Anthropic's $31bn Dalby datacentre runs into a district that remembers the gas bust

The distrust around Dalby has a specific history behind it. When coal seam gas arrived, its high wages drew workers off farms and out of local businesses ^[11]. Because a gas well takes far more labour to set up than to run, the industry then left as quickly as it came, leaving business owners with debts on investments they no longer needed ^[11]. Academics still disagree over whether the region ended up worse off or slightly ahead ^[12]. The datacentre's staffing plan has the same front-loaded shape ^[5].

Against the company's long-term jobs figure, the $31bn budget works out to about $22m per ongoing role ^[1]. Cecil Plains farmer Liza Balmain, who led a long campaign against the gas industry, said she sees "huge similarities" between the two ^[13]. Denver Kanowski lives in a gasfield about 15 minutes' drive from the site ^[22]. "This is the power of money and the power of greed and shortsighted stupidity," he said ^[9]. "I've read this book before," he said ^[10].

Zerra DC, the Singapore-based developer, has argued partly on water, saying the cooling system would draw about as much as an average shopping centre ^[3]. Opposition has grown anyway. Organiser Mordechai Winters says more than 21,500 people have signed his petition in a few weeks, mostly from the area ^[7]. That count equals about 61% of the Western Downs council's population of 35,452, though not every signer lives inside the council area ^[3]. "I was crushed. You know, it's very disappointing that the council and also the government would consider it," Winters said ^[8].

Who approves the project is unsettled. Mayor Andrew Smith said authority over the region's largest ever project should rest with the council, and that the council did not expect the state coordinator general to take it over ^[18]. "We did ask the question, but our understanding is it will stay with local government," he said ^[19]. Then on Friday, the Guardian reported, things changed, when the state announced it would take datacentres out of an existing arrangement ^[20]. We do not know yet whether that moves the Dalby decision away from the council.

In my view, the trade-off for Anthropic and Zerra DC is one of sequencing. A state-run approval may clear faster this quarter. The cost would come later, if residents who already fault both the council and the government ^[8] lose the forum closest to them and take the fight to lawyers instead.

Legal help is already in place. Jo Shulman, chief executive of the Environmental Defenders Office, which has long helped communities fight coal seam gas projects, said datacentre queries to its free legal advice line have risen 250% since January ^[14]. "I would say the datacentre is the new frontier," she said ^[15]. She calls datacentres an essential part of the clean energy transition ^[21], but wants a pause: "We think that there should be a moratorium on any further datacentres, or they risk repeating the same things that we saw with the coal seam gas boom," she said ^[16]. In the United States, according to the Guardian, three-quarters of Americans now oppose datacentres and more than 500 counties have imposed a ban ^[17].