As Woodside Energy investors convened for their annual meeting in Perth, Australia, on May 8, they were met by protests and heckling. Activists, angered over the fossil fuel company’s climate impacts and accidents, repeatedly disrupted speeches by company management.

While management and demonstrators debated, Woodside workers about 800 miles to the north were scrambling to stop a major “unplanned discharge” from a company pipeline that was being decommissioned. Amid a devastating marine heatwave, Woodside’s May 8 spill dumped about 64,000 liters (almost 17,000 gallons) of wastewater laced with oil, chemicals, and other contaminants into the Indian Ocean northwest of the Ningaloo Reef, a World Heritage site.

Australian environmentalists are calling for Americans to pay close attention to the company’s history of accidents as Woodside makes a major expansion into the U.S.

“Because we have a lot of experience with Woodside in Australia, I think it’s really important that folks in the U.S. understand how Woodside’s operated here and what that might mean for you folks in the future,” Fern Cadman, a campaigner for Australia’s Wilderness Society (no relation to the U.S. group), told DeSmog. “It just points to the need for really high regulatory scrutiny of all aspects of their operations.”

But under Trump, the federal government is poised to move in the opposite direction —specifically on safety rules for LNG projects.

In a little-noticed move, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) said on April 29 that it’s considering changing the rules governing LNG safety, including during construction — regulations that have been in place for decades.

PHMSA announced those plans on the same day Woodside officially revealed its decision to move forward with its $17.5 billion Louisiana LNG project (previously known as Driftwood, when the project was owned by Tellurian).

Given the LNG industry’s rapid expansion in the U.S., watchdog groups say that closer scrutiny for LNG safety is overdue, noting that when those rules were first issued, the U.S. was expected to be an LNG importer, not one of the world’s largest exporters.

But the Federal Register entry from PHMSA suggests the agency is looking to weaken, not strengthen, its standards.

“Are there current aspects of PHMSA regulations that are particularly burdensome on the ability of industry to operate LNG facilities that PHMSA should consider amending or rescinding?” the agency wrote. “How can PHMSA best design a rulemaking … for LNG facilities to be deregulatory and lead to cost savings for the industry?”

Safety advocates expressed alarm. “While it’s wonderful to see PHMSA finally addressing the long-outdated LNG safety regulations, it’s hard to reconcile this effort with PHMSA’s references to this being deregulatory,” Pipeline Safety Trust Executive Director Bill Caram said in an April 29 statement. He urged regulators to focus “on strengthening safety protections for communities near LNG facilities, rather than primarily focusing on operational efficiencies.”

Comments on PHMSA’s proposal are due by July 7.

A History of Accidents

Woodside’s May 8 spill was particularly worrisome because the incident occurred near the Ningaloo Reef, made a World Heritage site in 2011.

“A toxic spill this close to the Ningaloo Reef World Heritage Area or the pristine Scott Reef has the potential to be devastating for marine wildlife, including thousands of species of whales, sharks, fish, turtles and corals,” Australian Senator Peter Whish-Wilson said after the spill was made public at the end of May.

But environmental campaigners aren’t the only ones waving red flags about Australia’s largest independent oil and gas producer.

In March, a worker was crushed by an improperly secured generator on a ship working in Woodside’s Stybarrow oil field, suffering “broken ribs and potentially a punctured lung,” according to Australian news site Boiling Cold.

It was the latest in a series of safety incidents delaying Stybarrow field’s cleanup past a March 2025 regulatory deadline, Boiling Cold noted, including one instance where a 10-ton remotely operated underwater vehicle system plummeted from a crane to the deck of the same ship.

Australian union organizers have begun talking in dire tones about their safety concerns, warning that workers face potentially deadly risks.

“Safety incidents happen in a pyramid effect, where the signs of repeated near-misses, and the signs of repeated breaches of fundamental safety protocols, inevitably lead to another fatality,” Doug Heath, an organizer for Offshore Alliance, a union that represents some of Woodside workers, said earlier this month. “We hate to say that because we should never be saying that something is inevitable, but unless Woodside changes their safety culture, we can see another fatality coming on a Woodside asset.”

In 2023, a contractor at a Woodside-operated offshore oil platform in Australia was killed while “carrying out a high risk task,” trade publication Upstream Online reported at the time.

More recently, on October 3, 2024, a 36-year-old construction contractor died at a Beaumont, Texas, ammonia plant newly acquired by Woodside. He fell to his death while working inside a large tank, when a steel plate supporting his scaffolding caved in, OSHA records show.

“We’ve put in more complaints against Woodside Safety Management than any other oil and gas company over the last 18 months,” Heath, the Australian union organizer, said. “We’ve had a number of incidents, a number of near-misses, a number of injuries. It’s the worst it’s been in 20 years but Woodside is turning a blind eye to it.”

The company’s reported safety data shows a significant rise in its total recordable injuries, which have climbed from 11 in 2010 to 57 last year. While Woodside has also grown significantly over the same period, its “total recordable injury rate,” a standardized number reflecting the average number of injuries experienced by 100 full-time workers in a 50-week year, nearly tripled over the same time, reaching 2.44 per 100 workers last year.

That’s significantly higher than the overall U.S. rate of 0.9 injuries per 100 workers for oil and gas extraction nationwide, the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show.

“The types of recordable injuries we are experiencing are of lower severity, such as lacerations, wounds and soft tissue injuries,” a Woodside spokesperson said in response to questions from DeSmog, emphasizing that safety is a priority for the company.

“We gather these insights due to a strong reporting culture that we continue to improve through various mechanisms,” the spokesperson added. “Specifically, we are working to build upon existing conditions where the people exposed to a higher risk of injury are setup correctly to do their work, and when there is a change, they feel safe and supported to make the safest choice. This takes time to embed with our staff and contractors.”

Woodside’s top management has also emphasized the company’s commitment to safety.

“Our strong performance in areas such as climate, safety, cultural heritage and environment is not only important to Woodside’s reputation and social license to operate,” Woodside’s board Chair Richard Goyder told investors during an April briefing. “It is also essential for securing new business opportunities, managing operational and financial risks, and delivering the strong governance that our stakeholders rightly expect.”

Cadman with the Wilderness Society noted that some of Woodside’s recent incidents involved decommissioning and clean-up work, and warned that companies have greater incentives to cut corners after an oilfield has reached the end of its profitable life.

But, she said, companies should still be held to the same safety and environmental standards during decommissioning as they are when a project is bringing in revenue – and there are still plenty of options to do so. “If these operators want to be getting approval for new projects, they should be made to demonstrate that they’ve been a good corporate actor.”

Risky Business

Woodside has also taken heat for continuing to invest in major new fossil fuel projects like its Louisiana LNG facility — and not just from climate watchdogs.

“Woodside Energy’s final investment decision (FID) on the $17.5 billion Louisiana LNG terminal was a stunner,” trade publication RBN Energy wrote in May. Most LNG projects sign up customers for a strong majority — at least two-thirds — of what they can handle before officially greenlighting construction, RBN noted. Woodside had less than one-sixteenth of Louisiana LNG under contract when it pulled the pin on the $17.5 billion project.

Credit ratings agency S&P Global took a dim view of the company’s apparent gamble, warning that its decision “introduces more inherent volatility into Woodside’s business,” and gives it less of a buffer against falling oil and gas prices or higher-than-projected construction costs.

“It points to the speculative nature of offshore oil and gas activities,” Cadman said.

LNG projects also carry their own particular risks. The industry has been hit by over 100 significant accidents worldwide from 1944 to 2024, a December report from Greenpeace found, including a 2004 explosion in Albania that killed 27 people. Most recently, three workers were killed and two injured at Sempra’s Port Arthur, Texas, LNG project in a scaffolding collapse on April 29.

When regulators allow oil and gas companies to roll the dice, Cadman noted, it’s not just workers, investors, and lenders along for the ride. The rest of us have a lot on the line as well.

“The reality is, climate change is here. It’s real. It’s happening very fast. We are transitioning away from fossil fuels and that transition could happen along a range of scenarios,” she noted. “And one of our real concerns is that these companies like Woodside were never made to pay bonds for their cleanup and so they aren’t putting nearly enough money aside for cleanup.”

“If some of the speculative activities, like expanding into the U.S. with Louisiana, if that doesn’t pay off,” she said, “it’s the decommissioning here that won’t happen.”

“It’s the environment that wears the impact.”