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    Santos–Traditional Owner deal in Cooper Basin: access and closure lessons for engineers

    March 17, 2026|

    Reviewed by Tom Sullivan

    Santos–Traditional Owner deal in Cooper Basin: access and closure lessons for engineers

    First reported on Australian Mining

    30 Second Briefing

    Santos has launched the first stage of a “first-of-its-kind” agreement in the Cooper Basin that gives Traditional Owners formal responsibility to manage Country across its oil and gas tenements. The program establishes a Traditional Owner–led land management framework alongside Santos’ existing exploration and production activities, rather than relying solely on company-run heritage surveys. For mining and energy operators, this signals a shift towards co-designed access, monitoring and rehabilitation regimes that may materially affect project approvals, fieldwork scheduling and long-term closure planning in similar onshore basins.

    Technical Brief

    • Framework is being rolled out in staged phases, with this announcement covering the initial implementation stage.
    • For other onshore basins, similar co-management structures could become de facto conditions for social licence and approvals.

    Our Take

    Within the 145 Policy stories in our database, Santos features relatively often in Australia-linked items, signalling that its Cooper Basin operations are a recurring focal point for regulatory and community engagement developments.

    For onshore hydrocarbons in Australia, Cooper Basin–related pieces in our coverage increasingly intersect with Sustainability-tagged content, suggesting that social licence arrangements with Traditional Owners are becoming as material to project risk as subsurface or infrastructure constraints.

    Because the Cooper Basin underpins long-life gas supply into eastern Australia, any novel Traditional Owner agreement there is likely to set reference expectations for future project approvals and expansion negotiations across other onshore basins.

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    Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.

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