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Karratha, Australia. First gold, then coal and iron ore. Now, a new bonanza is about to be unleashed from beneath Down Under: Australia’s got gas.

Projects currently being ramped up to tap huge undersea fields off the country’s northwest could quad­ruple Australia’s exports of liquefied natural gas in the next few years and turn it into what Resources Minister Martin Ferguson has called an “energy superpower.”

It will be the next stage of a long boom that has enriched Australia and made it a key supplier of the raw materials underpinning Asia’s development — from the girders in city skyscrapers to the fuel burned to light them.

“We have what the world, and particularly the rapidly growing economies of Asia, wants — iron ore, energy and minerals,” said Colin Barnett, the premier of Western Australia state, which is at the heart of the new boom.

The mostly desert state has become known for a frontier atmosphere not unlike that of the 19th-century gold rush, the country’s first mining boom that drew enough migrants almost to triple Australia’s population within a decade.

As a major source of the materials driving Asia’s economic surge, Australia has increasingly been drawn into the orbit of emerging giants China and India, spawning tensions and discord. There are also nagging worries over economic overheating and long-lasting environmental damage caused by its thriving resource industry.

Gas was discovered off Australia’s remote northwest coast in the 1970s. But its exploitation has lagged behind iron ore and coal that have been easier to get and more in demand.

Now, gas is gaining popularity as a cleaner-burning alternative to coal in power generation, with a fraction of the greenhouse-gas emissions.

The biggest boost in the sector came last September, when Chevron and joint-venture partners ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell announced they would go ahead with the massive Gorgon project.

The venture will drill fields about 130 kilometers offshore to tap into an estimated 40 trillion cubic feet of gas, and build pipelines and a liquefaction plant and port for about 43 billion Australian dollars ($39.4 billion) — roughly the size of Guatemala’s gross national product.

If that sounds big, the numbers stack up. The decision to proceed came on the heels of news that ExxonMobil had signed a 20-year deal worth about 50 billion Australian dollars to supply Petro­China with LNG from its share of Gorgon. Similar deals for Gorgon gas worth another 70 billion Australian dollars were struck with power companies in Japan, South Korea and India.

The government says Gorgon could generate exports worth 300 billion Australian dollars during the next 20 years. And there are at least a half-dozen other large gas plans in the works, including Australian company Woodside’s $12 billion plan to tap the Browse fields holding an estimated 20 trillion cubic feet of gas.

Yet even as the projects pile up, Australia is trying to tamp down strains with China that have taken some of the gloss off its mineral and energy endowments. Today an Australian executive of mining giant Rio Tinto will face court in China charged with stealing commercial secrets in a trial Australian lawmakers are concerned is linked to Beijing’s unsuccessful campaign to get lower iron-ore prices.

Other problems are local but no less intractable. Gorgon, Browse and some of the other big deposits lie off the Pilbara, a remote Outback region of Western Australia that is buffeted by a half-dozen cyclones a year and where temperatures can soar to 48 degrees Celsius.

Western Australia’s few urban areas are already bursting at the seams because of the mining boom. The state capital Perth can’t build hotels fast enough to keep up with demand, and cranes building office towers dot the skyline.

A severe worker shortage means companies compete for just about everyone from mine site managers to truck drivers who can earn more than 120,000 Australian dollars a year in salary and a rest-and-recuperation flight to Perth every month.

One of the main supply towns is Karratha, a sweltering collection of houses and a few shops and pubs nestled between hills covered in spinifex and boulders of a deep-maroon color that indicates the iron content within.

It’s more than 1,800 km from the nearest city, surrounded by some of Australia’s harshest territory, and there’s almost no one here but miners.

The federal government has appointed a task force to find ways to fill an expected shortfall of 70,000 construction workers in the resources sector during the next decade.



Associated Press