Who profits

Five companies dominate Australia’s LNG export sector. Their ownership, revenues, profits, and tax records are a matter of public record — though the public record requires significant effort to assemble, because Australia’s gas taxation and disclosure regime is considerably less transparent than comparable jurisdictions.

Woodside Energy is Australia’s largest oil and gas company, and the only major LNG producer that is Australian-based and ASX-listed. In 2024 it reported:

EBITDA: US$9.3 billion — a 70 per cent EBITDA margin. Operating revenue: US$13.2 billion. Total dividends declared: US$2.3 billion — fully franked, at the top of its 80 per cent payout target. Total returned to shareholders since merging with BHP’s petroleum business in 2022: US$9.7 billion.

Its 2024 Australian tax and royalty payments — across all tax types, including company income tax, payroll tax, fringe benefits tax, and royalties — totalled A$4.1 billion. Woodside has paid PRRT since August 2025. The PRRT component is not separately disclosed in this figure.

Woodside’s half-year 2025 result continued the pattern: underlying NPAT of US$1.26 billion, with the CEO describing a ‘world-class business rewarding shareholders with strong dividends today’.

Meg O’Neill’s departure for BP in early 2026 is a matter of public record, and it illuminates something important about how the Australian gas industry values its senior executives relative to the rest of the world.

At Woodside, O’Neill earned approximately US$5.47 million annually — a base salary of approximately A$2.2 million plus bonuses and equity. At BP, her package is valued at approximately £12.2 million in her first year alone, including a base salary of £1.6 million, pension benefits of £458,000, and additional awards compensating for share vesting she would have received had she remained at Woodside.

BP is paying her to replace awards worth approximately £8.3 million that she forfeited by leaving Woodside. The market valuation of her skills — built substantially on managing Australian gas assets — flows to a British company and its global shareholders.

Chevron is an American multinational headquartered in San Ramon, California. Through its Australian subsidiaries it operates the Gorgon and Wheatstone LNG projects in Western Australia — two of the largest LNG developments on earth.

In 2024, Chevron Australia paid A$5.1 billion in combined taxes, royalties, and levies — making it the fourth-largest company income taxpayer in Australia for the second consecutive year. Its income tax liability for 2024 was A$2.9 billion.

And in August 2025, it made its first-ever Petroleum Resource Rent Tax payment. The first. Ever. After more than sixteen years of Australian LNG exports.

Chevron’s position is legally correct. The PRRT is designed to apply only after a project has recovered all its capital costs and achieved a defined economic return. Gorgon and Wheatstone were enormous capital investments — US$54 billion between the two of them, by some estimates. The PRRT rules, as designed, meant that tax did not flow until those costs were recovered.

But this also means that for the entire period from first LNG production — from the first cargo shipped, from the first billion in export revenue — through every year of the Ukraine war windfall, through every year of record profits — Chevron paid no petroleum resource rent tax on those projects. The special tax designed to ensure Australians benefit from their gas produced nothing from Gorgon and Wheatstone until August 2025.

Santos is formally an Australian company, listed on the ASX, with operations spanning Australia, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, and North America. In 2024 it reported underlying net profit of US$1.2 billion on sales revenue of US$5.4 billion. It declared dividends of US 23.3 cents per share — equivalent to approximately 40 per cent of free cash flow.

Santos has paid some PRRT from its Western Australian operations since approximately 2019, distinguishing it from the major offshore LNG projects. But its Queensland operations — the GLNG project at Gladstone, which exports coal seam gas — have a different tax treatment, with Queensland state royalties applying to Queensland gas production.

Santos CEO Kevin Gallagher’s total compensation is approximately US$5.57 million annually. He directly owns approximately 0.076 per cent of the company — worth approximately A$70 million at current share prices — giving him, as a company filing notes, a ‘significant personal stake’ in its performance.

Shell operates the QGC LNG project — one of the three Gladstone export terminals — and the Prelude floating LNG facility off the coast of Western Australia.

For the eight years to 2022, Shell’s QGC subsidiary avoided paying income tax on approximately A$25 billion of income. This is not illegal. It reflects carried-forward losses, capital allowances, and the deduction structures available under Australian tax law.

Shell has acknowledged, in communications with shareholders and analysts, that its Prelude floating LNG project will never pay PRRT. Not that it has not paid yet — that it will not pay. In a 2013 filing, Shell projected that Prelude would pay A$12 billion in taxes over its project life. That projection has not been maintained.

In 2024, Shell’s Australian operations paid approximately A$482 million in royalties, fees, and infrastructure contributions. Shell is a Dutch-British multinational. Its profits flow to global shareholders through its The Hague headquarters. Australians do not own Shell.

INPEX is the single most striking example of how the Australian gas taxation system fails its citizens.

INPEX is the majority owner and operator of the Ichthys LNG project in Darwin — one of the world’s largest LNG developments. It is majority-owned by JOGMEC, an arm of the Japanese government. It exports approximately 9 million tonnes of LNG per year — more gas than is used by households and businesses in New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia combined.

ATO transparency data shows that INPEX’s Australian entities recorded more than A$36 billion in revenue over eleven financial years while paying less than A$500 million in combined income tax. In FY2023 — a year of elevated global gas prices — they recorded A$9+ billion in Australian revenue. Their taxable income that year: A$23.5 million.

To put it bluntly, if we can reduce our income tax expense by 1% out of the ¥900 billion, profit will increase by around ¥10 billion.INPEX, Shareholder presentation, February 2025

Meanwhile, Japanese companies are reselling the Australian gas they buy from INPEX and other producers for profits exceeding A$1 billion a year. The resource leaves Australia as free gas. The Japanese government’s extraction company pays minimal tax. Japanese traders on-sell it for profit. The profit stays in Japan.

The ownership structure of Australia’s gas industry means that the bulk of the wealth generated from Australian resources does not stay in Australia.

Woodside is ASX-listed but has a substantial foreign institutional shareholder base. Santos is similar. Chevron is entirely US-owned. Shell is Dutch-British. INPEX is Japanese-government-majority-owned.

When dividends are declared, they flow to wherever the shareholders are. When profits are not paid as dividends — when they are retained or reinvested — the retained earnings accrue to the same foreign owners.

The gas industry employs 16,200 people in Australia — 0.11 per cent of the workforce. It does not provide mass employment. It does not generate substantial domestic economic multiplier effects. It extracts, liquefies, and ships. The extraction fee Australians collect for providing this resource from their own territory — through the PRRT — is less than the beer excise.

To summarise what the gas rort means for ordinary Australians: the resource is Australian. The companies extracting it are mostly foreign-owned. The profits flow to foreign shareholders. The taxes collected are negligible relative to the wealth extracted. The executives who manage the extraction are paid tens of millions of dollars. And when Australia’s gas export CEO leaves for a British company, BP pays her more than double her Australian salary for the expertise she built on Australian assets.

There is one last element of who profits from the Australian gas industry that deserves attention: what is left when the profits stop.

Every LNG platform, pipeline, processing facility, and export terminal must eventually be decommissioned — dismantled, removed, and the environment restored. This is a requirement under Australian law and international maritime obligations.

Companies that paid minimal resource tax during the productive decades of their projects will be able to use their closure costs to reduce the PRRT they would otherwise owe during wind-down. And to the extent that some projects face insolvency or abandonment — as already occurred with the Laminaria and Corallina oil fields — taxpayers inherit the liability.

The industry extracts. It pays almost no resource tax. The executives are rewarded with packages built on Australian assets. And then the industry leaves — and if the cleanup bill is too large, that stays with Australians too.

The question this series asked from Article 1 is: where does the money go? This article answers it with names and numbers drawn from public filings, ATO transparency data, and company reports.

Woodside: US$3.6 billion profit, US$2.3 billion in dividends, mostly to foreign shareholders. CEO departed for double the pay at BP.

Santos: US$1.2 billion profit, US 23.3 cents per share in dividends.

Chevron: A$2.9 billion income tax liability in 2024, first PRRT payment after 16 years.

Shell: A$25 billion in income from QGC over eight years, minimal income tax paid, Prelude acknowledged to never pay PRRT.

INPEX: A$36 billion in revenue over eleven years, less than A$500 million in income tax, zero royalties, zero PRRT, majority owned by the Japanese government.

And behind all of it: a decommissioning liability of up to A$66 billion, with taxpayers in line for the majority of it.

Article 5 of this series asks how the political system came to protect this arrangement. The answer involves money, and it involves the same companies documented above.