'Pitiful': Landholders offered $50k to host controversial gas project works

The Deed of Option agreements, which the company has been offering to selected landholders in recent months, gives it the right to access a lot for seven years.

It previously offered landholders $1500 to allow it to access the property to conduct a route survey.

Opponents of the project say relatively few landholders have taken up the offer.

Despite that, the company is yet to leverage an Authority to Survey notice granted in 2023, which allows it to enter properties without the landholders' consent.

It is not known if Santos plans to renew the notice, which is due to expire next month.

Liverpool Plains Action Group spokesman and Quirindi farmer Peter Wills said he was aware of a number of smaller landholders who had taken up the new deed of option agreements.

Legal advice obtained by the group cautions against signing.

It advises that the deed would severely restrict the landowners' ability to freely lease, sell, subdivide or dispose of the land.

It also restricts the landowners' right to object to the development of the pipeline even if the project changes.

"The terms of the easement, as currently drafted, place considerable restrictions on the landowner's ability to use, or even move through, the parts of the land within the easement area," the advice says.

Santos did not respond to questions about the deed of option agreements.

Santos satisfied a requirement to commence construction of the project by October this year when it built a laydown area on a property that it acquired at Quipolly in late 2023.

Mr Wills said the group estimated Santos had surveyed only about 20 per cent of the 422-kilometre pipeline route that runs from the Narrabri gas lateral to the Port of Newcastle.

He said he believed that most larger landholders would also snub the new Deed of Option agreements.

"It's a pitiful amount ($50,000) when you consider the value of the properties," he said.

"The further you go down the years into a land access agreement, you have got an environmental assessment that was done in 2007 over your property that might not be enacted until 2030."

"There are landholders in our group who have read the 40 pages and every time they read it reads worse in terms of the restrictions on landholders."

The fate of the Narrabri Gas Project, which is a key supply point for the gas pipeline, remains uncertain following a Federal Court in March that ruled in favour of the Gomeroi People in an appeal against a 2022 decision by a Native Title Tribunal.

In approving the project, the tribunal said its benefits outweighed concerns it would damage the traditional owner's culture, land and waters and worsen climate change.

The court ruled that the tribunal failed to consider the public interest in the project's environmental impact.

"There are a number of passages in the tribunal's reasons which indicate that it did indeed consider it was no part of its function ... to evaluate for itself the environmental impact of (such) a project," Federal Court of Australia chief justice Debra Mortimer said.