Australia outback gas players eye Northern Territory to skip data centre power queue

The Territory's proposed data centre developments are anchored by shale gas from the Beetaloo sub-basin, Australia's only shale gas province, which lies 500 km (310 miles) south of Darwin and sent its first commercial volumes this week.

"A developer with land and an energy source can begin generation behind the meter, right next to the facility," said Jason Finlay, a partner at Vantage North Group, a consultancy formed this year by former Territory bureaucrats.

"No connection application, no augmentation works, no four-to-eight years' wait on someone else's transmission line," Finlay said, speaking at the South East Asia Australia Offshore & Onshore Conference in Darwin.

Gas producers and advisers promoting Australia's Northern Territory as a home for AI data centres say developers there can bypass grid-connection queues stalling projects in the populous southeast by building their own power generating units.

The pitch from companies positioned to benefit from a data centre build-out comes as Canberra plans to require new data centres from next year to be matched by renewable generation, with natural gas allowed only as a backup.

In the east, "you basically cannot get a connection for a data centre anymore," said Alex Underwood, CEO of Beetaloo Energy BTL.AX, which plans to become one of two producers from the basin.

His company's Beetaloo Digital arm, which plans to supply land and power for data centres, holds exclusive rights from the Territory government for a site 30 km from Darwin, where a 2-gigawatt campus will need about 200 terajoules of gas a day per gigawatt.

Supply is only just underway, with Tamboran Resources TBN.AX turning the tap to start piping 40 TJ a day to Darwin on Tuesday. Beetaloo Energy will add another 15 TJ later this year.