CSG WATER BRINGING LAND TO LIFE. Courier Mail, Brisbane by John McCarthy 30 Aug 2013 WATER and how it is treated may well define the coal seam gas industry’s success or failure. Above all other issues in regional Queensland, water is the one topic on which they will not only get a fight, but will also be crucial in the way the burgeoning industry is judged by the community. The irony is that the CSG companies would probably prefer to not have anything to do with water. For them it is a waste product, but under their conditions they have to find a beneficial use for it. They also had to commit to "making good" any loss of water from a farm’s bore. But while the CSG industry has brought economic life back to stagnating towns in the bush, there is still deep concern about its impact on water. Such is the sensitivity of water that Arrow Energy showed in discussions with government that if it was to reinject water back into the Condamine Alluvium, it would prefer someone else did it because of the risks involved and its liability. The Condamine Alluvium is a body of water considered close to sacred by the irrigators on farms around Dalby to Cecil Plains. Arrow has since said it will not reinject into the alluvium but will instead investigate the long-term potential of deep aquifer injection. However, we are still investigating the long-term potential of deep aquifer injection. The CSG companies also have agricultural trials on their own farms in an attempt to show the community the benefits of CSG. The CSG companies have signed up 4017 land access agreements with farmers, but not all of them have been done willingly, according to farmers. In the booming oil and gas town of Roma, CSG water is being treated and put back into the aquifer from which its residents get their drinking water. According to Santos, it is effectively 50 years’ supply, a claim that Mayor Robert Loughnan said was difficult to back up. "I don’t know where they get that from. Whether you could say 10, 50 or 100 years, I don’t know," Cr Loughnan said. But he said it was certainly a benefit for Roma because its current aquifer was being depleted by increased demand and the council has had to sink bores further away from the town to diversify its supply. The depletion of its current water source has been caused by the spectacular growth of the region which, of course, has been sparked by coal seam gas. The CSG supply certainly won’t droughtproof the town, he said. In the Maranoa, Santos’s operations will siphon 13,000 megalitres a year from the groundwater aqifers. QGC has the capacity to purify as much as 200ML a day, which is about a third of the amount used by farmers. An Olympic swimming pool takes 2.5ML. Santos GLNG has installed a pivot irrigation system to cover 72ha of farming land, a sub-surface drip irrigation system to further irrigate an additional 3Oha, and will be planting l3oha of crops, mainly leucaena, a fodder crop for cattle. "This irrigated forage crop means cattle grow faster, allowing the landholders to sell their annual crop of 700 cattle sooner than without irrigation," a company spokesman said. QGC puts its water production in perspective by claiming the resources sector uses 4 per cent of Australia’s groundwater while agriculture takes 50 per cent. It treats the water and delivers it to SunWater, which then sells it to irrigators in the region. At its peak, QGC expects to be producing about 1SOML a day (72 olympic pools) for 18 months, or 65,000ML a year. Ken Schmidt bought his property on the Tara-Chinchilla Road because of the access to QGC’s water. "It’s basically tripled the value of the land," Mr Schmidt said. "It was exceptionally marginal soil and we have improved with micro-organisms and water." He now has seven centre pivots irrigating about 2SOha of cereal crops. "The water quality is brilliant. It’s turned this semi-arable land into highly productive agricultural land. It would be just grazing land without it." Sun Water is also building a 120km pipeline from Wandoan to the Glebe Weir on the Dawson River, near Taroom. Farmers will be able to access water through the pipeline or from the river. Its water plant at the Kenya field will also be piped to the Chinchilla Weir. The choices for CSG companies are slim. They can reinject the water back underground, they can treat it and deliver it for town use, or treat it and let it be used for irrigation. It is expensive. QGC has budgeted $1 billion for its water activities. For as long as the projects have been going the questions about what they will do with the silt left over after treating the water have been unanswered. For the most part it appears it will be buried in landfill because no one has yet found a viable commercial application. QGC alone will produce 4 million tonnes of salt by 2040. Arrow said it was committed to offsetting its impact on the Condamine Alluvium. "The offset can be achieved through substitution of groundwater allocations, purchase of groundwater allocations or injection," the company said. "Substitution of groundwater allocations consists of Arrow supplying treated CSG water to licensed Condamine Alluvium groundwater users, in return for which they cease taking groundwater until such time as Arrow is no longer able to supply them with water." Farmer Wayne Newton said some landowners were happy to sign for irrigation under the scheme but delays in getting allocations were costing them considerable amounts because they had already installed infrastructure. "I think it’s fair to say that right across the area there is still a fair bit of concern about the water," he said. Activist Drew Hutton said water was the most precious resource for farmers and the CSG companies were allowed to "splash it around". "The consequences of the withdrawal of such massive volumes of underground water, along with the very large amounts of unusable salt and other waste products, are unknown," Mr Hutton said. "As usual, the coal seam gas industry is making great claims about their generosity, when what they are actually doing is withdrawing massive amounts of underground water - a public resource - with unknown consequences, and leaving it to future generations to clean up the mess." Arrow expects to produce about 350 billion litres of water over the life of its project and is the project most likely to raise concerns because of its potential impact on the Condamine Alluvium. Ministerial briefing documents show Arrow was considering pumping water back into the alluvium, but may have dropped the plan.
Posted on: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 06:30:18 +0000
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