A$0 corporate income tax over 10 consecutive years
- Operator
- Santos
- Project
- GLNG (Gladstone)
- Period
- FY 2014-15 → FY 2023-24
- Income or context
- A$47.0 B — total income declared to the ATO over those 10 years
Volume IV · Tax-paid record
§ IV
When the buyer pays more tax than the seller.
Japan's annual tax on imported gas — A$1.8 billion — exceeds Australia's entire Petroleum Resource Rent Tax. Three of the largest projects on Australia's coast paid no corporate tax for years on tens of billions of declared income. Every figure on this page is from the ATO, Treasury, or a company instalment statement; the source for each is named under the figure that uses it.
§ A The headline number
Japan's tax on Australian gas is bigger than Australia's.
Four figures, drawn at the same scale, from the same April 2026 Australia Institute report and IEEFA's 2025 LNG-resale analysis. The bars are not normalised, weighted or animated. They are the reported annual flows.
Sources. Denniss, Campbell & Saunders, Taxing gas in Australia and Japan, Australia Institute, 21 April 2026 · IEEFA, How Japan cashes in on resales of Australian LNG, 2025 · ATO PRRT statistics, FY 2023-24.
§ B Three receipts
What the ATO Corporate Tax Transparency report shows.
Three operators, three projects, three independently-verifiable lines of the public record. Each card cites the dataset name, the operator's ABN-linked entity, and the years the figure spans.
A$0 corporate tax + PRRT, combined over 6 consecutive years
- Operator
- Inpex
- Project
- Ichthys LNG (Darwin)
- Period
- FY 2017-18 → FY 2022-23
- Income or context
- A$43.0 B — total income across those 6 years
August 2025 first-ever PRRT instalment over 16 years after first gas
- Operator
- Chevron
- Project
- Gorgon + Wheatstone (WA)
- Period
- First PRRT: August 2025
- Income or context
- First gas: 2009 (Gorgon) — Combined investment across both projects: ≈ A$135 B
The ATO Corporate Tax Transparency dataset is published annually under s 3C of the Taxation Administration Act 1953. Each entity is identified by ABN. Multi-year figures are line-summed, not estimated.
§ C The map
Six of Australia's ten major LNG facilities pay no royalties.
Royalties are levied by states. The Commonwealth has no royalty for offshore production — only the PRRT. Six of Australia's ten LNG facilities are Commonwealth-water projects: state royalty does not apply. The other four are Queensland's onshore coal-seam-gas-fed plants, where state royalty does apply but the PRRT does not.
6 of 10 in Commonwealth waters — no royalty, PRRT only
3 of 10 QLD onshore — state royalty, no PRRT
1 of 10 NWS — grandfathered royalty + PRRT (pre-1985)
01 North West Shelf Woodside · WA first gas 1989 Royalty + PRRT (grandfathered)
02 Pluto LNG Woodside · WA first gas 2012 $0 royalty · PRRT only
03 Gorgon Chevron · WA first gas 2016 $0 royalty · PRRT only
04 Wheatstone Chevron · WA first gas 2017 $0 royalty · PRRT only
05 Prelude FLNG Shell · WA first gas 2019 $0 royalty · PRRT only
06 Ichthys LNG Inpex · NT first gas 2018 $0 royalty · PRRT only
07 Darwin LNG Santos · NT first gas 2006 $0 royalty · PRRT only
08 Queensland Curtis (QCLNG) Shell · QLD first gas 2014 QLD royalty · no PRRT
09 Australia Pacific (APLNG) ConocoPhillips · QLD first gas 2015 QLD royalty · no PRRT
10 Gladstone LNG (GLNG) Santos · QLD first gas 2015 QLD royalty · no PRRT
Six of Australia's ten major LNG facilities sit in Commonwealth waters — federal offshore. State royalty regimes do not apply; the only resource-rent instrument is the federal PRRT. The North West Shelf is the lone exception, grandfathered into a 1985 royalty arrangement. § D explains why the PRRT, in practice, has collected very little from those six.
Source. Geoscience Australia · APPEA project register · state royalty regimes (WA Petroleum (Submerged Lands) Royalty Regulations, QLD Petroleum and Gas (Production and Safety) Act 2004).
§ D Why so many zeros
A$284 billion in unrecouped PRRT deductions, growing faster than inflation.
The PRRT is, in name, a 40-per-cent super-profits tax. In practice, a balance-sheet item — accumulated, uplifted, transferable deductions — has grown to a size that defers PRRT liability indefinitely for most offshore LNG projects. This is the balance, and the rate at which it has grown.
A$284 B unrecouped PRRT deductions sitting on industry balance sheets, end of FY 2023-24
Each unrecouped PRRT deduction is uplifted annually — at the long-term bond rate plus 5 to 15 percentage points, depending on cost class. Compounded, an exploration cost can grow at ≈18 % a year, faster than inflation. The balance accumulates against future PRRT liability with no time limit, and (post-2019) transfers between projects under common ownership.
Uplift
Project costs that aren't immediately deductible carry forward at LTBR + 5 pp (general expenditure) or LTBR + 15 pp (exploration). Compounded annually, an exploration cost grows at ≈18 % a year — faster than inflation, faster than most depreciation schedules.
No expiry
There is no time limit. A deduction lodged in 1988 can still be carried forward in 2026, uplifted every year in between. The deduction balance grows, the PRRT liability shrinks.
Transferable
Since 2019, exploration deductions can be transferred between projects under common ownership. A 2017 Treasury review (Callaghan) found this enabled material profit-shifting between PRRT-paying and pre-production projects in the same group.
Sources. ATO PRRT statistics (annual) · Treasury, Petroleum Resource Rent Tax Review — Final Report (Callaghan, 2017) · Petroleum Resource Rent Tax Assessment Act 1987, ss 33 (uplift), 45A–45D (transferability).
§ E The full ledger
Every row, with the source it came from.
Reduced to lines we can trace to a primary source. The right-hand 'tax / income' bar shows the ratio of total tax (corporate + PRRT) to declared income — almost always under 1 %, often 0 %.
| Operator | Project | Period | Income (A$ B) | Corp tax | PRRT | Tax / income | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Santos | GLNG + Cooper Basin | FY 14-15 → FY 23-24 · 10 yrs | $47.0B | $0 | $0 | 0.00% | ATO TT · all years |
| Inpex | Ichthys LNG (Darwin) | FY 17-18 → FY 22-23 · 6 yrs | $43.0B | $0 | $0 | 0.00% | ATO TT · 2017-2023 |
| Chevron | Gorgon + Wheatstone | Aug 2025 instalment | — | — | — | n/a | Chevron AU · Aug 2025 |
| Shell Energy AU | Prelude + QGC | FY 2022-23 | $14.2B | $0 | $0 | 0.00% | ATO TT · 2022-23 |
| Woodside | NWS + Pluto + Scarborough | FY 2022-23 | $17.8B | $1,620M | $460M | 11.69% | ATO TT · 2022-23 |
| ExxonMobil | Bass Strait (Gippsland) | FY 13-14 → FY 17-18 · 5 yrs | $42.0B | $0 | $0 | 0.00% | ATO TT · 2013-2018 |
| ExxonMobil | Bass Strait (Gippsland) | FY 2022-23 | $13.4B | $1,230M | $305M | 11.46% | ATO TT · 2022-23 |
| ALL PROJECTS | Total Commonwealth PRRT | FY 2023-24 | — | — | $1,500M | n/a | ATO PRRT · 2023-24 |
| ALL PROJECTS | Total Commonwealth PRRT | FY 2021-22 (peak) | — | — | $2,000M | n/a | ATO PRRT · 2021-22 |
Notes on the data. Income is the figure declared to the ATO (gross revenue less GST), not necessarily project revenue. Corporate tax is income tax paid in the year of the disclosure. PRRT applies to most offshore Commonwealth projects and to NWS, but not to onshore CSG-LNG. Multi-year rows aggregate the figures across the years stated. Earlier drafts of this page included rows for ConocoPhillips Australia, Origin Energy, Sinopec, BHP Petroleum and QGC standalone — they have been removed pending re-verification.
§ F What now
If this is your first time seeing the ratio, that's the design.
The ATO transparency dataset, the Australia Institute's 2026 report, and the company instalment statements above are all public record. They are not on the lobby's website. They are not in the lobby's full-page newspaper ads. We have not redacted, reformatted, or recoloured them.