Beetaloo Energy: Just add gas – millions in potential data centre revenues

OK, so Beetaloo Energy is sitting on a monster gas resource in the Northern Territory's Beetaloo and MacArthur basins and is just months away from first gas sales to the Northern Territory government.

While that plan is on track, Beetaloo has now set its sights on pulling together a consortium of majors that can collectively create a data centre hub south of Darwin to be powered by Beetaloo's own gas, mind you, and it appears to be getting plenty of buy-in with Beetaloo.

Big players signing MOUs recently.

All right, Alex, firstly, how much land do you need to build a DARPA centre precinct near Darwin? Because these things aren't typically small, right?

So we've secured 185 hectares under an exclusivity with the NT government, which is about enough for one to two gigawatts of data centre.

All right, so I see you've started signing partners up to this plan, so it's not just pie in the sky.

Oil and gas major Halliburton has signed on with an MOU.

What will Halliburton's role be and what does it bring to the table?

So it brings two critical things.

First of all, they can provide an integrated field service plan to drill and frack wells for us, but also critically they can provide power generation into the data centre.

Now, Australian Gas and Infrastructure is a massive gas pipeline player.

Everybody knows them on the East Coast in particular.

They've also signed an MOU with Beedaloo Energy, and I'm guessing they're looking to build a pipeline from your project to the data centre precinct.

Firstly, is that right? And secondly, isn't there already a pipeline going up to the Northern Territory?

So there is existing pipeline connectivity, but we're going to need a much bigger pipeline, and AGRG is proposing to build a 750-kilometre pipeline up to Darwin, which would be much bigger.

Right.

Now, Beetaloo Energy is a gas company, not a data centre operator.

So just sort of walk me through it.

What's Beetaloo's actual role in this thing? And by the way, how much gas would a project like that swallow up?

So data centres use massive amounts of power, and this is about creating a local market for our gas.

At a gigawatt of scale data centre, it would need potentially up to 200 terajoules a day, which is hundreds of millions of dollars a year worth of revenue to us.

And that's really the core focus for us in this place.

Now many people think the Beetaloo gas basin in the Northern Territory is going to revolutionise gas supply in Australia and I note that majors like Inpex and Santos are now starting to muscle in.

Data Centre Project decide when will Beetaloo Energy start producing gas from the region, how much gas and who are you going to sell it to?

We're going to start selling gas this side of Christmas under a contract with the NT government and that'll start supplying about 10 terajoules a day into the local market this year.