The Karratha Gas Plant sits on the Burrup Peninsula, a short drive from Dampier in the remote north-west of Western Australia. From a visitors centre perched on a hill above it, you get a spectacular view of the giant facility: stretching over two square kilometres, it is bound by the blue waters of Withnell Bay and the red rock hills of the Murujuga National Park. The first time she took in this vista, author and journalist Marian Wilkinson was stunned. ‘No image’, she writes, ‘quite captures its breathtaking size and scale.’

The gas plant is the centrepiece of the North West Shelf Project and represents Australia’s first liquefied natural gas (LNG) export plant. Here, Woodside Energy burns gas to power five LNG ‘trains’, or large processing units. Those units transform gas into liquid so it can be shipped to Asia. The operating licence for the Karratha plant was due to expire in 2030. Not long after the 2025 federal election, Labor’s new environment minister, Murray Watt, announced he would approve Woodside Energy’s application to keep it running for a further forty years.