Who profits

Meg O’Neill spent almost five years as CEO of Woodside Energy, Australia’s largest oil and gas company. By its 2024 results, Woodside had returned US$9.7 billion to shareholders since its 2022 merger with BHP’s petroleum business. In 2024 alone, the company declared US$2.3 billion in dividends on a US$3.6 billion profit. Her own total annual compensation was approximately US$5.47 million.

In early 2026, she left Woodside for British energy giant BP, where her pay package was valued at approximately £12.2 million in her first year. BP is picking her up for more than double what Woodside paid her.

Woodside, meanwhile, paid A$4.1 billion in all taxes, royalties, and levies to Australian governments in 2024. Chevron made its first Petroleum Resource Rent Tax payment in August 2025, after sixteen-plus years of LNG exports, and the PRRT component of that A$4.1 billion is not separately itemised. Australians remain unsure how much of that total is the resource-specific tax designed to ensure public benefit.

This is not a story about a corrupt company. Woodside is not doing anything illegal. It is doing what its shareholders are paying it to do: extract Australian gas at minimum cost to itself, and return the maximum possible cash to its owners.

The question this article asks is who those owners are, what they receive, and what Australians receive in exchange.

01The companies extracting Australian gas

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

Three of the five companies that dominate Australian LNG, Chevron, Shell and INPEX, are foreign multinationals. The resource is Australian; the tax collected on it is small beside the wealth extracted.

02Woodside Energy: dividends over PRRT

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’.

Correction, 7 October 2026. The opening of this article said Woodside’s shareholders received US$9.7 billion in dividends over Meg O’Neill’s five years as CEO. Woodside’s full-year 2024 results put US$9.7 billion as the total returned to shareholders since its 2022 merger with BHP’s petroleum business, as this section states, not a total for her time as CEO. The opening now says so. It also said she spent five years as CEO; she held the role from August 2021 until early 2026, so it now says almost five years.

Correction, 8 October 2026. The opening also said Woodside’s shareholders were "more than half" foreign institutional investors, and no reference carried it. Woodside’s 2024 annual report ¹⁹ gives its shareholders by registered address, not by who owns the shares in the end, and does not support the claim, so it is cut from the opening and from the figure beneath it.

03The CEO who left for double the pay

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.

04Chevron: first PRRT payment after sixteen years

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 and 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.

05Santos: an Australian company listed on the ASX

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 what the company filing calls a ‘significant personal stake’ in its performance.

Correction, 8 October 2026. The heading of this section said Santos has global shareholders. No reference in this article says who holds Santos shares, so the heading now says only what the section documents: Santos is an Australian company listed on the ASX.

06Shell and INPEX: the foreign companies that paid almost nothing

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.

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 a Japanese company. 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.

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. INPEX, a Japanese company, pays minimal tax. Japanese traders on-sell it for profit. On this outlet’s reading, that profit stays in Japan.

Correction, 8 October 2026. This section said INPEX is majority-owned by JOGMEC, an arm of the Japanese government, and called it the Japanese government’s extraction company. Neither is supported: no reference in this article gives INPEX’s ownership, and INPEX’s own shareholder page (inpex.com/english/ir/shareholder/stock.html, opened 8 October 2026, figures as of 30 June 2026) lists the Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry as the largest holder of common shares at 23.81 per cent, and as the holder of the one special class share, and shows no majority holder. It now says INPEX is a Japanese company and no more. The sentences saying Shell’s profits flow to global shareholders through its The Hague headquarters, and that Australians do not own Shell, are also cut, with the matching clause in the note on reference ⁷: neither reference says who holds Shell’s shares.

07Who the extractors are and what Australia keeps

Some of the companies that extract Australia’s gas are foreign multinationals.

Woodside and Santos are ASX-listed. Chevron Australia is part of the US company Chevron Corporation, Shell is a Dutch-British multinational, and INPEX is a Japanese company.

When dividends are declared, they flow to wherever the shareholders are. The references in this article do not document who holds the shares of each company.

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.

The resource is Australian. Chevron, Shell and INPEX, three of the five dominant companies, are foreign multinationals. The taxes collected are negligible relative to the wealth extracted.

To summarise what the gas rort means for ordinary Australians: the resource is Australian. Chevron, Shell and INPEX, three of the five dominant companies, are foreign multinationals. 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.

Correction, 8 October 2026. This article said the gas companies are "mostly foreign-owned" and that the profits flow to foreign shareholders, in the caption, the opening quotation, this section and the closing summary; none of its references carries that. It now says what they document: Chevron, Shell and INPEX, three of the five dominant companies, are foreign multinationals. The paragraph above on who owns each company, the closing summary line that called INPEX majority-owned by the Japanese government, and the clause that said Woodside’s dividends go mostly to foreign shareholders, are cut or reworded for the same reason. The subtitle, which said the gas is mostly extracted by foreign multinationals and that their profits flow offshore, now says only that three of the five dominant companies are foreign multinationals. The opening line of this section and the sentence on retained earnings, which assumed the same foreign owners, are replaced, and the note on reference ¹⁰ that repeated the JOGMEC claim is cut. The heading of this section, which said the money goes "offshore and out", now reads "Who the extractors are and what Australia keeps", because the section does not document where the money goes.

08What remains: the decommissioning liability

There is one more thing worth knowing about who profits from Australian gas: what gets left behind 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 when projects face insolvency or abandonment, as already happened with the Laminaria and Corallina oil fields, taxpayers inherit the liability.

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

Correction, 8 October 2026. This section, the brief and the key facts said analysts estimate taxpayers could face 60 to 70 per cent of a decommissioning bill of up to A$66 billion, citing an Australia Institute page that carries neither figure. They now give the government-commissioned estimate of A$66.8 billion in inflation-adjusted terms ¹⁸ and IEEFA’s finding that taxpayers could bear up to 58 per cent of such costs ¹⁷. The closing summary no longer says taxpayers are in line for the majority of it. The illustration at the head of the article is aligned the same way. Its decommissioning panel earlier showed A$60-66 billion and 60-70 per cent and now reads A$66.8 billion and up to 58 per cent; its closing line no longer puts a A$60 billion bill wholly on taxpayers; and the figures it showed that this article does not state (INPEX exports of A$21 billion, and PRRT collected of A$1.98 billion falling to A$1 billion by 2028-29) are replaced with INPEX’s A$36 billion of revenue and under A$500 million of income tax, and the A$4.1 billion and A$5.1 billion paid by Woodside and Chevron in 2024, all stated above. Its description now says what it shows.

09The rort

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. 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.

And behind all of it: a decommissioning liability of A$66.8 billion in inflation-adjusted terms, with IEEFA finding that taxpayers could bear up to 58 per cent of such costs. ^{17 18}

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.

If it’s a rort, we cover it.