Australia Is About to Become the Most Important Energy Suppliers on Earth

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Welcome to Energy 101.

Today we have two Aussies in the house again.

I've been having a lot of Aussies on, just the FYI.

But you know, that was about offshore.

And the other one was a brew owner here in Houston.

But we got guys from the real place in Australia.

That is the Northern Territory.

It's Darwin, a hidden gem as I first note in my documentary I did that I love to bring up.

But we have Aiden and Jason all the way from Darwin.

And we're just going to get into what is going on over there.

If you haven't heard, there's a little thing called the beetleoo basin.

And it is going to be something you hear more and more, hopefully, as years come by.

So, what the hell?

What's going on? It's been two years.

It's been a while since you've been out.

Yeah.

But I think the basin is probably getting to a really exciting point.

We've seen government come in and buy the first molecules of gas out of the basin.

And so those contracts have been done.

And they're the deals we put together for government to help really unlock the basin.

And that's put a lot of excitement into there.

We expect both the exploration companies in the basin to hit first production in the middle of this year.

I think it will probably be a bit of a race between the two.

And who gets that first foot across the line and a really start to crack the basin open.

So I think really once we get that first gas and the first molecules into that pipeline and sold locally into the NT,

everyone will start to see what the decline curves look like in the basin.

Start to get EURs on those wells.

Really understand what the commercials look like.

And then everyone can run their numbers after 12 months and we're off to the races.

Yeah.

So I mean, how does a basin just now unlock in 2026 or however long this has been going on for?

We've been drilling a permeant for over a century.

And you see some moves up in the northeast of the U.S. right now with the shell revolution.

So I'm going to assume it has something to do with that.

Yeah, I'd say so.

They've known about the Betaloo for a while now, at least a couple of decades from Aubrey McClendon

and Hess was out there for a while, moved into a couple of Australian companies

with most of the acreage there, origin energy, Pangai resources and a few others.

And there's been sort of this slow building of momentum,

but I would call the momentum almost exponential.

It kind of grows zero on year.

And we're at this really critical juncture right now where we've had the first 3,000 meter lateral drilled,

flow tested for a first couple.

There's been another few drilled.

Pracking is going to happen on those in the next couple of months.

And the results have just been astounding.

You know, Marcellus, top tier Marcellus type, type performances,

but which both operators out there, you're wearing one of their lovely hats,

Betaloo Energy, Australia Formula Empire Energy and Tambor and resources.

Even one of the Australian mid mages and Santos is really interested in doing some exploration drilling out there now.

There's been a lot of money and movement announced for their programs.

So I think a catalyst of different elements, you know,

the squeeze for natural gas in Asia and New Basins opening up

and who's going to supply the Asian markets all away from just the continual rapid advances

of the share industry here in North America.

I think probably the other thing too that's been a real catalyst is,

a lot of the work we did in the Northern Territory was around getting the approvals

and the regulatory environment right.

And so you would have known when you were out there, they had a whole inquiry around,

how can we do this safely?

I think one of the big differences in Australia compared to the US

is you've been doing shale for decades and decades.

And we just don't have that learning in Australia.

And so when we first started looking at the basin and starting to understand

what was potentially there, government really had to kind of work out,

how do we get this out of the ground safely?

And be able to communicate that to the community,

so that they had confidence in what was going on out there.

Obviously, there's lots of conventional plays in Australia,

but this is the first kind of shale development.

And so they spent a couple of years really working out,

was the science, say, all those sorts of things?

That put in place a really strong regulatory environment

that everyone can get in behind.

And if we meet those markers and do what needs to be done,

then we can extract the gas safely and really pick up on the lessons

that have been learned in the US over the last many decades

and the mistakes that have been made, let's not make those again

and really give the community confidence that we can do this safely

and really look after the long-term environment

for the people in the territory.

When you talk about safety and stuff,

are people concerned about fracking specifically

or just the land in general?

I mean, people understand like Australians

are very conservative with their land

and even though it's a whole wasteland there in the middle,

we want to protect it at the same time, right?

What exactly is the culture around that?

It's Australian, we love our environment

and our natural environment and nature

and we do everything we can to protect that.

But at the same time, our entire economy

runs on resources, on mineral resources and gas resources

and that's getting becoming more and more ingrained.

It's interesting, the Beelou in Central Australia,

it's one of those unique things

where it's really rugged, rough country to some people

but absolutely beautiful to those T.O.s

and the people that live there and in the Northern Territory.

We just really enjoy the unique sort of different biotypes

to get around there and a lot of it was,

we just want to make sure this is done right.

You know, there's the probably incorrect stereotypes

of how drilling happens, you know,

the all roughnecks out there throwing chains around pipe

and there's oil flowing everywhere

and it's not like that.

You know, these are for the rigs that are out there now,

it's really safe.

And the people who worked those rigs and all that equipment

they care about the environment just as much as anyone else does.

And so getting government to demonstrate that

or government, you know, being able to demonstrate that

to the public was a key part of the inquiry

that happened in the Basin.

I think one of the other things too is like in Queensland

they've got a colceum gas,

coal bed methane is what you call it here.

And so when that first kind of kicked off in Queensland,

there were lots of primary producers

who were able to light up their rivers

and their dams and those kinds of things

because they didn't have in place

all the right kind of protections

and those sorts of things for the environment,

that's gotten so much better now anyway

because they've learnt the lessons and worked out

what do we need to do to be able to get it out of the ground kind of safely.

And so I think that kind of put a lot of,

you know, that's not great for pastless

and other people that are also using the land.

And I think this is probably the key bit

is it's helping people understand

this isn't an eitheror.

You can have multiple industries working together

and working in the same bit of land

for the most amount of value

that ultimately gets fed back into the community

through jobs, through employment,

through business opportunities,

all those kinds of things.

And we can manage that dynamic together.

I think the other thing too

is Australia has been built on the primary industry.

You know, in the early days

our whole economy was off the sheep's back

is how we used to talk about it,

which was big large sheep farms

and all those sorts of things.

And so there's probably been this real build out culturally

around how we make our money is off the land.

And then probably over the last kind of,

you know, 50, 60 years,

it's really been then around resources

and getting, you know, rocks out of the ground

and exporting those into places that need it.

And then perhaps more in the last couple of decades,

it's really been about gas extraction,

LNG export and those sorts of things.

And probably what isn't well known is,

like we're the third largest LNG exporter in the world

in Australia.

And so our real market

and our real piece of the market

that we fulfill is that,

that Asian LNG demand

and making sure that they have certainly

their supply for their energy needs.

Yeah, I want to get into the product

and, you know, the use of all this energy that you'll have, right?

First off, there's a couple of old cab words

we've got to cover.

We've got to cover.

You know, we said,

T.O., which is short for traditional owners,

which is the more common term

to refer to indigenous folks

up in the Northern Territory

for some certain reason.

We can get into that later.

And you'll set pastoralist,

which is ranchers,

that's going to end right now.

Ranch farmowners, landowners.

We can do a glossary of 10s.

Yeah, I was just talking about this a couple of years ago.

The translation.

Yeah.

Just a little translation there.

So let's get into what's going on with this energy.

So there's a few understandings

that I feel like is general to me,

which is, you know,

first of all, you have all the offshore

in West Australia,

off, you know, off Perth and stuff.

You got a big history of known for mining minerals,

you know,

point at the element table

and, you know, you all are mining it over there, right?

And now,

but I'm not really sure like what they're doing

for land drilling and stuff like that.

But it sounds like you'll have plenty of resources,

plenty of room,

and the jobs are abundant and everything.

But then there's also some kind of motif

and headlines coming to the energy security in Australia

for everyone who lives on the East Coast

and that it's expensive.

Like how is it expensive?

And an issue that sometimes when, you know,

people are living in like what seems like a paradise.

Like what is exactly the truth

and what's happening over there?

Yeah.

And this is the really tricky question because some of it

comes down to where your belief system is

on the political spectrum.

Some of it comes down to, you know,

what your views are on if you work in the resources sector.

But ultimately it comes down to policy and commerce, right?

There are plenty of resources there.

There's changes in policy that happens

with different governments as they come in

about what they're going to regulate,

what aren't they're going to regulate,

where they're going to invest in supporting industry

and where they aren't.

And there's always been enough gas coming out of the ground.

But for a long time, there was gas coming out of the basin

called Ottway, which is sort of south of Victoria

and the Bass straight.

And those fields were,

Exxon was one of the largest players in those fields

and they're rapidly depleting.

And that's all of a sudden put a lot of constraints

on the energy, on the energy market on the East Coast.

And everyone's then turned to Queensland

where the big coal seam gas we call it CSG production is.

And there's three LNG facilities in a place called Guadston

that I think there's six trains in total

with three different players there.

And they'd built out a lot of LNG capacity

where they were just exporting that gas

because they didn't need to put that back into,

a lot of that back into the domestic market.

And there's a few other basins around the movement

which is a Santos project in the Cooper Basin

had been supplying sort of everything on a steady state.

And there was a lot of money and policy put toward renewables,

so solar and wind.

And from the physics side of it,

let's take any sort of sentimentality around the environment

when the sun isn't shining or when there's clouds

and when the wind isn't blowing, renewables don't work.

And then you have to look to batteries.

And batteries are extremely expensive to be able to firm up

to the level of electricity reliability

that we as a society are after.

And so I think one of the challenges

when you have a changing government at a federal level

is a lot of the, some of the politicians

and the policy providers and the staffers

haven't necessarily lived the journey of energy policy

in power, in government,

and they can take a little bit of time to lead up to that.

And so I think people call it a policy failure.

I don't. I think it's just been a direction

which has generally been coming from a good place around

we need to go ahead long into renewables,

forget fossil fuels, that's the future

and then the reality of physics and commerce caught up

and now we're in this really tricky spot.

I think probably it's fair to say it's a conflation of issues.

You have a jurisdiction that's using a lot of the gas.

The use to a field that is reaching its end of life.

And that starts to reach end of life

with a lack of development

because we've got this plan for transition.

Right when Ukraine gets invaded

and gas prices go through the roof around the world.

And so everyone suddenly has this pressure on them around.

Hang on a second.

Where are we getting this energy from?

And they haven't invested in the exploration side.

And so they go, oh well, we're exporting all this gas.

This is crazy.

And it's just the outcome of a successive number

of independent decisions that have all conflated

into the same issue.

I think the really cool thing though in the NT is

we've got this abundant amount of gas.

It's way more than we can possibly use locally.

Our local production, our local kind of energy requirements

are sort of 60, 70 scuffs a day.

That's it because we're such a small population.

And so then it's really we are an export jurisdiction.

We need to feed into those LNG markets to make this work.

We can easily support Australia's demand needs

if that's what they need and build a pipeline over over the years.

But fundamentally, when you get into the mechanics of it all

and understand what's actually going on below,

you know, below just that noisy headline type issue,

you start to see the fundamental structures

are really there to make this place work.

Right. So what's the current temperature check going on in Australia

as a nation?

Like is the energy security thing in the headlines

or everyone is chilling right now?

Energy security is definitely in the headlines

and it's front and center for them.

In the NTE, we've had both sides of politics supporting

development of gas in the in the Bidalu

and so the kind of political thought

of should the Bidalu happen or not, you know,

is perhaps doesn't carry those same kind of challenges

at might on the East Coast.

But the Australian government is going to have to come up

with a with a solution about what that looks like.

Ultimately, it means more supply.

If you make rules around constraining existing production

and those existing contracts that are sending gas to Japan

and Korea and those sorts of things,

then you're going to have Japan and Korea

and diplomats knocking on the door, you know,

of the Commonwealth government and saying,

hey, hang on a second.

We've invested, we've brought all this gas,

we've got contracts in place.

What are you doing, superseding those

and outlawing them effectively to force demand in domestically?

Really what you need to do is bring on more supply

and you're right at the prime point of when Bidalu starts to come online

to be able to support that new supply that's needed.

And so that kind of becomes the natural solution.

As the editor, I'll pull up the map

and it'll be a graphic straight from the documentary

because I have top 16 cities with Darwin being the 16th.

And it's all up there on the top

and then you get most of everyone on the Southeast.

And when all this gas starts coming, you know,

what's the decision?

Do we finish the infrastructure to connect?

Darwin, all the way up here to all these cities

that are like, you know, 20, 30 million people, right?

Or does the NT start selling up north to what is like

three billion people in like a circle, right?

Like you have the global south, you have Asia,

all of South Asia, like they are ready to take it.

And as already, LNG, ports built in Darwin,

like y'all are a city of a state of a quarter million less people

and y'all are about to be like a super power of energy.

So realistically, what is going to happen in the next 10 years?

Is y'all going to work together with the rest of the country?

But there's enough of both, right?

That's the key. There's enough of both.

But the East Coast's problem

and is kind of their problem.

We're ready. We're there.

As a jurisdiction, we can help them. We can support them.

But it doesn't necessarily behoove us

to build a pipeline to a jurisdiction that...

Might not want the guests over the long term.

Might not want the guests over the long term.

Or you have different political kind of persuasions

based on the three states, if you say Queensland,

New South Wales and Victoria.

And Queensland in and of itself is generally okay

because it has the colcine gas there.

But I guess the answer is we'd love to help out fellow Australians.

And that's just from our view.

And I speak for most of the people in the Northern Territory.

But there has to be a little bit of coordination and collaboration

to be able to get that gas going there.

And we see companies in Australia,

midstreamers who are putting proposals together to say

we can get gas in a market, we just need some help.

And that would be the logical step.

So you've got APA that already in early stage planning

for building a large pipeline into that East Coast market.

That supports their pipeline network

into the rest of the East Coast of Australia.

I think it also provides an opportunity

to backfill the LNG facilities in Queensland.

And so I think if the commercials of that kind of transaction

can be worked through and landed great,

it'd be fantastic if that doesn't need any sort of government support

to make that project happen.

And they can make it work commercially.

And then in the Northern Territory,

it's absolutely sending gas north into the existing LNG facilities

and then probably building out additional LNG facilities

in Darwin to export into Southeast Asia.

In the Northern Territory, that's the market we can control.

We can control what's going on in the Northern Territory

and exporting gas into Southeast Asia.

And so I think what we're trying to convey is

that's the pathway to market that we're sold,

like 100% focused on.

And I think we're more than happy to support the rest of Australia.

They have to help solve the problems that they have

in terms of getting gas into the rest of Australia.

If they want to do it and they're ready to do it, great.

We're here to help.

But I can't solve your problem for you.

You need to be able to solve your own problem.

And then I can solve the supply issue.

Yeah.

It sounds simple enough.

It's right there.

It's the classic you can lead a horse to water, right?

And we're very much,

we're very much as a jurisdiction want to help them.

And APA is a great company.

They're taking a big step out there to really try and help provide solutions.

The other midstreamers that are in Australia

and, you know, Gemini AGIG, they all want to do this.

They see it as really important for energy security.

And they all want to play their part.

And that's probably an interesting thing is the midstreamers

have all got their own plans about how to get gas into the East Coast of Australia

and have got solutions for that.

And then it's just working out the right commercials

of which ones make sense.

And I think if they can get one that makes sense,

where they can get off takers and all those sorts of things

at the other end of the pipeline to underwrite that investment,

then we're good to go.

It's certainly not a shortage of midstream players

that are wanting to be able to send gas into the East Coast.

There's more a question of making sure the buyers on the East Coast

are in a position to enter in the contracts that help underwrite that.

It was a tricky thing as well during COVID.

I'm not sure if they had it here where, you know, energy prices,

gas prices plummeted.

And then, you know, some of the consumers wanted to try and play the market

and try and play the spot game market.

And unless you're an internationally sophisticated gas trader,

playing the spot market for gas can be really, really troublesome.

And so a few businesses and industries found themselves

in a really difficult spot when Russia invaded Ukraine

and they were all of a sudden very short.

And those contracts didn't exist.

That underpinned additional, you know, additional drill out

and underpinned additional pipeline infrastructure.

And so there's a little bit of catching up to be done in that regard as well, I think.

I should just say just because we mentioned that the C word.

I think there's also a misconception that, you know,

during that period, Australia was kind of locked down.

And in the NT, it wasn't.

In the NT, we never missed an LNG cargo at all during that period.

The town kept running, the state kept running,

it kept delivering on all those energy requirements.

Very different to kind of the rest of, you know, some parts of Australia

that were significantly constrained in what they couldn't, couldn't do.

And so I think there's a, I guess this is probably the, the key bit of,

of understanding of being out here in the, in the US and,

and really starting to talk to players around,

they're understanding the beta law and those sorts of things.

There's, there's a lot of misconceptions and, and helping people kind of decode

how you actually operate in Australia.

There's a very clear kind of pathway in all that.

It's just a different kind of language than maybe what people are used to.

And that's kind of the function that we see ourselves being able to help people with

is how to do that translation and how to understand what's actually going on

and what's real, what's just, you know, made up and, and, and what's noise

and be able to do that translation so they can make investments into the beta law with confidence.

Yeah.

I like to call it what's ahead line and what's a hard fact, you know,

and then there is a difference between the two.

And, and when you're on the other side of the, you know, the big pond,

it can become a little bit tricky for, you know, American businesses,

investors to have us provide us to see what's, you know, what's the real and what's what's the noise.

Let's take a step back.

Y'all actually worked for the NT government, which means y'all are probably

in our, in the office when the moratorium was created and taken away, right?

So, I mean, this is something a bit like I feel like is a big deal that isn't really brought up.

But, you can compare to here, like in New York, we have the state of New York has banned fracking.

It's under moratorium and the Northern Territory did the same thing, and, but it was lifted.

And I've done research and like that, it like this technically has not happened before.

So why don't you give us a little background of working in the parliament, whatever y'all call it over there.

Beautiful, beautiful venue.

The building, yeah.

We didn't get to work over there.

We were bureaucrats.

We were in politicians.

The politicians get the nice building.

Although our offices were pretty good, I can't, I can't.

Yeah.

Give you a whole recap of what that was like and what's going on up to all today.

So, in 2016, we had a change in government in the Northern Territory.

The Labor Party came in and the Labor is, it's a bit of a unique thing

to some of the Commonwealth countries around the world, whereby it's established as the sort of union movement,

the political arm of the union movement.

And you have a bit of a swath of political persuasions within that.

You have some people who are left and you have some people who are right,

but ultimately they generally sit left of center as a party.

They were, they saw the momentum that was happening for the beat of Lou for fracking

and what they implemented was a moratorium to understand it better.

And I think that's the really important part to give them their cutos.

It was never a backdoor way of implementing a ban.

It was, no, we just need to take our time to understand if this can be done safely

and economically, viably.

And so, let me interrupt you and say that I love that that happened like that

because that's exactly what should be happening now with the data centers here.

Everyone's panicking and these towns one by one are proving or disapproving.

Hundreds and maybe even thousands of people are just showing up and chaos is happening

with these protests and stuff and it's like exhausting.

It's like, yeah, like everyone's confused, they want answers.

They're going to keep coming out and making a buzz, trying to cancel it, slowing everything down.

When you have your government, you have the ability to just stop, slow things down.

Say, hey, let's put a ban on this for six months a year.

You know, all this huge stuff takes time and it should.

Let's take a look at it, get the research, have people come in and state their facts

and then we'll make a decision.

And I guess everyone in America just loves to deal with chaos

because we do not handle things like that.

It's the ultimate, you take a step back or stand still to actually take a couple of steps forward.

And that's what happened through the moratorium.

Independent retired judge came in to oversee all the scientific,

the hydraulic fracturing inquiry is called as the scientific inquiry.

They had information and evidence presented from both sides, from independent scientists,

from the CSIRO, which is the Commonwealth Science Agency for Australia.

And came up with a series of recommendations that said, this can be done and it can be done safely.

And the risks can be managed if you follow these recommendations.

136 recommendations, two of them got split up and I think it ended up at 138,

all of which we implemented and the industry was allowed to proceed again by a left-leaning government

because they recognized that they followed the science, they trusted the science,

and they looked at the regulations and said, yes, we can do this safely.

And there's components of that that really were, we don't have enough research yet in this area.

And so we need to do some more research in that space.

One of the things that kind of came out of that was, let's do some baseline environmental assessment

in terms of what's going on in the area.

Then you can actually measure, okay, well, how's this impacting further down the line?

You've actually got a baseline then to go, hang on a second.

I think we need to tweak what we're doing and improve what we're doing.

And I think this is a really important thing is, U.S. Shale has evolved over, you know, 70 years.

Australia is at this starting point in the Northern territory

about this real sort of toddler, you know, newborn kind of stage.

And it's, how do you take these lessons from all the people that have done this before?

Pick those up and then help continue to kind of carry those forward.

And we'll get to learn, you know, over the coming decades,

the beetle will be the same in many aspects of Shale Basins in North America.

And I'll have its own differences as well in terms of, you know, how it works and how it operates

and the differences that we'll start to show up.

And we'll start to learn as to, you know, what's the best way to extract the most dramatic gas out of the world

and get those into the markets that need it.

I think, on the data center piece, a lot of the work that was done in that Shrieber,

which is what it was called strategic regional environmental baseline assessment.

In government, we love it.

We love acronyms. We love it.

And even on the outside, we still love it.

We can't escape it.

That's provided this architecture for a whole bunch of other industries, including data centers.

You know, so we know how much water is in the basin.

We know what the environmental baselines look like.

We understand, you know, air modeling and all of that.

So again, it was very much what was seen as a frustrating standstill

is actually going to propel us as a jurisdiction

and as an industry much quicker than what you would see in other areas.

It's that go, go slow in order to go fast, slow down, learn how to walk,

get the walking down, and then you can run and sprint in all those sort of things

that are going to flow from that.

That's exactly where we're at.

So when the moratorium got lifted, were you all still on the office?

Sure were.

So when the moratorium got lifted and then the recommend,

everyone was focused on implementing those 136 recommendations.

When they all were implemented, that's when we were starting to tie in the buying the first gas molecules

and the contracts that were then being put in place to really unlock the base.

And to be honest, having those contracts in place, having the first molecules

coming locally has been a really great positioning for the basin.

Everyone then will get certainty on what the client curves are on the wells,

be able to float as those governments are really good counterparty

in order to manage the risk that comes along with that.

I think it would have been much more difficult for the exploration companies

to be able to sell that gas into perhaps more regular markets.

And so I think that really sets the basin up to be in a really good position

over these next kind of 12 by 10 months.

An absolute cutos to the current government

because what had happened in 2024,

there was a change in government in the Northern Territory.

I don't recall who was Chief Minister,

or which party was in power when you were visiting.

Alistair?

So Alistair is the chair of the gas task force, probably, when you were visiting.

He's now the CEO of Department of Mining and Energy,

which is kind of industry development for the mining resources energy sector

and the regulator sits within that department.

So Alistair's a mainstay in one of the best public servants that exists

in the Northern Territory without question.

From the actual politician perspective,

I think it was great to see the Labor government, the left-leaning government,

start to work to put these deals into place

and to approve these deals and to purchase the gas and for the CLP government.

That's in power now, which is sort of the conservative right-wing government

to come in and not play politics and say,

this is what's needed.

These contracts are going to underpin industry development.

And they're really big about sort of economic certainty and growth,

and they've just lent into industry development.

So kind of cutos to them as well to come in and not play any of the politics

and just get on with it.

So the more triumphs lifted and it's like,

hey, we took a break, we proved it, you know, back to action.

And now we got all these companies coming in and, you know,

like you said, molecules are out of the ground ready to go.

What is the public still doing?

You know, obviously people are still against it.

How do you deal with the, it's like, hey, we played your game,

we took a look and now we're going to produce,

we're going to make money, we're going to help this state grow,

this city grow, like how do you, how do you deal with these people

who are almost contradicting how just energy security works?

I think, I think at the moment that there's still a really small pocket

of people who wouldn't matter what you said.

The sky's blue and they're like, are you sure?

And they'd go outside and check.

And then look at a blue sky and tell you it was right.

It's not quite blue.

Correct.

Yeah, that's right.

And so I think there's always going to be pockets

of the community that are like that.

I think when you think, look across the broader section of the community,

everyone's excited.

So the workers, the people that operate and own businesses,

the people that work in those businesses,

the people that are really wanting to,

are really wanting to see this base and develop.

And they're all kind of work out, how do I position my business locally

to be able to get a piece of that action?

There's so many smaller macro businesses

that then feed into the larger businesses in the NT.

And so all our trades guys run their own little subcontracting companies.

They contract to a bigger player and all that sort of stuff.

And so they're all just excited about what's coming through the pipeline.

How real is it?

And I think they're all starting to see that they're actually

is kind of something here.

And I think once those first molecules start to flow,

it'll really crystallize for them.

We've had a couple of instances where gas suppliers stopped,

getting fed into the gas fire generators in the NT.

And so people have had a moment of shock of power's been out for a few hours.

And we need to kind of solve this now.

We can't be relying on just on renewables and those sorts of things.

And so I think that's really helped kind of crystallize that this needs to happen.

I think also in the Northern Territory,

people are understanding more about how our economy works.

And so economically we're really relying on benefits from the Australian government

flowing through to the through to the Northern Territory.

And that really helps kind of keep our economy alive.

And so people are seeing this is really the opportunity to be able to start to stand on our own two feet.

And when we do that, we can generate more of our own source.

So it's revenue and all those sorts of things.

Then we can be a better in a better position as a jurisdiction to start to make our own decisions

without sort of having to rely on the generosity of Canberra to help support

what we're doing day to day in terms of the level of services we need to be able to provide to the people.

To echo what Jason was saying, it's a small part of the population that are still opposed to it.

And fundamentally, I think that will get even smaller as the industry grows

and develops and the benefits continue to flow.

And a lot of a lot of the noise honestly comes from outside of the Northern Territory now.

It comes from the East Coast and some of the extremely left-wing parts of the East Coast

or heavily environmentally focused parts of the East Coast.

I'd say the vast majority of Northern Territories are okay with it.

They understand what the economic benefits it's going to bring.

And very importantly, the traditional owners have all agreed to it.

They've signed the Indigenous Land Use Agreement to allow for now appraisal gas to be sold into the market

and to be put into the pipelines, which is a great sign that there are a majority of traditional owners in that area who are forward.

It's on their traditional lands and they've approved it.

And fundamentally, these molecules that the NT government's brought.

If they didn't buy those molecules, they're buying LNG emergency gas

from those LNG producers in Darwin. So they're buying off JKM spot price

or they're buying it out of the East Coast market of Australia, which is very constrained at the moment and even worse.

And so it's like, we need this gas to keep our lights on.

And so that starts to shift everyone's view about, oh, I hang on a second.

This is a nice to have. This is a must have.

The field that we were relying on for our domestic gas supply was meant to last until 2034.

And as of today, it's completely depleted.

And so, you know, as that was declining, that really became the impetus to be able to purchase, you know, additional gas

out of the out of the beta lib basin. And, you know, definitely supported by the older gas fields in Central Australia as well, which is great.

I heard that before where y'all are running out of gas when y'all are sitting on topic gas at the same time.

But hopefully that's all the change in y'all supply yourselves eventually.

Yeah, that's, that's it. Yeah, we've got a, we've got an existing onshore gas field down in Central Australia

and reliable producers down there. But it's a different scale and that we're talking about.

And the beta-lu is a good opportunity to kind of diversify and make sure we've got a diversified mix.

We've seen exactly what happens when we rely too heavily on one field.

And, you know, now it's the case of building out the infrastructure. And even again, it's very seldom done by governments where the Northern Territory government has provided a guarantee

for the construction of a, the first compression and processing facility in the beta-lu.

So, beta-lu energy bought one and refurbished one from the East Coast and Tambor and were building their own.

And the Northern Territory government stepped in to help get that financed and put across with a, with a guarantee, which is unusual for a government generally in Australia.

And so, this government really lent into it and said, yeah, we want to back this industry in.

We're going to do this. We're going to use that balance sheet to help.

I think we need to do like a big picture of everything going on.

I mean, you got Darwin all the way up there. And, you know, I would compare it to Midland where you kind of brought it up.

Like, this is kind of the only thing going on over there, right? Like, is this gas, this energy.

But, you know, why is Darwin even there in the first place? And I mean, the answer is World War II, right?

Like, can we, can we kind of start from the reason why the hell the city is all the way up there?

And then we can kind of like tie into like what's going on now?

Because the comparison to Midland is not fully thought out because Midland is a literal shithole.

Darwin is a beautiful oasis.

It really is.

Yeah.

But first off, like, just, you know, I guess, you know, stepping away from the energy.

Like, this, why is Darwin all the way up there by itself?

Well, you start with the traditional owners across the coast to have been there for tens of thousands of years.

Of course.

And done, you know, lived the way that they lived and even were trading with the Macassans from Indonesia.

So that's actually the history of trade, the international trade work networks has been there for a long time.

You're more, you're a longer territory than I am. So I'll get the other of you all are from there.

I've been there 30 years now.

So all my adult life I've lived in the NT.

We're right on the doorstep of Asia.

And so obviously, you know, during World War II, huge defense base out there and defense kind of set up.

Interestingly, it's one of the first places that were bombed in Australia.

You know, it's and we commemorate that every every every year, the bombing of of Darwin during World War II.

And there's a US, the US has Perry that was was sunk out there in the Darwin harbour.

You know, that was there helping with the defense of Australia during that time.

And you know, the fact that you got to tell everyone, yeah, more, more bombs dropped there than in Pearl Harbor.

That's right.

Yeah.

No one talks about it.

No.

Yeah, the bombing imagery in Darwin is awesome.

The way you're commemorated.

Can't say that word.

Including the corners of the parliament building being bombs like built into the structure.

I love it.

Like it's such a nice touch to it.

It's a really great experience.

The bombing of Darwin experience in some of the military museums.

For anyone who's visiting Darwin, you've got to go and see that and really get at the bombing of Darwin experience out on the warfare.

Did you get to see put the 3D headsets on and see all the actual bombs?

Yes, it's so fantastic.

It's terrifying if you were, you know, if you really get into it, but a really good representation of just how brutal that was.

Yeah.

It's an extraordinary history like Austin Ash was an administrator, you know, many decades ago.

And also a Supreme Court judge and federal court judge and stuff.

And hearing him before he passed away, kind of talk about, he came up as an airman during World War II, met his wife.

They, you know, stayed and settled, settled their family there.

And hearing him kind of talk about what the place was like back then during that period of the war and those sorts of things, you know, how he's out on the TV islands, which is an Aboriginal community now.

And I saw, you know, has always been, but he was, he was posted out there watching the planes fly over and calling in, you know,

hey, this is what's going on here and getting the defences organized and all that kind of stuff.

It's just an extraordinary rich history of, of defense and being right on the doorstep of Asia.

We are fundamentally kind of focused towards Asia and the Asia markets.

And so that's kind of how we've carved out I think this really unique difference from the rest of Australia.

It's hot up there. And so really it's people that love the place that end up staying there and really kind of turning it into something.

And it's become a really like a really strong town of opportunity. And so one of the things lots of people will say is that I'd never get the experience in the exposure to just extraordinary things that I get in the Northern

culture and in Darwin. I just wouldn't get that anywhere else in Australia. And so the people that can kind of stand the heat and and are willing to kind of lean in and get stuff done.

They're the ones that live and survive up there and thrive up there. And and those that perhaps get a bit weaker the needs, they'll stay a couple of years and and decide to get out.

So it's kind of become the real culture of the place.

The defense has been a really a really big cornerstone of of all that. And then, you know, we start to get into sort of the resource development and those sorts of things.

And cattle, you know, cattle has been a big one. And my understanding is that's what sort of first put down as a place as a you know with the vesties.

Abattoirs, they are probably a well prior to to World War II. And I the city sort of built out from that and then kind of really took it, you know, the big steps.

You know, during during World War II is the Northern base. And so agriculture is a big is a big industry and of great importance to the Northern Territory.

But the largest part of our economic story is is resources mining mining and energy basically.

Yeah, there's a few things. There's the energy. There's the strategic position of where you are for your country.

Like almost like I guess the Southeast Asia is relatively peaceful right now on a world scale.

But like if things are ever ugly, like Darwin is right there to protect the rest of their country. Right.

So that's always something worth investing in, right?

Absolutely.

And the third thing you mentioned is the cattle, which was a fun piece of trivia I got to learn.

First off, there's wild cattle everywhere in the NT. They're like, and they're like, they're like these Brahmas.

They're like white and they're very humpy.

Oh, the Brahman cattle. Yeah. Are they Brahma? Brahmas?

Yeah, because we have Brahmas here and they look very similar. And I learned that there is a industry where they fly helicopters and they get the free cattle and make them run into a trap.

When I got, when I got a local was telling me about this because you go out there, you go start driving down south towards like daily waters.

And you know, it's just nothing but dirt road and or you're freshly new highway like one road.

Yeah.

And you can see the cattle out on the side and then you can see the helicopters flying around.

And so I'm like, I got to ask the question, I have to get it filled in.

And I'm like, man, this is, you know, so he tells me how it works to helicopters fly and someone's on the ground with like an RV.

And I was like, what the, there should be like a show about this. And he's like, oh, there he is.

So a lot of that's a lot of that's mustering. So they might not necessarily be wild cattle.

They might be cattle that are just grazing on a station, but the stations are hundreds of thousands of acres.

And so I think that's the great way to play.

Yeah. So some of these stations are bigger than European nations, right?

And I mean, a horse would get pretty, pretty tuck it out if you had to go and muster like the way in the size of the day musters.

They get the cattle, the mustering choppers that they call them and they round them all up.

And then they'll be out there on the four wheelers kind of getting them all into the herd to be able to then, you know, get out and export.

Yeah.

The big wild sort of bovine up there, water buffalo introduced water buffalo.

And did you make it out to to Kakadu at all when you were there?

No, but that's like the recreational like tourist area.

It's one of the most beautiful.

It's like a waterfall and hiking. It's like beautiful. And it's not that far from Darwin, right?

Yeah, it's probably two, three hour drive out there.

There's a town in there called Jabaru.

Yeah.

I mean, it's comparable to like Utah, you fly into Vegas or Salt Lake City.

Then you go into two or three hours to go explore the national parks.

It would be very similar there.

Yeah. And Kakadu has lots and lots of buffalo out there.

But they're kind of water buffalo all over, you know, Northern Northern Territory.

And if, you know, if there's a fair few hunters out there who, you know, in the Northern Territory, who like to go and hunt, you know, different things and water buffalo is one of the ones that they can hunt in certain times.

When they're not hunting crocodile.

Well, I heard you'll take out a quarter million crocs a year.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. So the crock industry is huge in the NT.

So we have a number of crocodile farms.

So the guys get out there and I collect the eggs from like in the wild.

That's where you think mustering's fun.

Yeah. That's this is a whole not a level hanging from a helicopter side of a helicopter as it's hovering above a crock nest.

Yeah.

Pull the reed out and pull the eggs out.

So you'll be in a basket, you know, they'll drop you on top of a crocodile nest.

They'll keep it have a guy keeping an eye out for the mama crocodile.

They'll then collect all the eggs.

They've got to mark the eggs as they put them into the, into the cooler box to make sure they stay in the same direction.

Then they get put into it, go back to the farm, get put into incubator, get grown out.

And then all those crocodile skins then get sold to hammers to make cool handbags.

So it's a, it's an amazing industry in of itself of, and it's probably a really good capture of the essence of the NT.

It's kind of this, this wild, very rugged, wild ruggedness.

But then also like delivering high end high quality products into high end high quality markets.

And it's at the gory because they're like, and they're like a pest.

Like there's like a billion of these.

Well, so they're still protected.

You can't hunt legally, you can't hunt crocodiles in the wild.

So the crocodiles that are getting, that are getting that are used all come from farms.

The only times that they will, will hunt a crocodile in the wild is if there's a case of a crocodile, a crocodile attack.

And it's, you know, deemed to be, you know, a man eater or, or dangerous.

They'll go at that.

Even the crocs that might be up near Darwin up in the harbor, they set traps for them.

And then they try and relocate them.

The challenge of course is crocs being territorial.

They can move along distance.

So when you relocate them, you've got to relocate them a very long way.

Or you send them to a crock farm or a zoo or something, something like that.

But there's a lot of them.

There's, there's a lot of crocs in the wild.

Yeah. So the way that it kind of describes it is the country's almost a carrying capacity.

Yeah.

So in the amount of crocodiles that the country can kind of sustain, it's almost that kind of capacity.

But you just, so you just need to be aware of it.

Don't go swimming.

Yeah.

So that's a problem.

There is beautiful beaches up there.

Like stunning.

Yeah.

The water is beautiful.

It feels nice.

And there's crocs in them.

Yeah.

So I don't think anyone's really complaining that, you know, you got to take care of them sometimes.

But yeah, it's probably, you know, animal, wild animal management and cultivation practices are probably the same as any other, you know, environmental management practices.

There are those who think that it doesn't need to be done.

And then there's the majority of the rest of us that think balance is important.

You know, you need, you need, it's like, I think one of the good examples that I've gone way off of tangent here is, you know, in Africa.

How they'll allow permits for hunting the big old male giraffes because they're extremely dangerous to younger giraffes.

And so they make a bit of an industry on that.

But it's required for the overall health of the herd.

You know, there are those, I don't know enough about it to know, you're probably with the more of the crock expert than I am.

But my wife looks after the Crocodilean Farmers Association internationally.

And so she's right across all this sort of stuff and sustainability practices and all those kinds of things.

How they look after the Crocodiles and manage it and, you know, get all those things right for the brands and those kinds of things.

So it's a really sustainable industry because they have, the Crocodiles have been protected.

They've built the right regulations around that management.

They've got, you know, money getting invested into research and all those kinds of things.

And I think this is another good signal of like, when the territory is developing in industry, they're working out how to do it right.

How to do it in a sustainable kind of way.

And how to really make sure that, you know, we're valuing all those different aspects that come with an industry.

It's not just sort of get out there, get as many Crocodiles as you can or get out there and get as much gas as you can and it doesn't really matter.

It's not how do we do this sustainably and effectively and those sorts of things for longevity and all that kind of stuff.

And so I think the messages we've done it repeatedly.

Absolutely.

How we move and adjust and flex the rules and practices according to the technology, according to where that particular resources at that, at that particular time.

I think we can demonstrate and have demonstrated as a jurisdiction, we're good at that.

And, you know, industry likes the flexibility and likes to be able to, you know, maneuver with government.

So long as the right signals are there, it's not moving the goalposts.

It's hey, we're thinking about doing this.

What do you think is an industry, you know, what do you think is stakeholder and we'll start to move.

You make the changes and adjustments as we think we need to.

Yeah, let's wrap things up with, I mean, I still wanted to talk about the big picture of the NT in general.

When it comes to, you know, the growth to expect.

So the state is twice the size of Texas and there is only a quarter million people in that.

And for reference, Texas has over 30 million people.

And Darwin's all the way on the top.

So you start driving down and it just becomes more and more rural, more into the bush, as you like to say.

But back more commonly for us.

And I've been to some of these towns and they are like, I mean, there are towns.

There's homes and schools, but they're dirt roads.

It is like extremely undeveloped.

And speaking of, you know, the undeveloped there.

I mean, like I said, there was a highway that you know, that is only recently built.

And the one that's going in like East West is still being built.

Right?

Going towards in the basin to even help all this stuff be traveled on wheels.

Like, what is, how has that been going?

And what is the future of that?

I mean, Darwin will hopefully not be the only city, you know, city city in the Northern Territory in a decade, right?

Like what kind of growth are we seeing because of this gas?

Yeah.

And I think really it's the tension between the ultimate scale of what this can get to and where it is right now.

And how do you make decisions around that development and build out that infrastructure in an effective way?

And so no one wants to duplicate roads and put in all this infrastructure.

And then there's a delay in the industry for whatever reason.

And it's sitting there kind of doing nothing because that investment is getting diverted from other areas of where they can invest that money.

And so I think that's kind of the tension at the moment.

Governments doing a lot of work at the moment around how to set up logistics points and all those sorts of things.

Probably the likely cases you rail everything down into the basin and then set up a real big logistics precinct in which to then send everything out onto the field from there.

You've got to remember that these permit areas are huge.

And so once you get onto the permit area, you need to kind of drive down the road in the same way that you might in Midland or somewhere like that is completely different.

You're on the on the big pastoral station on the big you know ranchers on the big ranchers station.

And so then you're building different kind of roads and those sorts of things to be able to haul your equipment around and those sorts of things.

And so I think as we see, you know, the larger players start to make those signals that are coming in and they're looking at building out LNG facilities.

And we all know that it's been getting just sort of a couple of hundred wells a year and all those sorts of things will start to see this the rest of this kind of infrastructure really get built out.

But at the moment, government's definitely doing all that early planning, all that sort of stuff.

They're clearing corridors and those sorts of things for pipelines at the moment and out there talking to landowners around how they can get, you know, the rights to be able to put those pipelines in and all those sorts of things.

So they're doing that early do risking kind of work that is really important at the moment.

And all the, you know, we brought it up earlier to traditional owners, these native Aboriginal people.

They're all living in a lot of them are in a Northern territory.

I remember from my research, it was a quarter of the population is Aboriginal.

While comparing other states, it's like two percent, three percent, whatever.

So this is all super hopeful for them.

I mean, how, I mean, what is the vibe there?

Are they excited?

There's jobs. There's money.

There's growth.

Like, is it all?

It's a, it's a mixed bag.

The people that are probably the most proximate and within the base and tend other most excited because they're generally getting the most education from the operators around what we, what to expect, what kind of jobs and economic businesses,

what sort of micro business opportunities there's going to be some of the other areas.

They might be a little bit more second spec because they're not getting as much information because they don't necessarily have a direct connection to it.

But what I can tell you, one of the, one of our clients that we work with is a, is a, and not for profit that works on Aboriginal economic empowerment and, and job creation and training.

And we work really closely with a lot of the operators and the service providers.

And all they, all they want from us is how can we provide jobs and training and services for people coming into the basin.

And so, you know, where we're lining up with, with these not, without not for profit, salt bush and, and how we can help really bring a lot of these people out of poverty, which is, you know, where a lot of them live, remote communities are extremely expensive and difficult to service as a government.

To put, you know, health services there to put police services there to put basic infrastructure there costs a lot of money far beyond what the Northern Territories have to generate on its own right now.

And that's the other step to this is, you know, when, when the Northern Territories able to generate more own source revenue from the industries like this, you can provide better services throughout the Northern Territories, not just, not just focused on the basin.

So there is, there's trepidation from some, but I'd say a lot of the ones that are going to be most immediately impacted are generally pretty excited.

And both, I think, both the, the two companies that are out there, Tambora and Ann, Bidalu Energy Australia, former Empire Energy, have both done a huge amount of work with those, with those groups.

And so, if you have a look at some of Empire Energy, Bidalu Energy Australia's clips when, you know, they're making announcements and all those sorts of things, you've got conversations with the traditional owners talking about how, once they started to understand what was going on and how it all worked.

And, and those sorts of things in the role that they play in, in the development of that field, you know, that you can see that they're excited about what it's going to bring for their community.

When the, when the update to the section 19 got signed with Alex, they all got up to hug him one by one with, with, you know, Alex Underwood.

Yep, they were all hugging him one by one once they were able to get the deal for the benefit, which was beautiful to see, you know.

Oh, so I saw myself going down there with Brian Schuffield and there were stuff that we couldn't even record, because it was just an intimate 101 setting with, with the people down there.

Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's going to be hugely transformative for them, for, for the, for the T.O.s and, and the operators are going to, like a really passionate about playing a big part of that.

And it's an easy thing to think it up to work and be motivated about. It's like, and I think this is the exciting thing. The more we get US technology kind of out in the basin and the more companies are involved in that, the more opportunity there is to kind of really make a difference in, in the work that you do and, and really have an impact for people.

It kind of, you know, Chris writes a whole philosophy around bringing more and more energy online to help people, you know, be lifted out of poverty and the benefits that come from energy in, in your, in your society is, is huge and we get to play a really great role as part of that.

Yeah. So I do, we do what we do, you know, we're in government and now we're out doing, doing our thing and the passion hasn't changed.

We've just, we've been approached from a different, different way here, but the value of energy, you know, and, and just changing people's lives can't be understated.

Yeah, overstated, I should say, can't be overstated.

It's a full circle moment with Chris right, because he comes from Liberty and Liberty is the technology in the Beteloo helping do this, the drilling through this tough rock in this new shell out there, right.

Any, any opinion or correlation about that when it comes to Chris right or the tech, making all this happen.

Well, so I think the tech, the real shift that's happened in the Beteloo has been the bringing in US technology into the basin.

And so what we saw, and when you can go back and have a look at the logs yourself, what we saw in the early days of the basin is, they were getting about 5% recovery of the gas in place within the, within the shell.

And so when the US tech started to come in, that increased to over 20%. Just from those first kind of, those first bits of tech like Liberty and HMP and those, those kinds of companies actually being in the basin and understanding how to drill that shell.

And this is the really big opportunity, I think, for US and North American technology companies is, how do I get my equipment out there and get my crews out there.

You guys know how to do it. You've been doing it for decades and those sorts of things. And so the opportunity to kind of bring that out into the into the NT and really kind of make a difference in terms of how we maximize the amount of gas we're getting out of the ground from each well and really drive those costs down.

And then the benefits that are going to flow into the community for us and then obviously into South East Asia in terms of energy security is just it's endless.

And so, you know, the stuff that Chris writes doing and he's forward thinking about the importance of energy in terms of economic development and helping, helping people uplift their lives is just it really fits neatly with the, with the philosophy of what we're trying to do in the NT as well.

So yeah, I think we're probably big fans. Yeah.

It's fair to say cool. Well, let's wrap things up with, you know, what are y'all doing now? We're here with advantage North group. How did that transition from government to this business go?

Really, that's kind of the key bit of what we're sort of saying before when we when we started to sort out the gas transactions for the NT government and and and to get those purchase agreements for those first molecules.

We could really see that benefit of US tech playing a role in in the development of the basin. The biggest risk for for people in the US is how do I get my technology out there?

Like it's a long way. I don't understand the regulatory environment. All the things we've kind of been talking about today. I'm hearing all these that there's all these issues and and it's hard to do business.

And and so what we really do is kind of play that translation role. And so it's it's not difficult. It's just different.

And so we can help what we do is help provide that on the ground understanding that on the ground support of how to actually bring your expertise the US expertise into into the basin.

And help people see sort of, you know, the value of the opportunity through what's likely to be probably one of the biggest show plays over the coming decades.

It's a Western jurisdiction. So it's it's it's well known and the market's huge in terms of, you know, what's out these days is going to need over the coming decades.

And so we've been out out in the US now for a few self almost two months and me little low little low under six weeks meeting with, you know, businesses that we're working with investors.

Our first companies and even not for profits and in some of the some of the work just to sort of talk about what we do and what what the below is and and how how it's going to progress.

And and as much as continuing to educate ourselves. I mean, just on this trip, there's been so much learning that we've been able to take and we can think about how do we apply those learnings into the basin.

How do we help people in the Northern Territory and businesses in the Northern Territory also step up to ever to capture some of those opportunities.

And so this has been a really good sort of journey of discovering as much as I thought, you know, I didn't think I knew a lot, but I thought I knew a bit before coming out here.

I'm like, I haven't even scratched the surface of of of the industry and and it's it's really cool to be doing what we do and be able to work with the clients that we work with who believe in the be low as much as we do.

Well, let's hope the word continues to get out because I'm not hearing enough about the Beatles. Yeah, it's been two years almost and, you know, before they know it, it's going to be coming up and it's going to be no one's going to be able to shut up about it.

Absolutely. That's the goal, right? That's the goal.

Yeah, all right. Well, guys, thanks for coming on.

Thank you so much.