Australia’s north-west reefs teem with life – but they are also at the centre of a massive fossil fuel expansion

Marine life in Scott Reef, a ‘coral reef paradise’ off Western Australia’s coast. Woodside Energy wants to drill into the Browse basin around it, particularly its Torosa gas fields, where wells are planned within 3km of the reef. Photograph: Alex Westover and Wendy Mitchell/Greenpeace

Australia’s next wave of fossil fuel expansion is planned for environments far from where most people will ever see it. Places like Scott Reef.

Once part of an interconnected coral ecosystem that rivalled the Great Barrier Reef in scale, Scott Reef now sits in a remnant group of atolls near the edge of the Australian continental shelf, nearly 300km from its sparsely populated north-west coast.