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I'm Nicole Johnston and you're listening to 7am. A battle's brewing in Western Australia's unique Kimberley region beneath its red dirt is a vast reservoir of onshore gas. Now an oil tycoon from Texas wants to get it out. The Kimberley is at the centre of a controversial proposal called Project Valhalla to drill fracking wells across it. The communities divided, somewhat the royalties, others want to protect the regions by a diversity and cultural significance. Today journalist Catherine Wilson on the fight over fracking in the Kimberley and the company trying to push it through. It's Monday, April 6. Cath could you start off by taking us to the Kimberley, tell us about the place and why this idea of fracking is so confronting for so many people there? Yes, so the Kimberley region is renowned as the largest and most intact tropical savannah in the world. This is an area three times the size of England and almost half its residents are first nations. And this is important because there's an incredible intact culture with many traditional owner groups and their cultural practices have been intact for millennia. And the Kimberley catchment includes the Matawara Fitzroy River. One traditional owner I spoke with describes the river as a life vein where generations hunt and fish and she told me it's how our ancestors live back in the day. We still do that today. Another traditional custodian Albert Wigan described the region as a garden of Eden. It's quite simple, there's nowhere else like it, on the planet. Literally, there is no place like the Kimberley's on the planet. And he described the song lines here as a kind of mapping flowing with the Fitzroy River and its tributaries and also its water holes and underground aquifers. As indigenous people in the Kimberley's, we've always revered water as being the source of creation. There's no other place like it on the planet with not a single extinct local species. And can you explain for us exactly what fracking is in really simple terms? What does it involve? So fracking involves rings that drill down between two and five kilometres into the rock and then forces megaletres of water and sand and chemicals under high pressure into the rock layers to fracture them. So this allows many gases to be collected and it also involves millions of litres of contaminated waste water to be managed on the land and in this case, near important tributaries of the Fitzroy River system. So what's been proposed is an exploration project of initially 20 wells, possibly with a view of up to 40,000 wells in future. But these initial 20 wells are called Project Valhalla. And Project Valhalla covers an area roughly the size of Tasmania and it covers the Fitzroy River catchment in the Canning Basin, which apparently has one of the world's last undeveloped large-scale reservoirs of onshore gas. And it'll also involve other infrastructure, you know, in kind of pristine country like roads, processing plants, a pipeline and wastewater treatment and so on. Now, Kath fracking's been banned in Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia. And it used to be banned in WA as well. So why was that overturned? Yeah, fracking was banned in Western Australia after a station quarry in 2017 found that economic benefits were slight and it found the environmental risks were beyond regulatory scope. But that ban was lifted in 2019. The WA government decided to lift a moratorium on fracking after an independent scientific inquiry declared the practice safe. The Western Australian government has said that it only opened up about 2% of the state to fracking. But fracking free advocates say this is disingenuous because most of the state can't be fracked anyway. And the Project Valhalla itself covers roughly 2% of the state. Kath, what's been the reaction from people in the Kimberley about this? What are you hearing? The resistance to fracking is very widespread and it seems to cross all ideological lines. And there are various surveys of residents' attitudes to fracking. And they showed that an overwhelming majority of Western Australians oppose it. And the bodies opposing it include environs Kimberley, whose director explained to me how residents have been defending the Kimberley from mining since colonisation, several indigenous land councils and farmer alliances like Lock the Gate. And from the First Nation groups voices for Kimberley, one traditional loaner Albert Wigan told me that there's anxiety and mistrust and genuine fear. In Western Australia, there's such a mining-orientated state. And it has such a significant input into our national economy. And so it has a lot of influence and power, so to speak, industry in particular. When it comes to what the future of Western Australia is going to look like. And for indigenous people, I don't think our aspirations are necessarily on the cards as well. But still Project Valhalla has secured land agreements with a couple of indigenous communities. And this influenced the EPA decision. Other Aboriginal communities in the lease area oppose Project Valhalla, especially downstream communities who say they haven't been consulted. And Albert Wigan told me about the impacts to downstream communities beyond health and environmental risks, he said. Songlines would be disrupted. And so would access for some of the traditional owners. He calls Project Valhalla the end of my people. Really, he kind of defines the end of my people. And they're ongoing connection, they're ongoing relationship with this incredible environment. And that's why. So as you can imagine, Nicole, this has caused a split among First Nation groups and also within families. Albert says some traditional owners are vulnerable to being exploited by promises of fracking royalties because they need the financial support that the company is offering them in return for agreement. Coming up, the Texan oil man with the Kimberley in his sights. Cath, could you tell us about the company that is actually behind this project, Black Mountain? Yes, so Black Mountain is the company behind Project Valhalla. It's founded and chaired by Ritt Bennett, who is a Texan oil man in his mid-40s, who comes from a Kentucky coal family. Originally from Kentucky grew up in coal countries, so different part of kind of fast fuels. But my family had continuous coal mining operations since 1912. So when the state lifted its fracking ban, he bought an exploration permit over the canning basin. We could stand up 20 rigs and drill a boatload of oil and gas wells within six months and really gross meaningful production. And that responsiveness just doesn't exist in mining. This seemed like a brave move because so far, the Kimberley community has fended off our co-oper, origin, Mitsubishi. But Ritt Bennett is persistent and Black Mountain has now spent around 40 million on Project Valhalla. Much of it fighting through regulatory obstacles. For example, it managed to get an exemption to laws for bidding export of inland gas. It repeatedly deferred its requirement to conduct seismic surveys. The company claimed Project Valhalla would run with net zero carbon emissions. But in 2023, Asick find it for greenwashing and said its sustainability claims had no credible basis. The Australian Securities and Investment Commission yesterday announced that it issued three infringement notices to Black Mountain Energy for greenwashing. The fine to late-to-ASX announcement, including one, which claimed greenhouse gas emissions associated with its Valhalla project, their fits were crossing, when at zero. And then the Federal Government's independent expert scientific committee also found the company's claim that downstream water resources wouldn't be impacted, weren't substantiated. And it also found the company had not proved that vulnerable species weren't at risk. These include fish lizards and mammals that have huge significance. to indigenous residents. And there's also rep benefits, eyebrow-raising past comments that suggest a climate-skipped mindset. Yeah, I guess there would have been volcanoes, etc. Just the natural cyclicality of the earth, which I sometimes think were presumptuous and things like humans are driving kind of every kind of climate event that occurs. But after all these setbacks and regulatory roadblocks, the West Australian EPA found the risks from Project Valhalla were insignificant and recommended it for ministerial approval with conditions that the company is happy with. So this suggests to some people that the company has friends in government. The project, it's now at this stage where it needs approval from both the Federal and the WA Environment ministers, do you think that's looking likely? It's hard to tell. There have been an unprecedented number of objections to the EPA's decision in the Kimberley community. Now that community consists of only around 40,000 people, but there were more than 8,000 formal objections appealing to the EPA. Many of these objections came from outside the stage and groups like Environ's Kimberley are saying that their campaign really needs nationwide mobilisation. Everyone understands how special the Kimberley is and is completely unacceptable to have industrialisation through oil and gas fracking. I spoke with Environ's Kimberley director, Martin Pritchard, who told me that people are absolutely aghast and that they see the Kimberley as a sacred cultural and environmental landscape and they can't understand how the EPA made this recommendation. Today we've had the outrageous news that the West Australian EPA has recommended that fracking could go ahead in the Kimberley. This is the worst decision the EPA has made in years in Western Australia. What is it that Black Mountain is promising to the local community in return for this access? So among other things, Black Mountain is promising a couple of traditional loaner groups, possible royalties, football team sponsorship, laptops, community funding, including science classes. Among people objecting, there's a strong belief that the bulk of financial benefits, though, would go offshore, especially as gas exports aren't being taxed in Australia. There aren't easily access details of Black Mountain employment and financial projections, but of course there would be some employment involved in fracking and building infrastructure. And locals do argue that this would be more than offset by damage to the tourism industry, which trades on the region being a pristine state. So it's big tricky and of course the damage to indigenous culture can't be quantified in financial terms. And Kath, do you think that the community at the end of the day can actually win the fight here? Or are the odds really stacked against them in terms of being able to defeat an oil company and possibly even the state government on this? We'll have to wait for the appeals process to complete sometime this year to see if the state's environment, Minister Matyswimburden will accept the EPA recommendation. But the interesting thing about this fight is that the majority of the Labour government, the state Labour government itself, seems to oppose fracking. The Western Australian Labour Party conference was held in November last year, and its members voted to ban fracking, so that's really confusing. And for those fighting, the next step might involve electoral pressure with Labour having already seen damage in seats where fracking has become an issue. Martin Pritchard from Environ's Kimberly told me the safe labour seat of free mantle was nearly lost last election to an independent who took up the Kimberly fracking cause. And he also warned that the Labour Party suffered the near loss of its prize Kimberly seat in 2013 to the Greens. And this was amid the fight against Woodside's proposed gas refinery. So based on past victories, it would seem a no-win scenario for Black Mountain, especially as the company had to do list from the Australian stock exchange after failing to attract investment capital. The fracking issue and mining issues generally in Western Australia have generated the most extraordinary galvanisation and mobilisation across the country. Most of those objections to the EPA didn't come from the Kimberly itself, it came from outside, West Australia and Australia wide. So I think this is really quite an extraordinary story of grassroots mobilisation against big companies, a succession of big companies who have a lot of cloud in government and yet, you know, still this is an extraordinary story of people power that has seen this whole region kept in its pristine state. Cath, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Nicole. We'll be back tomorrow with an episode on the first e-safety report on the government's teen social media ban, with kids getting around it and reporting the same level of online abuse, the early results and not looking good. I think it's a red flashing light for the policy. It confirmed how much circumvention there is of the ban. About 70% of them said they still had them after the ban, that is very, very widespread. They said their number of reports about cyber-boying and image-based abuse on those platforms that have been banned from teens in the age group that were meant to be banned had not changed. So is it a failure? Or is the government right to ask for more patience? I'm Nicole Johnston and this is 7am. Thanks for listening.