Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong will have a particularly delicate diplomatic dance when she visits Timor-Leste today.
Emboldened by the Solomon Islands “success” in playing Australia off against China, President José Ramos-Horta — elected in April — has raised the prospect of Chinese investment in a proposed landmark onshore gas processing facility for the Greater Sunrise field if Canberra and energy group Woodside do not play ball.
“Timor-Leste would favourably consider partnership with Chinese investors if other development partners refuse to invest in bringing gas via pipeline to Timor-Leste,” he said recently. “Timor-Leste would be on a financial cliff if Greater Sunrise is not operating within the next 10 years. So, very soon, [Timor-Leste’s] leadership has to make decisions … if necessary a trip to China.”
Wong has been similarly shoring up Australia’s relationship with Papua New Guinea ahead of landing in Dili today, telling its leaders that Australia is “seeking the closest possible relationship” with our northern neighbour. China is extremely interested in resource-rich PNG, and Port Moresby has already turned down an offer to develop a naval base and has signalled an intention to build a fishing port. Chinese Foreign Affairs Minister Wang Yi visited the country in June.
And, as ever, the long shadow of Australia’s egregious, government-sanctioned spying on the cabinet of the then nascent Timor-Leste in 2004 — aimed specifically at gaining information on talks about oil and gas reserves at the time underway — hangs over Wong’s visit. The still-unfolding scandal also saw the unseemly prosecution of whistleblower Witness K and his lawyer Bernard Collaery, recently halted by the Albanese government.
Timor-Leste’s elder statesman and revolutionary hero, former president and prime minister Xanana Gusmão, has been particularly critical of the prosecutions. “I already promised to them, if it was not a secret trial, I will go to be their witness,” he said in 2019.
The ambitious Tasi Mane project comes with an $18 billion price tag for the pipeline processing plant, airport and road infrastructure that see gas piped from the Greater Sunrise gas field, developed by Woodside, between the country and Australia to Timor-Leste’s remote southern coasts. The capital, Dili, and second city Bacau are on the north coast.
Tasi Mane, long the personal project of Gusmão, has been on foot in a mainly stop, occasionally start, way for more than a decade. Its cost means that international investment is needed, and Gusmão has previously, but unsuccessfully, pushed the project to Chinese investors.
Its promoters argue that the tiny nation needs the value-adding processing industry to kickstart its economic diversification and to provide jobs and skills to its young people. Critics say the mooted benefits don’t stack up and will continue the country’s resource reliance, one that is potentially problematic as the world tries to wean itself off fossil fuels.
Woodside claims a pipeline across a very deep under-trench to the tiny nation is not viable, preferring to send gas to Darwin — where it currently pumps gas from the Timor Gap.
Still, there seems to be a newfound political consensus in the Timor-Leste semi-presidential system. Previously the multi-party coalition government, led by Prime Minister Taur Matan Ruak — elected separately to the president — and backed by the Parliament’s latest party, Fretilin, has been either opposed to or ambivalent about the project.
That’s changed in the two years since Fretilin replaced Gusmão’s National for Timorese Reconstruction (CNRT) in 2020. Since then Fretilin’s resources minister, Victor Soares, has been appointed and he is backing the project. The head of the National Petroleum and Minerals Authority (ANP), which regulates the nation’s oil and gas projects and previously opposed the Tasi Mane, has also been changed.
But time is very much of the essence for Timor-Leste. Revenues from its existing energy source, Bayu-Undan, have filled the nation’s sovereign wealth Timor-Leste Petroleum Fund with tens of billions of dollars and provide 90% of the nation’s revenues. But they are fast drying up, after which Dili faces the prospect of an economic and societal upheaval.
A lack of infrastructure in the mountainous, developing nation, as well as barriers to entry and a lack of land reform, have hindered the growth of coffee production and tourism — two targeted sectors. In the face of this, more Timorese are working offshore to support their families, leading to a manpower and talent drain.
As it stands, the development of Greater Sunrise is essential. But Swinburne University academic Michael Leach, one of the country’s keenest observers, posits that there could be another way forward.
“The sleeper opportunity here is whether a country like Timor-Leste would be a good case study for a country being paid to not develop its oil and gas resources,” he said. “At some stage, wealthy countries that have been the main contributor to carbon emissions will have to pay other countries not to develop fossil fuel reserves. What better case study than a small country like Timor-Leste with substantial oil and gas fields?”
That’s unlikely to be on Wong’s agenda — at least at this stage — but she is well placed to at least begin healing the wounds between the two countries over energy that Alexander Downer and his spies have inflicted.
East Timor controls its gas assets if the gas terminal is built on its lands. Australia controls East Timors gas assets if the terminal is built in Darwin. Australia is trying to steal East Timors resources by stealth. The excuses why East Timor cannot have its own resources infrastructure are disingenuous at best.
Given that our refining is done in Singapore, let’s hope they don’t return to the favour to the recalcitrant white trash at the arse end of the world™ ® PJK (who was on NewsRadio today giving out about the US war on Russia in the Ukraine).
If Woodside had to choose between building a floating LNG platform (seek “Prelude FLNG FPSO”) and a maybe-impossible pipeline to a non-existent gas processing plant onshore, they would certainly choose the floating LNG platform. Floating LNG factories are now the preferred option for most new offshore gas fields.
The problem with laying a pipeline across the Timor Trench is not so much that it is deep at 5 km, which it is, but that it is steep. As the Australian plate pushes underneath Timor at about 100 mm a year, the soft sediments lying on it avalanche frequently, breaking cables and threatening a hypothetical pipeline. A hundred years earlier, the much simpler Overland Telegraph cable was broken at least twice before they gave up and laid the cable around the western end of the Trench – to Kupang.
They need whatever help we can give them, they have had great leaders and we should give them whatever resouces they need, the bugging was an absolute disgrace (full stop)
“The sleeper opportunity here is whether a country like Timor-Leste would be a good case study for a country being paid to not develop its oil and gas resources” he said.
Surely Michael Leach’s insight is not only ‘middle ground’ but the most advantageous option? Global climate realities are in every World Nation’s face. TODAY! 2050 already a farce. 2030/35 . . . now the very ‘brink’. Far, far deeper than the off-shore Timor trench.
Greater Sunrise is mostly in Australian waters. Australia has agreed to a ‘unitisation’ share, allocating all production wherever it is from in the field notionally between Australia and Timor Leste, which gives more of the field to Timor Leste than its share of the acreage. But Greater Sunrise is still mostly Australian, on any view of international boundary rules.
Gas processing on shore in Timor Leste requires a difficult and hugely expensive pipe bridging the very deep ocean trench near the Timor Leste coast. This isn’t an argument about who gets the proceeds of gas processing: it’s about burning most of those proceeds in huge capital costs for a relatively small project.
Timor Leste would lose if gas processing plant were there. And Timor Leste has already gained more than its share of Greater Sunrise. Frothing nonsense about ‘trying to steal East Timor’s resources by stealth’ is just code for engineers to pocket huge profits from an uneconomic project that would gain little or nothing for Timor Leste, while burning away most of the gains from developing Greater Sunrise.
You’re kidding right? This entire debacle has been about who gets the proceeds.
As the downvotes suggest, introducing simple scientific reality is a non-starter when the emo brigade needs to vent and virtue signal.
Never mind the facts, feel the feelings.