Federal assessment documentation for the Valhalla Gas Exploration Appraisal Program (Valhalla Proposal) has been released for public comment.

Read the documents here, and submit a public comment here.

Comments are due by 11.59pm, Monday 20 July 2026.

The Valhalla Proposal is a major fracking project consisting of up to 20 exploration and appraisal wells being drilled in the Canning Basin in the WA’s northwest.

Assessment process

The Valhalla Proposal is currently being assessed under the federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act). This assessment is separate to the process under state laws (the Environmental Protection Act 1986 (WA)), in which a record of over 8,000 appeals against the Environmental Protection Authority assessment report on the proposal are currently with the Office of the Appeals Convenor.

The federal assessment is looking at potential impacts on the following matters protected under the Act (protected matters):

  • national heritage values of national heritage places,
  • listed threatened species,
  • listed migratory species, and
  • water resources.

The Valhalla Proposal is being assessed by ‘preliminary documentation’, which is one of the assessment pathways available under the EPBC Act. Under this pathway, the proponent must publish its documentation (which includes material submitted when the proposal was referred, as well as additional material the government has required the proponent to prepare) for public comment, and respond to public comments made.

Importance of public comments

A public comment period is one of only a few formal opportunities for the public to get involved in an assessment under the ‘preliminary documentation’ assessment pathway.

Comments are an important part of the assessment process, and will ultimately inform the federal government’s decision on whether to approve this proposal, and if so any conditions to apply.

There are no formal rules around what your comment can include – based on the relevant legal criteria that will be applied to the government’s decision, some topics that could be useful to focus on are:

  • how concerned you or your community are about the proposal;
  • how adequate (current, accurate, complete) the preliminary documentation is to assess the potential impacts of the proposal, and whether the government should ask the proponent to provide more information (e.g. further studies);
  • any new or better information that should be considered in the assessment, for example peer-reviewed research, government reports, or your own on-ground observations of an area or species;
  • direct, indirect and/or cumulative impacts on the protected matters identified above (noting that, while you may have concerns about other impacts of the proposal, the government’s decision will be limited to these specific protected matters);
  • whether proposed avoidance, mitigation and offset measures are adequate to prevent significant impacts on protected matters; or
  • suggestions for what conditions would need to be applied to the proposal, and whether the proposal should be approved or rejected.

Public comments open

The federal assessment of the Valhalla Proposal can be viewed on the EPBC Act Public Portal here. This includes the formal invitation for public comments here, which sets out where the documentation is available and how to make a comment.

The proponent’s assessment documentation for the Valhalla Proposal has been published on its parent company’s website here.

Under the EPBC Act, comments on preliminary documentation are required to be made to the proponent of the project. The proponent is then responsible for reviewing comments, making any necessary updates to its documentation, and providing the updated documentation and copies of the comments to the federal government for a final decision on whether to approve the project. In this case, the proponent Bennett Resources is asking for comments to be provided to it via an online portal on the website of its parent company, the Texan fracking company Black Mountain. The comment portal is here, but there are other options for submitting a comment if you cannot use the portal (as set out in the formal invitation linked above, and on the portal).

Comments are due by 11.59pm, Monday 20 July 2026.

Note: the EPBC Act is currently subject to significant reforms, which may impact the applicability of the information above to other proposals. Please refer to the EPBC Act Public Portal to confirm a proposal’s assessment pathway under the EPBC Act.