Woodside sold the project to an insubstantial company to avoid a few hundred million in decommissioning costs: now it and its competitors will pay the price.
The green light for Black Mountain Energy comes just months after Federal experts said its environmental risk assessment was "limited and disjointed" and reached "largely unsupported" conclusions.
The environmental watchdog is set to remove restrictions on climate pollution in months but is much slower looking into concerns about quarantine and turtles on the Barrow Island nature reserve.
