Ben Harvey: WA kids get tour of Chevron’s Wheatstone gas plant for Resources Technology Showcase 2021

I haven’t spent a lot of time with a bunch of 15-year-olds since I was one so a recent trip to the Pilbara with a planeload of them was instructive. The school was Darling Range Sports College and the destination was Chevron’s Wheatstone gas plant near Onslow. The college won a competition that Chevron ran as part of the Resources Technology Showcase 2021, which was hosted by Seven West Media back in June. I suspect the climate change warriors reading this are already on Twitter bemoaning the fact I have been complicit in an oil and gas company’s brainwashing of West Australian kids. If you are one of those people please know that you have my blessing to get your outrage on. A robust debate about the role of fossil fuel in modern economies is important. But you’re not allowed to charge your phone after you tweet because Wheatstone supplies a lot of the gas that runs the electricity stations in WA, and that would be hypocritical. And you need to tap on the keypad without the lights on, for the same reason. And if you stumble in the dark you’re not allowed to go to a public hospital. Because oil and gas companies give the WA Government a lot of money, which means your medical treatment, while excellent, would be morally compromised. I could go on ... For about six hours last Friday, 30-odd students were given a tour of the giant Wheatstone facility. We use the word “giant” or “colossal” so often when we describe big resources projects that the words have lost their impact. I looked up the thesaurus and found a better one for Wheatstone: Brobdingnagian. That’s the name of the land in Gulliver’s Travels where everything is massive. Wheatstone is an industrial development of Brobdingnagian proportions. To drive home its Brobdingnagianess™ I am going to itemise some big figures. It is made up of 320,000 cubic meters of concrete (enough to fill 128 Olympic-sized swimming pools) and 22,549 tonnes of structural steel. It took 171 million hours to construct (the build started in 2011). At one point the workers’ camp housed 7400 people and was the 14th biggest town in WA. The kitchens there were pumping out 100,000 meals each week. The offshore gas it processes comes to Wheatstone from the Wheatstone and Iago gas reservoirs, which are 200km offshore in 2950m of water. A processing platform that’s 225m tall diverts the gas to shore through a 225km pipeline (that’s nearly long enough to span Tasmania). The pipe weighs 340,000 tonnes (that’s nearly as much as Clive Palmer). It cost $US34 billion to build, which means its not far off the international space station as one of the single most expensive and complicated things humans have ever put together (LEGO’s Ultimate Collectors Series Millennium Falcon is also on the list). Wheatstone’s main game is the production of liquid natural gas. It produces a tonne of LNG every 3.3 seconds, which allows a full cargo ship to leave the jetty every 36 hours and sail to markets in Asia. Importantly for people who like to boil eggs for breakfast it also sports a domestic gas plant. The natural gas from that part of the facility helps fill the Dampier-to-Bunbury pipeline and allows Extinction Rebellion members to make hearty breakfasts before they superglue themselves to something. For the record, the Darling Range Sports College students didn’t get brainwashed. Guess what the most common question asked of each Chevron executive was. Something about climate change? Peak oil? The price of carbon? Nope. It was “how much do you earn?” If you’re gonna wreck the planet you may as well come home to a nice house.