Voice of Real Australia is a regular newsletter from ACM, which has more than 100 mastheads across Australia. Today's is written by ACM national agriculture writer Chris McLennan.
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That leaky rust bucket in the Timor Sea is today being unplugged from the ocean floor.
It is the first stage of an embarrassing $325 million clean up operation which many people still don't know anything about.
That's probably because out-of-sight out-of-mind applies to the Northern Endeavour.
A 274m long oil production platform is permanently moored way out of sight, or 550km northwest of Darwin in the Timor Sea.
The story of the Northern Endeavour needs to be in the public eye - there are many people who should be held to account.
Northern Endeavour is a former oil and gas production vessel which has long been a floating time bomb as far as the marine environment is concerned.
The Northern Endeavour stopped producing oil in 2019. Its former owners Northern Oil and Gas Australia went into liquidation in 2020. The Federal government has maintained the Northern Endeavour and associated subsea facilities ever since.
Taxpayers were left to clean up the mess.
Commercial production of between the Laminaria and Corallina oil fields began in 1999 through a joint venture of Woodside Energy Ltd and Talisman Oil & Gas Pty Ltd.
Woodside owned and operated the Northern Endeavour and announced its intention to stop production from the vessel in 2016 and move to decommissioning the fields soon afterwards.
Sensing an opportunity, NOGA came into being in 2015.
NOGA "felt the region had potential for further oil and gas development" and in 2015 entered into a sales agreement with Woodside and Talisman.
This resulted in Talisman acquiring both the Northern Endeavour and Woodside's interest in the oil fields, and NOGA then bought 100 per cent of Talisman.
It wasn't long before the authorities began to worry about the corroded state of the Northern Endeavour and the company's ability to respond to any emergency, like an oil spill.
But even 550 kilometres distant from Darwin in the Timor Sea, it is still moored in Australian waters.
For a long time it looked like the taxpayer was going have to fund the decommissioning of the ageing Northern Endeavour and plug up the holes in the oilfield.
To the credit of the Morrison government, they rushed through laws during their final days of the last Parliament to force the oil industry to pay.
Offshore oil and gas operators have to hand over 48 cents per barrel of any oil and gas they extract, backdated to July last year until the money is paid back.
There are estimates the levy will raise more than $3 billion over the next decade and pay for this particular clean-up.
A $325 million contract has been signed with Petrofac Facilities Management Limited to start the decommissioning - called phase one.
Northern Endeavour will be disconnected from its subsea equipment and any operating wells will be temporarily suspended.
Decommissioning and remediation will likely take several years.
The government said the complex task to clean up the Northern Endeavour "sends a strong signal to the world that Australia will maintain its global reputation as a safe, reliable and responsible country for offshore oil and gas development".
For years this once proud factory ship has been swinging around on its moorings attached to the sea floor about 500 metres deep waiting for someone to act.
The clean-up has been spread across three phases.
The first is to get rid of the Northern Endeavour before it sinks or ruptures. Petrofac Facilities Management Limited took control of Northern Endeavour late last year, winning the tender to decommission it and unplug it from its "subsea equipment", or its nine sub-sea oil wells.
Temporary plugs will be used on the wells and those connections from Northern Endeavour will sit on the sea floor for future clean-up phases which will also include permanent plugs. Northern Endeavour will be towed away to a shipyard in Malaysia or Singapore and broken up for scrap.
Phases two and three of this cleanup will mean going back to the site and removing that infrastructure left on the ocean floor and permanently plugging the wells.
Whether its rehabilitating a uranium mine in Kakadu National Park, or plugging oil wells beneath the sea, extractive industries have to be held to account.
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