Woodside are assuming operatorship of the Bass Strait oil and gas rigs they co-own with ExxonMobil Australia. Many of the rigs are due for decommissioning and the rest are soon to retire. The Australian company has a sordid history of environmental violations, particularly when it comes to (not) cleaning up after themselves. This timeline details all the screw-ups in the public domain. If you notice any we've missed, get in touch.

In May 2025 the news broke that Woodside, during decommissioning operations at the Minerva gas field off the Otway Coast of Victoria, had jettisoned hundreds of kilograms of plastic waste into the Southern Ocean. Beachcombers had been finding pieces of saddle clamps, clips that hold bundles of pipelines together, washed up on southwestern beaches since early February. Woodside did not report the scale of the plastic pollution to the environmental regulator until mid April, by which time at least one-hundred and sixty saddle clamp components had been set adrift. Fully aware of the issue, Woodside nonetheless continued operations at the Minerva field until May 2, releasing another four hundred plastic components into the sea. On the 25th of July, the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) instructed the company to cease all decommissioning work until they had amended the offending engineering issues. That same month, Woodside announced it would be taking over operations of the Bass Strait Joint Venture it co-owns with ExxonMobil. A fifty-plus year old network of rigs and pipelines that carries with it the largest and most complex decommissioning liability in the state; a $13 billion clean-up bill that is now coming due. 

Woodside, like their joint venture partners ExxonMobil, have a penchant for environmental violations. Around the same time they were shedding plastic waste into the Southern Ocean, another of their decommissioning operations in Western Australia spilled sixteen-thousand litres of oil onto Ningaloo Reef. Neither of these violations were met with fines from NOPSEMA. 

Last year we published a timeline detailing all of ExxonMobil’s failures in southeast Australia. Now, as Woodside prepares to take the reins on the largest decommissioning project in Australia’s history, we are following up with a timeline covering all of the Australian resource giant’s violations since their Gippsland beginnings. If you have questions about anything presented here, or know of a failure we’ve missed, please get in touch. 

Decommissioning is expensive and offers no return on investment. Fossil fuel companies around the world routinely do everything they can to avoid their legal obligation to restore the environment they have exploited. Right now both ExxonMobil and Woodside are lobbying Australian state and federal governments for permission to abandon pipelines and sections of oil rig in the Bass Strait. The regulator's toothlessness in the face of repeated violations offers little encouragement that the industry will be held to account. Already they are selling communities on the dubious claim that abandoned infrastructure produces positive environmental outcomes. For more on that issue, check out this blog post.

If you want to help with our campaign to clean up the Southern Ocean you can make a donation to our work, sign up to our newsletter or come along to a collective meeting.

Woodside's degradation of the environment isn't limited to Victoria. Check out Save our Songlines and see how you can help with their fight to protect Ngarluma country from the company's ruthless expansion plans on Burrup Peninsular.