News: WDS Australia's Woodside Energy bumps up output view for fiscal 2023, page-66

AUST Business today (extract):
WOODSIDE WARNS OF GAS PROJECT DELAY
santos court ruling ‘creates uncertainty’
Perry Williams
Woodside Energy has conceded its $16.5bn Scarborough gas development off the West Australian coast faces delays as the fallout from a court ruling against Santos in the Northern Territory ripples across the industry.
Tiwi Island traditional owner Dennis Tipakalippa won a Federal Court case in September that found Santos failed to consult traditional owners for its Barossa project in the NT, after he had sued the national environment watchdog over its approval of the offshore drilling plans.
That decision has effectively meant the offshore regulator has stopped approving environment plans, a move that has now raised concern over slower progress at Scarborough, according to Woodside, with delays in receiving environment plan sign-off.
“It is worrying. We are concerned about the uncertainty that the court case has created,” Woodside chief executive Meg O’Neill said after its annual investor day on Thursday.
“That said, we are working very closely with the regulator and the government to understand what exactly we need to do to meet their expectations. So we’re at a point in time now where approvals are not critical path. We intend to keep it that way.”
A decision on Santos’s appeal in the case is expected to be handed down by the Federal Court on Friday. If the ruling is upheld, it is expected all environment plans would need to go through a much tougher consultation process, hitting both Australia’s offshore oil and gas players and the nation’s nascent offshore wind industry.
The National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority told a Senate hearing in November that it was now required to apply a far broader definition of “relevant persons” since the Barossa decision. It revealed it had issued 43 decision notices since the court judgment on environment plans under assessment, requiring companies to consult in line with the court decision. “That’s obviously a very large amount of consultation, and that’s what we’ve been applying since the decision,” the authority told the Senate.…..