Petroleum and Gas

This bill updates Queensland's gas laws to regulate hydrogen and other renewable gases alongside traditional natural gas. It creates a 'covered gas' category that includes hydrogen, biomethane, synthetic methane and gas blends, and establishes a clear licensing pathway for hydrogen pipelines. The changes support Queensland's renewable hydrogen industry, which could be worth over $33 billion by 2040.

This bill requires large mining and gas projects in Queensland to share the benefits with the regional towns near them. It bans future projects from staffing their entire operational workforce as fly-in fly-out (FIFO), makes it illegal to discriminate against local residents when hiring, and requires every project to do a social impact assessment. It also permanently bans underground coal gasification (UCG), a controversial gas-extraction method.

This bill establishes Resources Safety and Health Queensland (RSHQ) as an independent statutory body to regulate safety and health across Queensland's coal mining, mineral mining, quarrying, explosives, and petroleum and gas industries. It separates the safety regulator from the department that promotes industry growth, responding to the coal workers' pneumoconiosis (black lung disease) inquiry that found the regulator lacked independence. The bill also creates an independent Commissioner for Resources Safety and Health and gives the Work Health and Safety prosecutor responsibility for prosecuting serious safety offences.

This bill makes wide-ranging changes to Queensland's resources, energy, and water laws. It introduces industrial manslaughter offences for the mining and resources sector, reforms how the State manages mine rehabilitation and abandoned mines, tightens scrutiny of who can hold resource authorities, extends energy consumer protections, and increases transparency of water infrastructure charges in South East Queensland.

This bill reforms the governance of Queensland's mining and resources safety regulator (RSHQ), expands the Land Access Ombudsman's dispute resolution role while keeping it government-funded, and streamlines mining tenement administration. It responds to a 2025 independent review that found gaps in RSHQ's oversight, accountability and enforcement.

This bill makes wide-ranging amendments across the Natural Resources, Mines and Energy portfolio. It reforms mineral and petroleum exploration permits with a 15-year cap, strengthens water compliance penalties, introduces dispute resolution for state land sublease disputes, streamlines Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land administration, and supports the establishment of CleanCo as a government-owned clean energy generator.

This bill protects the Condamine Alluvium, a large underground water aquifer in southern Queensland's Darling Downs, from potential harm caused by coal seam gas (CSG) extraction. It introduces mandatory water quality conditions for new CSG wells, expands landholder compensation rights for ground subsidence, and requires gas companies to get landholder agreement before drilling directional wells.

This bill creates a new pooled Financial Provisioning Scheme that makes mining companies share the cost of protecting Queensland from unrehabilitated mine sites. It also requires every mine to prepare a binding Progressive Rehabilitation and Closure Plan with enforceable milestones, audited every three years.

This bill sets up a new independent Land Access Ombudsman to help landholders and resource companies resolve disputes about the agreements that govern mining, petroleum and gas activity on private land. It also gives the Land Court power to decide these disputes and preserves technical mining rules that were due to expire.

This bill reverses a set of yet-to-commence changes to Queensland's resource laws that would have reduced the public's right to object to mining projects and weakened protections for farmers and rural landholders. It restores community objection rights in the Land Court, writes protections for homes, schools and key farm infrastructure into primary legislation, and removes ministerial powers to grant mining leases over land without the landholder's consent.

This bill reshapes how Queensland landholders and resource companies resolve disputes over mining and gas activity on private land, and modernises water planning laws to address climate change, First Nations cultural values, and urgent water quality emergencies. It bundles these changes with a large set of streamlining amendments to eight resource and water Acts.

This bill overhauls Queensland's environmental regulation across multiple domains. It introduces ERA codes as a simpler way to regulate lower-risk environmental activities, creates a single tourism permission for operators working across parks and forests, strengthens enforcement powers for environmental and koala habitat offences, and improves protections for bore owners affected by resource operations.

This bill creates a new Rehabilitation Commissioner to independently oversee mine site rehabilitation in Queensland, strengthens the residual risk framework for managing former resource sites after mining companies hand back their environmental authorities, and establishes a dedicated fund to manage the payments mining companies make towards the long-term costs of looking after those sites.

This bill overhauls Queensland's framework for managing the coexistence of resources, renewable energy and agricultural industries. It creates a new system for assessing and compensating CSG-induced subsidence damage to farmland, broadens Queensland's coexistence institutions to cover renewable energy, modernises the Financial Provisioning Scheme for mine rehabilitation, and streamlines regulatory processes across more than a dozen resources-related Acts.

This bill overhauls safety and health laws for Queensland's mining, quarrying, petroleum and gas, and explosives industries. It responds to the Brady Review of fatal mining accidents and the Coal Mining Board of Inquiry by introducing critical control requirements, mandatory professional development for safety roles, stronger enforcement tools, and clearer industrial manslaughter liability for labour hire and contractor arrangements.

This bill overhauls how Queensland charges royalties on petroleum production, replacing the old wellhead value method with a simpler volume-based model from 1 October 2020. It also brings mineral and petroleum royalty administration under the Taxation Administration Act 2001, creating a consistent framework with state taxes.

This bill makes changes across five unrelated areas of law: validating historically granted mining leases, clarifying petroleum lease renewal rules, strengthening water restriction enforcement in South East Queensland, protecting water providers' cybersecurity information from mandatory public disclosure, and repealing the never-commenced Personalised Transport Ombudsman Act 2019.

This bill creates Queensland's first mandatory biofuels targets, requiring larger fuel retailers to ensure 2 per cent of their regular petrol sales are ethanol or other biobased petrol, and fuel wholesalers to ensure 0.5 per cent of diesel sales are biodiesel or other renewable diesel. The mandate is designed to grow Queensland's biofuels industry, create regional jobs, and cut transport emissions while protecting consumer choice by excluding premium unleaded petrol from the target.

This bill creates a new Financial Provisioning Scheme for Queensland's mining and energy sector, replacing the old financial assurance system. It establishes a pooled fund where companies pay risk-based contributions, and introduces enforceable Progressive Rehabilitation and Closure Plans to ensure mined land is progressively restored during and after mining operations.

This bill makes wide-ranging amendments to Queensland's mineral resources, petroleum, and water laws. It reforms how landholders and resource companies resolve compensation disputes, requires climate change and Indigenous cultural values to be formally considered in water planning, creates temporary access to strategic water reserves, and gives the government emergency powers to address urgent water quality threats.

This bill updates multiple regulatory frameworks within Queensland's Natural Resources, Mines and Energy portfolio. It strengthens explosives safety and security, protects Cape York Peninsula heritage land from mining, modernises State land compliance powers, facilitates electronic conveyancing, improves gas safety regulation, and enhances Indigenous land management options.

This bill modernises the management of Queensland's state land, place naming, and resource authority obligations. It streamlines how reserves and trust lands are administered, gives trustees more autonomy, overhauls the place naming process to allow faster removal of offensive names, and requires resource companies to pay local government rates as a condition of their authority.

This bill tightens the environmental assessment of underground water taken by mining and petroleum projects, improves protections for landholders whose water bores are damaged by resource activities, and fixes gaps in how local councils enforce heritage laws. It also creates a transitional 'associated water licence' process for mining projects that were partway through approval when Queensland's 2014 water reforms commenced.

This bill creates a dedicated Mining and Resources Coroner who must investigate and hold mandatory public inquests into all accidental deaths at coal mines, mines, quarries, and petroleum and gas sites in Queensland. It implements the government's election commitment to increase oversight of mining-related fatalities and ensure families receive answers about how their loved ones died.

This bill amends coal mining safety laws and several resources Acts. It provides practical exceptions to the requirement that safety-critical position holders at coal mines must be directly employed by the mine operator, and creates a rent deferral scheme for critical minerals mining leases.

This bill implements 2019-20 Queensland Budget revenue measures across land tax, payroll tax, and petroleum royalties. It raises the payroll tax exemption threshold to help smaller businesses, introduces a higher payroll tax rate for large employers, increases land tax on large corporate landholdings and foreign owners, lifts the petroleum royalty rate, and provides a payroll tax discount for regional employers.

This bill restructures the GasFields Commission Queensland to clearly separate its strategic board from its day-to-day management, and to allow a part-time chairperson. It also makes it easier for biodiscovery businesses to on-license the use of native biological material, and fixes a technical gap in how port planning overlays apply to development.

This bill undoes several water law changes that the previous government passed in 2014 but which had not yet taken effect. It puts ecologically sustainable development principles back into the purpose of the Water Act 2000, removes 'water development options' that would have given large infrastructure proponents an early exclusive claim over water, and removes the ability to declare 'designated watercourses' where a water licence would not be needed. It also fixes a 2005 technical mistake in setting up the Lower Herbert Water Management Authority and confirms that existing river improvement trusts continue to operate.

This bill is an omnibus package that makes changes across nine Queensland laws in the natural resources and mines portfolio. It strengthens explosives security, modernises gas safety, protects two Cape York properties from mining, gives Indigenous communities more flexibility over land and social housing, and updates state land compliance powers and property titling.