As much as Royce Kurmelovs’ new book is about the oil and gas industry, it’s also about how journalists assigned to cover the beat navigate at times complicated relationships with the giant companies and the humans that represent them.

Tracing how the oil and gas industry developed in Australia, and digging up what industry titans like Adelaide’s Reg Sprigg knew about the sector’s contribution to climate change, Slick: Australia’s toxic relationship with Big Oil is a journalistic endeavour and a piece of reflection for the author.

It follows Kurmelovs’ first book, The Death of Holden, which chronicled the closure of the Australian carmaker. He then took to politics with 2016’s Rogue Nation, and then the banking industry with Just Money.

Now with Slick, Kurmelovs – born and raised in SA – hopes to show readers what the oil industry knew and when they knew it.

You’ve been covering this sector for quite a while now. Beyond climate change denial and lobbying tactics, what has surprised you most about the Australian oil and gas industry?

RK: I found some incredible things going through the industry’s own documents and materials – like how when the tobacco industry came under pressure, several US oil companies lent the tobacco guys their labs and helped give the world the cigarette filter.

So I was continually surprised. I think the first thing was the audacity. The second thing was just how far some of these people were thinking into the future – the industry in Australia were aware the burning of fossil fuels was a risk to human health and happiness as far back as the 70s, and their US counterparts, the 60s. The third was just how many people in petroleum are basically gamblers. Which is fine when you’re spending your own money, but when you’re gambling with everyone else’s future, people are going to take issue with that at some point.

As a journalist that covers this sector too, I found the sections touching on how you have to semi-integrate yourself with players in the industry to be quite compelling. Getting close to sources in this way is important, but as you say in the introduction, “freebies are supposed to be frowned upon”. How did you personally navigate this contradiction when writing the book?

RK: This is the nature of immersive and participatory research, particularly when you’re dealing with an industry that isn’t exactly keen on transparency or scrutiny. This is also why in writing the book, you disclose everything through the storytelling process. What’s interesting though is how the genesis of the book started with, as me a precariously employed freelancer who travelled up to Brisbane without a formal commission, walking around this big oil and gas industry conference where all these high powered executives had gathered under one roof in the wake of the Black Summer bushfires and the Lismore flood. It was pretty clear there was a story there, but it took a lot more work to get it out there. By the end, I think I went to four or five of these conferences, and had done considerable field work with climate groups and Indigenous communities.

In Chapter 5, you discuss South Australian Reg Sprigg in-depth. He’s certainly a titan of the industry, especially for South Australia. What do you think Sprigg’s legacy is?

RK: I’m not an authority on Sprigg’s life and career, but I mean he was the guy who helped get Santos off the ground, served as the founding chair of the longest-running Australian oil and gas industry association, and helped found Beach Energy. Since completing the book, I have also learned he was aware there was a risk posed by burning fossil fuels through the greenhouse effect in 1969 – this is the type of thing that should have legal, social and political consequences today. Personally, I would like to know more about what Sprigg knew about the greenhouse effect, when he knew it and where he got that information from. That would solve several mysteries and open several more.

My main observation of Sprigg, the man, was that he was a walking contradiction who appeared to have a tendency to become hyper-fixated on a subject that caught his interest and a habit of extrapolating from partial data to draw his conclusions in fields outside his specialisation. Sometimes these conclusions paid off, other times they were catastrophically wrong – like suggesting we actually need to burn more fossil fuels to ward off a coming ice age. He’d probably have been great fun at a party, though. He seems like a guy who’d ride a motorcycle off a roof into a swimming pool if you told him it couldn’t be done.

Slick: Australia’s toxic relationship with Big Oil by Royce Kurmelovs (UQP) is available now.

Sprigg’s “imperfect grasp of the material” was another point you touched on. Do you think his approach to the information at the time about climate change and global warming/cooling set Australia back?

RK: Do I think Sprigg’s personal views were responsible for fuelling climate denial and misinformation in Australia? No. There were others who took care of that and most of them came later as there was a changing of the guard in the industry’s leadership. Speaking in general terms, I do think he, probably unintentionally, helped shape a corporate culture in an industry group that is already famously stubborn, supremely confident and deeply cynical.

South Australia was the backdrop for that major clash between Extinction Rebellion and the industry in 2023. What was it like to be on the ground as a reporter at the time?

RK: Like most things associated with oil and gas: surreal. It’s worth bearing in mind that, for whatever reason, Extinction Rebellion didn’t turn out in the numbers initially expected, which also meant the protests weren’t as big as they could have been – if you were brave enough, you could probably draw some kind of inference about the “brain drain” from that. What was truly weird was just how quickly a moral panic spiralled into the passage of this hastily drafted set of anti-protest laws that went from a thought bubble to the floor of Parliament in a matter of hours. There’s probably a lesson in that somewhere.

In the year since, the South Australian government has been pushing towards hydrogen. I’m interested in your thoughts on that approach – is it feasible?

RK: Hydrogen’s one of those things that’s been held up as the means to get petroleum companies to move away from fossil fuel extraction into a new, green era. It’s worth bearing in mind, however, that many of the oil and gas people have soured on the idea and are now talking about all sorts of other things like so-called “renewable gas”. I’m only aware of one oil company in the world that has seriously, meaningfully, attempted to change its underlying business and that’s Ørsted in Denmark. Everyone else talks about transition, but that’s about it. The reality is that the people who run these things really like working in oil and gas, and if they changed, they wouldn’t be oil companies any more.

As to whether hydrogen is feasible? That’s a whole other, very important conversation. Broadly, there are two parts to this. The first is that we need hydrogen to make things like glass, steel and fertiliser, but we’re not going to be powering our cars with it or piping it into our homes. How we go about making the hydrogen and where we make it is what matters. Renewable technologies tend to decentralise production, not concentrate it. That raises certain questions. I’d also be watching carefully for any shift in language which suddenly starts talking about making hydrogen from gas or coal. That’s the kind of thing that suggests people want to cut corners because they double checked the price tag and are having second thoughts.

Also in the year, since companies like Santos have been at pains to spruik their environmental credentials (the carbon capture storage project is one example). Is this them caving to pressure from the public and agitators like XR, or is it simply greenwashing?

RK: These sorts of things are just these companies just trying to buy a little more time. That’s all it is, and all it’s ever been – and as I showed in Slick, we have documents showing that this is how they were thinking about the issue. The global oil industry – and in the early days the “global oil industry” was basically the US and UK oil industries – took one look at the research showing how car exhaust was causing smog over Los Angeles, another at the early lawsuits against tobacco companies over cancer risk and started putting two-and-two together. Ever since, they’ve been playing for time. Those with long memories will also recall how, back when coal was king, the coal producers promised to invent “clean coal” and use CCS to keep the industry alive. It never worked out. The same is happening now with oil and gas.

Are you hopeful about the future of the planet after writing this book?

RK: All I know is that giving into despair is the only way to guarantee paralysis. Nothing ever changes.