MinRes V Pilbara Ports plays out in court

THE COURT battle between Pilbara Ports and Mineral Resources has played out in the WA Supreme Court in a dispute over the Port of Ashburton channel fees.

Both The West Australian newspaper and WA business site, Business News, are reporting the dispute over millions of dollars in alleged unpaid channel‑use levies at the Port of Ashburton, with both sides leaning heavily on the terms of a confidential State Agreement linked to Chevron’s Wheatstone LNG project.

Pilbara Ports launched the action last year, alleging MinRes owed $5 million in unpaid export levies — a figure that had risen to $14 million by August 2025, according to Business News.

Representing Pilbara Ports, barrister Bret Walker SC told the court MinRes was resisting an “extremely straightforward” statutory liability. “We say this is utterly without any merit, has no footing in any legal analysis concerning the expression of ‘channel charge’,” he said, arguing that “using a part of [the channel] is still using the channel”.

The levy stems from a 2011 State Agreement under which Chevron built the Ashburton port and channel for Wheatstone LNG and later handed the assets to the state in 2017–18. Under that agreement, Chevron retains rights to recover costs from third‑party users.

The West Australian revealed this week that former ports minister Alannah MacTiernan warned MinRes boss Chris Ellison about Chevron’s rights as early as May 2020, writing that the oil and gas major had “certain rights” over the channel that “could potentially impact on the commercial viability of the project”.

Despite that warning, Mr Ellison told Premier Roger Cook in 2024 that he had only just been informed MinRes would be charged $1 per tonne, later reduced to 90 cents after negotiations between the state and Chevron. Mr Ellison wrote that the levy would strip $750 million from MinRes shareholders and transfer it “to an oil company in Houston, USA, for sailing ships in Australian waters”.

MinRes maintains the levy arrangement is invalid or improperly applied to its transshipment operation. Its counsel, Grant Donaldson, told the court the State Agreement was “a critically important document” and that the definition of the channel charge “is a number of things and can be all of them at the same time”.

MinRes has already succeeded in a separate action to access internal Pilbara Ports documents relating to the levy, winning discovery earlier this year.

Chevron, named as an interested party, reiterated outside court that the matter is simply a debt‑recovery issue between Pilbara Ports and MinRes, noting that subsequent project proponents “have benefited from the Port of Ashburton without having to make the significant up‑front capital investment required to construct it”.

Justice Jenni Hill has reserved her decision.