A group of 'Kakadu clowns' have surrounded the Darwin Convention Centre this morning as the NT Mining and South East Asia offshore conference begins.

The clowns - protestors from the NT Environment Centre - aim to highlight environmental risks associated with uranium mining in the Kakadu national park.

Minister for Resources Martin Ferguson and delegates from mining big players Inpex and Connoco Phillips avoided the protestors as they arrived this morning, walking directly into the convention centre as the clowns enacted the destruction of the national park caused by mining.

"We're here to send a message about Kakadu and uranium mining," organiser Cat Beaton said.

"Kakadu is Australia's largest National Park - it's very precious to everybody...Uranium poses a lot of risks.

"We want to send a message to recourse min martin Fergus that we really need to rethink this industry and surely in the NT we can do better. This is an industry that poses risks to workers, to transport, and, you know, on a good day it will end up as radioactive waste and on a bad day it can end up in nuclear weapons."

Independent gas consultant Arthur Dixon, was also at the conference, said Darwin was well placed for mining as the industry capital of Northern Australia.

"Certainly Darwin is well placed - it's effectively the capital of Northern Australia and it certainly will become another centre with LNG (liquified natural gas)," he said.

"We gain a lot of confidence talking to other people and hearing what they're doing - that's really what you get out of this kind of conference."

He remained cautious to comment on expansion of projects in the region, but said there was potential.

"The owners are usually very cautious about talking about expansion of projects...but Asia is our market, Asia needs energy, we have energy in Australia and LNG is part of that Australia."

The conference will continue for the rest of this morning.