SIX years after its own reports warned about the risks posed to underground water reserves by coal seam gas mining the Queensland Government has moved to bolster protections of groundwater in areas affected by the booming industry.
Hours after a Queensland Country Life article last week revealed that CSG companies were using a legislative loophole to avoid reporting on the impacts of their drilling on groundwater levels, the Queensland Government announced moves to close the loophole.
A special report in last week's edition of Queensland Country Life highlighted how the State Government's failure to set "trigger thresholds" on artesian aquifers was giving CSG companies a reason not to submit regular groundwater monitoring reports.
It was effectively allowing the industry to develop and operate at full pace while its impact on precious and finite groundwater resources continued unchecked.
The article detailed the findings of Dalby solicitor Peter Shannon, of Shannon Donaldson Province Lawyers, that departmental investigations had shown that most CSG companies had not submitted detailed monitoring reports on groundwater impacts despite a legislative requirement to do so.
Mr Shannon said CSG companies were using the argument that they could not provide groundwater impact statements until they were provided with benchmark trigger thresholds for each aquifer by the Government.
As of last week the Government had still not set trigger threshold levels for most aquifers, allowing Coal Seam Gas activity to charge ahead without monitoring of drilling and extraction impacts on groundwater levels.
At least two Government reports had also highlighted the potential threats that Coal Seam Gas drilling posed to groundwater reserves as long as six years ago.
As Mr Shannon was addressing a forum on CSG issues for landholders organised by his firm in Dalby last Thursday afternoon, Natural Resources, Mines and Energy Minister Stephen Robertson announced that new regulatory triggers would finally be set in August this year.
The trigger thresholds will be set when a 5m drop in water levels is recorded in sandstone aquifers and a 2m drop is recorded in shallow alluvial aquifers.
It will now be up to CSG companies to investigate aquifers where water has dropped below threshold levels, and they will then have to work out a solution and negotiate repairs with landowners or townships whose bores are affected.
Mr Robertson said a $2 million CSG groundwater unit would be established within the independent Queensland Water Commission to oversee the monitoring and reporting of groundwater impacts from August.
Once trigger thresholds were set, they could then be used to investigate both individual CSG operators' impacts and overall impacts on bore water, Mr Robertson said.
"If these trigger thresholds are exceeded and a water supply bore is affected, the CSG operator will be required to investigate.
"If the problem is caused by the CSG operator, then the operator will need to negotiate acceptable solutions with the bore owner."
There would also be a trigger threshold in relation to springs.
If the expected water level drop at a spring was greater than 0.2 metres the CSG operator will need develop a plan to manage the impacts.
The landholder-CSG forum at Dalby last week highlighted numerous other concerns for landholders, in particular how the CSG industry and State Government planned to deal with mountains of salt from CSG extraction.
State Government CSG team leader Mal Helmuth triggered alarm bells when he conceded that the Government had yet to come up with a viable solution for the salt problem, even though CSG companies were already bringing vast tonnages of salt to the surface.
Other issues at the forum included holding ponds on floodplains and subsidence over pipelines on floodplains.
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