The company hoping to create one of Australia's largest fruit and vegetable farms will now need the Northern Territory's highest level of environmental assessment before it can proceed.
Fortune Agribusiness, which owns Singleton Station, is proposing to develop a horticultural precinct south of Tennant Creek — growing crops on 3,300 hectares using a staged water licence of 40,000 megalitres a year.
The NT's Environment Protection Authority (NTEPA) said after reviewing the station's referral, along with 98 public submissions, it decided the project required an environmental impact statement — a first for an NT horticultural project.
"Why the EPA has formed a view this needs to be assessed at the highest level is [because] of some key uncertainties around the extent of groundwater-dependent ecosystems," NTEPA chair Paul Vogel said.
"The scale of this project and the size of the water allocation deserves a very high level of public and government agency scrutiny."
Dr Vogel said there was also a "paucity of information" about the potential impact the project could have on Aboriginal cultural values.
Adrian Tomlinson from the Arid Lands Environment Centre said the EPA's decision was appropriate and welcome by his organisation.
"It's an absolutely enormous groundwater licence," he said.
"It's the largest we've contemplated in the NT and possibly Australia, so it does need a different level of consideration to what's gone before it."
Mr Tomlinson said the Singleton project was "defined by risk and uncertainty" and hoped the EPA could properly assess the impact it could have on the region, its people and the environment.
Potential two-year process
Fortune Agribusiness had already started trialling crops on Singleton Station and hoped to start commercial plantings in early 2024.
It would seem those plans have stalled, with Dr Paul Vogel saying the EIS process was likely to take "a couple of years".
Fortune Agribusiness chairman, Peter Wood, said the company would work with the EPA, but said the Singleton project had already gone through plenty of scrutiny.
"They keep talking about uncertainty, but people seem to ignore the nature of our water licence," he said.
"It's staged over a number of years, so even though it's a 40,000ML licence, we only get 12,000ML up front, and we don't get any more [water] if the monitoring of the water table and GDE's (groundwater dependent ecosystems) doesn't meet expectations.
"It'll be 13 years from when we start to when we might fully utilise the 40,000ML. So it's a staged process with a lot of monitoring, and it takes out the uncertainty in my view."
Meanwhile, Singleton's water licence is facing a legal challenge. Mr Wood said six months had passed since the hearings in the Alice Springs Supreme Court, and he hoped an outcome would be known soon.
