Fears for heritage site as gas plant expansion | Australian Markets

Industrial air pollution is damaging priceless rock artwork, an knowledgeable says amid protests over a determination to increase the life of a main gas hub.

Woodside’s North West Shelf project – which hosts Australia’s greatest gas export plant – has been given the inexperienced gentle by the federal authorities to keep working till 2070.

The Australian power giant nonetheless has to just accept situations round heritage and air high quality on the project on Western Australia’s Burrup Peninsula, home to historic rock artwork, earlier than the approval is made official.

The approval has angered conventional homeowners, climate activists and scientists who’ve researched the impression of industrial air pollution on the rock artwork at Murujuga.

A report into air pollution on the site, linked to a $27 million rock artwork monitoring project, was solely launched by the WA authorities a week earlier than federal Environment Minister Murray Watt introduced the approval.

Benjamin Smith, an archaeologist on the University of Western Australia, mentioned the chief abstract didn’t replicate the important thing findings of the 800-page report by Curtin University scientists who he claimed had been gagged from talking publicly about it.

“They were outraged that their report and the integrity of their academic findings had been misrepresented.”

Professor Smith informed AAP the Curtin scientists felt the abstract had “lied about their findings” so he was talking out about a cover-up by departmental “spin doctors”.

The Cook authorities has dismissed the claims as offensive and factually incorrect.

The Curtin scientists subjected rocks in a climate chamber to acidic air pollution equal to emissions from the Burrup gas plants and located all of the rocks confirmed proof of degradation.

Prof Smith mentioned the Curtin analysis and his own research confirmed the pollution would eat away on the manganese within the rocks till they developed “holes like a Swiss cheese” that then prompted the rock surfaces to interrupt down.

“It is direct evidence for the first time from a government study that industrial pollution is damaging the rock art of Murujuga,” he mentioned.

The injury could possibly be mitigated by placing scrubbers on the commercial stacks to filter emissions and scale back air pollution however the best resolution was to modify the plants’ energy from gas to electrical energy, Prof Smith mentioned.

“If you transformed all of those plants to electricity … they could operate cleanly and we could have the perfect solution, which is profitable industry operating responsibly alongside the world’s most important rock art site.”

Prof Smith mentioned the well-known Lascaux caves in France held solely a few hundred wall work and dated back 17,000 years.

But the rock artwork at Murujuga has a million photographs going back a minimum of 50,000 years, together with the world’s first-known depiction of a human face and pictures of now-extinct animals.

Murujuga has been put ahead as a UNESCO world heritage site, with sturdy indications it will likely be accepted as such.

But the applying has been referred back to the federal and WA governments with suggestions to stop building on the site, to stop the air pollution and to organize a decommissioning report.