Queensland has awarded three new oil and gas exploration tenders covering 363,100 hectares, in a round the state government presents as part of its answer to the cost of energy.
Bridgeport Energy was declared the preferred tenderer for an extra 270,000 hectares, or 2,700 square kilometres, between Innamincka and Thargomindah on the South Australian border. The ASX-listed Vintage Energy won 62,500 hectares in the Channel Country, and a consortium of four businesses won 30,600 hectares in the Taroom Trough.
Bridgeport already holds about 90,000 hectares of oil-producing acreage in the Cooper-Eromanga basin. The state has now awarded 12 sites for oil or gas exploration since 2025.
The Queensland Resources Minister, Dale Last, said increasing fuel supply was the "only solution to bring down the cost of energy".
The timetable is longer than the announcement. Bridgeport's chief executive, Christian Lange, said it would take "the best part of two years" to obtain an authority to prospect before seismic surveys could begin. "Within a couple years, we'd aim to drill the first well," he said.
Lange said any fossil fuels taken from the new acreage would stay in Australia, and that impacts on groundwater, fauna, flora and roads would be assessed before exploration began. "We need to be cognisant that our disturbance on that land is zero effectively by the time we pack up and leave," he said.
The new sites sit outside the protected Channel Country flood plains, where fracking was banned two years ago, though parts of them are 5 to 10 kilometres from the boundary.
The Western Rivers Alliance, a group of graziers, traditional owners and conservationists, said it wanted assurances that significant flood plains would not be damaged, while taking no position on activity elsewhere. "As a collective, our position is for the activity to stay off the flood plain, which this does achieve," its coordinator, Riley Rocco, said.
Set the minister's claim beside the chief executive's calendar, though, and something unusual emerges about the product being announced.
If more supply is the only solution to the cost of energy, and the supply in question requires roughly two years of paperwork before anyone is permitted to go and look for it, then the only solution to this year's energy prices was a decision that had to be taken four years ago. Today's award is the only solution to the energy prices of 2030.
The unit of relief is therefore the hectare. Queensland has issued 363,100 of them, and will on current plans deliver the first litre at some point after the seismic survey, which is itself an exercise in making a loud noise at the ground and writing down what comes back.
Energy policy has been reduced to an acoustic measure. The state's contribution to household bills, for the next two years, is permission to listen.
There is a further efficiency in the arrangement that nobody has claimed credit for. Oil that has not yet been found has no extraction cost, no transport cost and no refining margin. On a strict reading of the minister's formulation, the cheapest energy in Queensland is the energy still underground, and the government has just awarded 3,631 square kilometres of it.
The chief executive's undertaking completes the logic. If disturbance on the land is to be zero by the time the company packs up and leaves, then the project's environmental footprint is defined entirely by its own conclusion, and the sooner it finishes the better it will have been.
The Department of Unnecessary Research notes that on this basis the most successful exploration programme imaginable is one that is awarded, permitted, surveyed and abandoned without anybody drilling anything, and that such a programme would also be the only one guaranteed to come in under budget.