Queensland Senator Larissa Waters asks important questions in parliament, that need some urgent answers. Senator Waters says there are massive concerns raised (and also within government departments) about what the CSG industry will do to our groundwater.
Clinical Focus:
“The mining and burning of coal: effects on health and the environment”
Environmental damage, water and health:
Coalmining poses a significant threat to the integrity of aquifers, which may be hydrologically connected to other groundwater-dependent ecosystems including farm dams, bores and rivers. Water from coalmines must be disposed of and waste material is often held within the surface lease of a mine, introducing a risk of contamination of human food sources. Pollution of the environment can also occur through windblown dust during transportation, where coal is washed and at export ports. In 2010, coal seam gas operations in Queensland were held up at two sites because groundwater had become contaminated with a potentially dangerous combination of benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene (BTEX).9 Similar contamination occurred after an underground coal gasification trial near Kingaroy.10 The Queensland government has recently banned BTEX chemicals from coal-bed fracturing fluids.
COAL seam gas was once regarded as a major hazard to coal miners because of the risk of explosion. Today it’s become a major hazard to graziers and farmers as the rush by mining companies encroaches upon the very land they are trying to make a living out of.
Governments throughout Australia are set to make billions of dollars in royalties from the rush and appear to be turning a blind eye to the possibility of major ecological damage caused by the fracking process used to extract the gas. The process reportedly is already banned in China.
NICNAS have been in existence for 20 years, yet all but a couple of the chemicals used in fracking, have never been assessed by our national regulator. And the few that have been assessed, have not been assessed for use in fracking.
THE scope of the coalmine and associated infrastructure project envisaged by Indian company GVK Power is a whole lot bigger than was proposed by Hancock Coal, but not all the benefits are going to flow to Australia.
“Would the department be happy to have a ‘licensed land fill’ somewhere with three million tonnes of salt sitting in it with no potential use for the interminable future?”
“I am very alarmed at the social disruption, depression, anger, violence, and political chaos that the CSG industry appears set to inflict on Australia.”
Now rehabilitation sounds great in theory, but farmers here say cropping is a precision science, as demonstrated by this re-levelling of cotton fields damaged in the last wet season.
BEN SULLIVAN: “I don’t see how you can take something out from lower down, that it’s not going to subside on the top and that’s going to change the way water flows and it’s going to make it near impossible to grow crops. And we’ve asked to take us somewhere and prove to us so we can feel safe in ourselves and our kids’ future to show us where this has been done, but I’m still waiting.”
Dr Somerville provided a “compelling and thought-provoking testimony foreshadowing the personal and social traumas that the arrival of the coal seam gas industry is likely to bring,” parliamentary committee deputy chair and Greens MLC Jeremy Buckingham told New Matilda.
In his written submission to the committee Somerville said: “I am very alarmed at the social disruption, depression, anger, violence, and political chaos that the CSG industry appears set to inflict on Australia.
Farmers are not against coal seam gas exploration but need it to be environmentally sustainable, says Lock the Gate president Drew Hutton.
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