THE peak body representing the coal seam gas industry says that while landholder concerns about potential groundwater impacts are understandable, there are many reasons to believe such concerns will not be borne out.
Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association director for Queensland and NSW, Matthew Paull, told Queensland Country Life that the companies behind the four major CSG projects planned for Queensland were all highly professional and committed to developing good and mutually beneficial relationships with landholders.
They were also bound by some of the most rigorous environmental regulations in the world, he said.
A key question landholders want answered before large-scale CSG developments proceed in Queensland is whether CSG companies can guarantee that their activities will not detrimentally impact upon freshwater aquifers relied on for town water supplies and agricultural operations.
Mr Paull said geology was based on probabilities by nature and as such it was impossible to make absolute guarantees about potential impacts. However, existing knowledge of the GAB and aquifers and groundwater models made it possible to say that risks of adverse impacts from CSG activities were very unlikely and manageable.
“Drilling wells and making sure they’re isolated from everything else is the business these petroleum companies are in, it is what they do,” he said.
“There is a lot of knowledge about the GAB and all the aquifers, and that knowledge is going to be added to.
“You don’t go and invest billions of dollars on a hope.”
The integrity of assurances that CSG operations posed little risk to groundwater reserves was backed by independent groundwater modelling, Mr Paull said.
“These independent groundwater modelling companies are major companies in their own right and have their own reputations to consider, so they’re not in the business of fudging results to suit their clients’ purposes.
“When gas companies say there will be next to no impact, that is not just their opinion, it is the opinion of the independent companies as well.”
The CSG industry has been operating in Queensland for over a decade, and in that time more than 1000 wells had been developed, Mr Paull said.
That number could grow substantially in coming years if four major CSG projects planned by Santos, BG Group, Arrow/Shell and Origin Energy for the Surat and Bowen Basins go ahead.
The environmental impact statements for each suggest that all four projects could result in a full-scale production scenario of 40,000 wells being developed, drawing more than 300,000 megalitres of CSG water to the surface every year.
However, that scale of development was based on “top end” estimates only and was unlikely to eventuate, Mr Paull said.
“The number of wells is not important. What matters is that each and every one of them has to be agreed and approved by a stringent environmental and safety regulatory regime.
“The public deserves to know that our industry is operating safely and sustainably, which is why we are working closely with community groups and government to ensure all concerns are being addressed.
“These are very big and complex projects and as a result they are very hard to get across the line,” he said. “People don’t invest in them in a hurry.
“How those projects actually proceed and what size they end up at is uncertain at the moment.”
While many landholder groups have criticised the Queensland Government for not going far enough to provide regulatory protections of groundwater resources and farmland from mining, Mr Paull said most gas companies believed Queensland’s regulatory regime “set a high standard” and was quite restrictive in terms of what they could do.
“It is not a tick and flick, it is a two-year exercise where you put in 10,000 pages or so of information and you have a lengthy discussion with the Government about what you’re doing, what they want to see you do and so on, and this has resulted in over 1200 conditions for each project, so it is a very heavily regulated industry,” Mr Paull said.
He also defended the process of hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fraccing’, which involves the high pressure pumping of water, sand and trace amounts of chemical thickeners, lubricants and other compounds deep into underground fractures to free up trapped gases.
In the US there have been reports of fraccing operations causing the unintended contamination of groundwater and the migration of gases and hydraulic fracturing chemicals to the surface.
However, Mr Paull said that despite these reports, the US regulators had regularly analysed the process and continued to approve it.
“It does continually come up as an issue in the US, but every time the Government looks at it they say it is okay.
“It is something that has been done for about 50 years in the US and has been widely used in Australia, it is a fairly standard technology.”
Mr Paull said about 5pc of wells in Queensland had undergone fraccing.
The process employed in Australia was basically the same as the US, he said.
“But the chemicals may be different and companies are continually looking for ways to user greener chemicals.
“The chemicals in the fraccing fluid are highly diluted, but company workers have to deal with the pure version, so if the chemical could have a harmful effect, apart from any other consideration it is in the interests of occupational health and safety to switch to something greener.”
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