Mining, Petroleum And Renewable Energy: Navigating Competing Land Use Rights

Australia’s renewable energy transition is accelerating, with large-scale wind, solar and storage projects being developed across vast areas of regional land. However, many of these regions also sit within prospective or active mining and petroleum basins.

The result is an emerging tension between renewable energy developers seeking long-term, stable land and operationally predictable tenure for generation and storage assets, and resource authority holders with statutory rights to explore for or extract minerals and hydrocarbons beneath, or adjacent, to the same land.

This overlap is common. Mining and petroleum tenements frequently extend across broad geographic areas and can coexist with agricultural land, pastoral leases and other land uses. However, when these tenements intersect with renewable energy projects, they can create significant legal, financial and operational risks.