Voice of Real Australia: Push to fire up El Dorado excitement included free steaks

It was the dry season in 2017 when a group of journalists were convinced to join a tour to an unremarkable spot in the Northern Territory outback.

None of us knew what we were getting into.

Origin Energy wanted our help to spread the word about the wealth lying far underground.

Oceans of natural gas lay kilometres under our feet trapped inside layers of shale rocks - or so they said.

It took a lot of imagination to see the dusty Beetaloo as the future of Australia's energy needs.

The brown coal mines of the Latrobe Valley in Victoria were easier to understand.

The hydro power of the Snowy scheme, that was man-made.

I'd even seen nuclear power plants in the US, no-one there seemed to be fussed about them.

Origin had produced a printed book with handy graphics and pictures to explain what they were about to do in the wilds of the NT.

Most of the journalists were flown by Origin to Darwin, an overnight stay and another flight to Daly Waters, and then by bus to Amungee.

A long way to see not very much.

I met the gathering at Daly Waters after driving the three hours down from Katherine, where I edited the local paper at the time.

A bus took us to two hectares hacked out of the wilderness which looked pretty much the same as thousands of square kilometres of featureless NT.

They sat us under a gazebo and supplied bottles of water as we alighted at the site of their capped well in this middle of nowhere.

The capped well was not that interesting, a few photos and back to the shade.

Then Origin's former chief geologist David Close produced a a fragment of the Beetaloo shale rock for us to touch and feel.

It usually sat on his desk.

It hadn't seen the light of day for a billion years, he said.

I handled it gingerly, afraid it was going to combust in the sunlight.

It didn't.

Far underground there were thick layers of these rocks, we were told.

Gas was trapped in their porous structure and could easily be released by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking for short.

Squirting a liquid into the shale under pressure released the gas which rose to the surface to be harvested.

This fracking process has been applied successfully for many years in the US and other spots around the world, we were told.

Over the years since, we have been told a lot of other things about fracking, but back then we were innocents.

This one well has been drilled, intersected the shale at depth, found gas and was capped.

Now Origin wanted to come back to drill a lot more test wells, as they later did.

Then the bus was fired up and we were taken the 50 kilometres back to Daly Waters to talk with some fans of the proposed development.

Origin shouted us a plate-sized steak cooked on an outdoor barbecue at this iconic pub, that was easier to understand.

In the intervening years Origin has spent many millions proving its belief there is enough gas in the Beetaloo to supply Australia's domestic needs for 200 years.

Then this week they sold out.

After all these years championing the riches of the Beetaloo - and it's not easy to be pushing a fossil fuel these days - it came as a shock.

Origin Energy has offloaded its stake in the gas-rich Beetaloo Basin to a so-called junior explorer Tamboran Resources backed by Texan rich lister Bryan Sheffield.

I believe those permits they bought included EP98, where we visited five years ago.

Tamboran paid $60 million for Origin's stake but retains a share of any future royalties from the project and a 10-year gas supply deal.

Chief executive Frank Calabria said the transaction would allow Origin to allocate capital to strategic priorities "linked to growing cleaner energy" and reliable gas supplies.

Origin also announced a post-tax loss of up to $90 million on the Beetaloo adventure.

Those free steaks from the Daly River pub could have added up.

But it wasn't an easy road Origin chose to take, to prove a new resource like that, let's see how the others fare.

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