A SINGLE national oil and gas regulator is back at the top of the agenda for Australia’s energy industry, as the sector looks to rebuild its dented reputation in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico and Montara oil spills.
A SINGLE national oil and gas regulator is back at the top of the agenda for Australia’s energy industry, as the sector looks to rebuild its dented reputation in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico and Montara oil spills.
While the federal government’s resources tax dominated talk at the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association’s annual conference in Brisbane last week, Resources Minister Martin Ferguson described the fallout from the spills as “the second elephant in the room”.
Mr Ferguson subsequently promised to get cracking with previously stalled plans to establish a single national regulator by July 2012, based on the government’s imminent response to previous safety inquiries and the outcome of the Montara oil spill inquiry. The Montara commission is due to submit its report on June 18.
“I intend to act appropriately and promptly on its recommendations,” Mr Ferguson said. “Collectively, we have let the community down and we must act to ensure the mistakes of the past don’t occur again.”
However, Mr Ferguson ruled out acting on conservationists’ calls for a moratorium on the awarding of new acreage until the government’s response to the Montara Inquiry had been finalised.
Such action would simply shut down the industry and put the nation’s energy security, jobs and the economy at risk for no real benefit, he said.
Flagged in August last year, the proposal for a national regulator followed a Productivity Commission report which found that billions of dollars could be saved by reducing duplication across state and federal jurisdictions and speeding up approvals.
Currently, the federal government’s National Offshore Petroleum Safety Authority is responsible for safety and environmental regulation of the offshore industry, although practical management and monitoring is undertaken by the states.
That has put Canberra at odds with the Western Australian and Northern Territory governments, which view the move as a centralist attack on state rights that would curb their influence over a key industry in their own domain.
The WA and NT governments instead proposed their own plan to eliminate duplication without ceding overall responsibility to Canberra.
After WA Mines and Petroleum Minister Norman Moore vowed WA would continue to enforce its own regulations onshore and in state waters, a planned vote on the proposal by the Ministerial Council on Mineral and Petroleum Resources in February was temporarily deferred, pending Canberra’s response to the Montara inquiry.
Despite some previous division within APPEA’s membership, the association’s chief executive Belinda Robinson said the organisation backed plans for a national regulator as long as the states also retained influence over activities in their own waters.
“No decision has been made yet, but we do see merit in there being a single national regulatory authority that takes adequate account of jurisdictional ministerial interests,’’ she said. “We do think it’s important that all jurisdictional ministers retain some level of authority over their own waters.”
Ms Robinson said she hoped such a compromise would bring WA into the fold and avoid an inefficient and overlapping set of regulatory regimes in the state.
“We would hope that they would put the efficiency of the industry ahead of a states’ rights agenda,” she said.