About the Beetaloo Basin

The Beetaloo Sub-basin is located around 500km south-east of Darwin. In the Beetaloo there is Aboriginal land, pastoral leases which co-exist with Native Title rights and interests, horticultural enterprises, cattle stations and Aboriginal people living in communities. 

Map courtesy of Protect Country Alliance.

Our concerns

In 2020, the Federal government announced it would use public money to support an expansion of gas mining in Australia, with shale gas mining in the Beetaloo Basin its first priority.

Numerous companies have their sights on the Beetaloo, including Origin, Santos, Falcon Oil and Gas and Empire Energy. The Federal government has already given millions in public money to a number of gas companies as they look to set up fracking operations in the Beetaloo. 

Fracking will lead to the industrialisation of vast areas of our country. The area will be littered with hundreds of gas wells, vast networks of roads, gas pipelines, processing plants, wastewater ponds and treatment plants. We are concerned for our land, all the creatures which live there, and for our people. Fracking requires enormous amounts of water. Water is life, and we worry that pollution from fracking could poison our precious water supplies and aquifers that run below our country, right across the Beetaloo.