Natural gas project operator attempts to walk away from environmental offsets

Inpex, which operates the Ichthys LNG project off the coast of Western Australia, has reportedly sought to abandon $30m worth of offset obligations

An attempt by the operator of a $34bn gas project to walk away from environmental offset obligations because it claims its impact was not as big as expected is "radically premature", a legal group has claimed.

The Inpex-operated Ichthys LNG project to extract gas from off the coast of Western Australia, pipe it to a processing plant near Darwin, and then export it - primarily to Japan - received environmental approval in 2011 from the federal Labor government.