Crucially, we have rushed to develop coal seam gas reserves as a cleaner alternative to coal, assuming it will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and tackle climate change. But will coal seam gas reduce emissions? By how much? We don’t actually know.
Underhanded tactics by a Korean coal mining enterprise has shocked a farm owner who thought he was selling to an agricultural company.
COAL seam gas drilling at a flashpoint site on the edge of the Liverpool Plains has been halted after the state’s biggest coal seam gas operator, Santos, backed down, ending a three-week blockade by residents.
The halt came as the O’Farrell government was forced into damage control over coal seam gas exploration after the Minister for Western NSW, Kevin Humphries, appeared to foreshadow a suspension of pilot production across the state.
In the world’s driest places, “fossil water” is becoming as valuable as fossil fuel, experts say.
This ancient freshwater was created eons ago and trapped underground in huge reservoirs, or aquifers. And like oil, no one knows how much there is—but experts do know that when it’s gone, it’s gone.
“You can apply the economics of mining because you are depleting a finite resource,” said Mike Edmunds, a hydrogeologist at Oxford University in the Great Britain.
Alan Jones discusses corruption in politics, dredging Gladstone Harbour, and the coal seam gas industry. Then he talks to Senator Bill Heffernan about the govt. documents he has found, where the government was advised of the risks of this CSG industry in 2006.
Protecting the water wealth of the Great Artesian Basin is the latest challenge for the coal seam gas industry, writes Ben Cubby.
The basin has existed in its current form for millions of years, but one of the biggest tests to its existence will come in the next decade. Beneath the layers of water lie some of the world’s most extensive coal seams. Just as the sandstone aquifers contain water, so the coal seams contain methane.
A lack of information about recent exploration for gas has landowners in the Mid West worried, and wanting answers.
The root of the problem, he says, is that politicians pay little attention to the long-term effects of decisions, especially the impact of mining on water resources.
“One thing people must have is food and water, but we are destroying that for one-off payments from mining,” he says.
“No one has a clue of the geology of aquifers. Once fractured, there’s no possibility for them to be fixed. You can’t mine without fracturing the aquifer.”
“The single most important thing you can have is water,” Mr Ball said.
Coal seam gas is a massive undertaking. It’s estimated there are now close to 4,000 wells in Queensland. That number will grow tenfold over the next 20 years. The plan is to take a lot of that gas to Curtis Island, off Gladstone in the World Heritage Area, where it will be processed and exported.
To service the huge liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers and expand its coal loading capacity, Gladstone Ports Corporation is now undertaking the biggest dredging operation ever attempted inshore from the Great Barrier Reef.
Alan Jones talks to Gundi Royle, an energy analyst who is attacking CSG industry and regulators for failing to conduct independent regional modelling of the groundwater impacts of up to $80 billion in planned coal seam gas (CSG) development.
Is the coal industry economically worthless?