recognising energy security needs while transitioning to renewables.

What it actually is: regulatory capture so complete the government’s adopted industry talking points wholesale. They’re not making policy. They’re taking dictation.

Gas is presented as necessary for firming renewable energy. Never mind that battery storage, pumped hydro, and demand management can do the job without the emissions. Never mind that every dollar spent on gas infrastructure is a dollar not spent on genuine solutions.

The 2030 target tells you everything. Australia is aiming for a 43 per cent reduction on 2005 levels. The science says we need 75 per cent to stay within 1.5 degrees of warming.

That gap isn’t a minor difference of opinion. It’s the difference between calling the fire brigade and standing in your burning house arguing about whether smoke alarms are too strident.

The Offset Shell Game

When actual emissions reduction gets too hard, Australian companies reach for offsets. Plant some trees, fund a renewable project overseas, buy some credits from a questionable scheme, call yourself carbon neutral.

Easy.

Offsets aren’t automatically fraudulent. Done properly, with rigorous accounting and genuine additionality, they can play a role. But “done properly” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

The Australian carbon credit market has been repeatedly exposed for delivering phantom abatement. Projects that would have happened anyway. Forests that were never at risk of clearing. Methodologies so generous they make a creative accountant blush.

Companies love offsets because they’re cheaper than actual transformation.

Much cheaper.

You can keep your business model intact, keep extracting fossil fuels, keep emitting, and just buy some paper to make the numbers look better. No messy industrial transformation required. No stranded assets. No difficult conversations with shareholders about why the company’s core business model is incompatible with a liveable planet.

It’s indulgences for the climate era. Pay money, receive absolution, continue sinning.

The Catholic Church at least had the decency to pretend the money went to God. Carbon credits go to consultants in Melbourne who’ll find you a forest that was definitely, totally, cross-our-hearts going to be cleared next Tuesday.

The gas industry has embraced this with particular enthusiasm. Every major company has offset-heavy net zero plans. Every major company is also expanding production. These two facts sit alongside each other in corporate reports with no apparent sense of contradiction.

The Cost of Delay

While we’re arguing about whether gas is clean and whether CCS might work someday and whether offset schemes are legitimate, the physics doesn’t take a smoko break. Every year of delay makes the transition harder. Every new gas project locks in emissions. Every dollar sunk into fossil fuel infrastructure is a dollar we can’t get back.

And while Santos execs are reassuring shareholders about long-term value, actual people are dealing with actual consequences. Communities flooded. Ecosystems collapsing. Young people inheriting a climate more cooked than a snag left on the barbie overnight.

The gas industry knows this. They’ve got the same climate science as everyone else. They’ve just done the sums differently: short-term profit beats long-term habitability. And they’ve convinced government that what’s good for Woodside is good for Australia.

Spoiler: it’s not.

What Net Zero Actually Requires

Real net zero isn’t compatible with expanding fossil fuel production. It’s not compatible with relying on unproven technologies to clean up emissions we could avoid making. It’s not compatible with offset schemes that let polluters pay to continue polluting.

Real net zero requires actually reducing emissions. Rapidly. Starting now.

That means no new coal and gas projects. Period. It means accelerated retirement of existing fossil fuel infrastructure. It means massive investment in renewables, storage, transmission. It means industrial transformation, not industrial protection.

The technology exists. The economic case is increasingly clear. What’s missing is political will to stand up to an industry that has spent decades embedding itself in government, funding both major parties, and convincing Australians that we can’t survive without digging up and burning everything under our feet.

We can. We must. And every glowing corporate net zero plan that comes bundled with new gas projects is evidence that the industry has no intention of leading that transition. They’ll follow, kicking and screaming, only when forced.

Until then, they’ll keep drilling, keep emitting, and keep telling us it’s all part of the plan.

The Bottom Line

The great gas con continues. Santos keeps drilling. Woodside keeps expanding. Origin keeps claiming climate credentials. Government keeps nodding along. And we keep pretending this adds up to a credible climate policy.

It doesn’t. It never did. And every year we waste pretending otherwise is another year of liveable climate we’re not getting back.

But at least the corporate reports look impressive. Very glossy. Lovely charts. Shame about the planet.