However, conflicting claims about whether the gas is ”greenhouse friendly” abound. The differences in the findings turn on assumptions about the quantity of gas that escapes into the atmosphere from coal seam gas operations, and the gas’s global-warming potential.

The claims
Vastly different claims are being made about the green credentials of coal seam gas and LNG. A study issued in April by engineering consultancy firm WorleyParsons concluded that, for every tonne of greenhouse gases emitted by a new coal-fired power plant in China, only 0.54 tonnes will be emitted by a new Chinese LNG plant.

And, according to WorleyParsons, while emissions from Australian operations to prepare LNG for export were almost five times higher than for preparing black coal for export, for each tonne of greenhouse gas emitted by gas production in Australia, 4.6 tonnes are saved globally.

Opposing claims – that natural gas is not more greenhouse-friendly than coal – are made by academics such as Cornell University’s Professor Robert Howarth and the University of Adelaide’s Dr Tom Wigley, both reporting this year in the journal Climatic Change. Their studies’ findings are based on actual experience with shale gas in the United States, rather than best practice for coal seam gas used by WorleyParsons. The academics find the footprint of natural gas is usually greater than for coal due to leaks from wells, pipes and in processing. Shale gas extraction emits slightly more greenhouse gas than coal seam gas, but their conclusions are still valid.

Why the discrepancies? The first main difference between the academics and WorleyParsons is in the amount of leakage of natural gas; so-called ”fugitive” emissions. WorleyParsons assumes best practice and very little fugitive emissions for the planned Queensland LNG developments. But its estimates are not independent; it took most fugitive-emissions estimates straight from the environmental impact statements of mining companies Santos Gladstone LNG and Australia Pacific LNG. (It’s noteworthy that, even with best practice, the environmental impact statements of Australia Pacific LNG forecast peak annual emissions in Australia for five LNG projects to be a hefty 35million tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year.)

The US researchers, in contrast, use actual data on fugitive sources; and these are considerably higher than those used by WorleyParsons.

A second reason for the discrepancy is the global-warming potential assigned to fugitive methane by WorleyParsons, as opposed to that of Howarth and Wigley.

WorleyParsons adopts the factor of 21 for fugitive methane emissions from coal seam gas operations (1tonne of methane gas has a global warming potential of 21tonnes of CO2equivalent), which is the factor adopted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Australian government and the US Environmental Protection Agency.

In contrast, Howarth and Wigley use more recent research in their estimates. NASA scientist Dr Drew Shindell, reporting in Science, found that methane, over a 100-year horizon, was 33 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in terms of its global warming potential, and 105 times more powerful over a 20-year horizon. (The reason methane is less powerful in 100 years than over 20 is that it has a much shorter life in the atmosphere than does carbon dioxide.)

Applying this updated estimate of the warming potential of methane, together with accounting for the increasing level of methane emissions by coal seam and shale gas projects in many countries, has profound implications for meeting global greenhouse targets.

Monitoring gas in Queensland
WorleyParsons has a large stake in the oil and gas industry, and it’s understandable it will assume best practice in its report. However, there appears to be a great deal of urgency in the development of Queensland gas fields and processing plants to meet export contracts in 2014.

This begs the question of whether best practice will be achieved or whether, in practice, losses of methane to the atmosphere will be akin to those in Texas (of about 5percent). Companies in Texas are hardly forthcoming on gas ”lost and unaccounted for”, partly because of the costs of monitoring.

If Queensland is to do better, it will need tight regulation by the state government, and companies will need to make commensurate investment in measurement technology and metering.

Accounting and tax implications
An update of greenhouse accounting by the federal Climate Change Department should include both a quantification of fugitive methane emissions based on actual data and the application to them of an updated warming factor. We won’t know the level of escaped methane emissions from LNG exports until the projects are in production and properly monitored.

When fugitive emissions are known, their full global-warming potential must be taken into account when taxing LNG export projects under the clean energy laws that come into force next year. But, with respect to the tax rate to be applied to methane, there is room for debate. Is the application of a global-warming factor of 105 times that of CO2 (1tonne of methane equals 105tonnes of CO2equivalent) most appropriate for assessing the global-warming potential of methane, and therefore for taxing it?

Reducing greenhouse gases over a 20-year horizon is critical in addressing global warming. To reflect the nature of the effect of methane on the atmosphere in this time horizon, the factor of 105 seems most appropriate (rather than the factor of 21 presently applied). The updated factor would be used in forecasting Australia’s 2020 emissions of CO2equivalent and in calculating the increase above the year 2000. A result will be that Australia’s 2020 greenhouse targets will harder to meet because there will be an increase in emissions accounted for in the period 2000 to 2020.

LNG is a trade-exposed industry under the clean energy legislation, so the effects of a higher tax would be ameliorated. However, the coal export industry would feel the full effects of an updated rate.

While industry will no doubt oppose the proposed changes, targets set using accurate accounting will have more meaning, in terms of the war on global warming, than ones that fail to quantify fugitive methane and, moreover, discount its potency.”

COLIN HUNT | The Canberra Times | Dec 6, 2011
Dr Colin Hunt is a visiting fellow in economics with the University of Queensland. This article first appeared in the November issue of The Brisbane Line, the magazine of Queensland think tank the Brisbane Institute.

The industry has been running an advertising campaign claiming that coal seam gas is ”up to 70 per cent cleaner than coal”. But the report, by consulting firm WorleyParsons, compared black coal and coal seam gas exports from Australia to China and showed that only best case scenarios come close to the promised major greenhouse gas savings.

Gas would release less CO2 when burned in a Chinese power plant, but most of the difference would be eaten up by the extra emissions from extracting and processing the gas in Australia.

While the emissions from processing coal made up only 2.7 per cent of its total greenhouse gas output, processing made up 22 per cent of the total emissions from coal seam gas.

The industry is already under fire from the independent MPs Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, who have tied their support for the federal government’s resources tax legislation to an investigation into the benefits of coal seam gas.

The report calculated a range of scenarios, the majority of which showed gas would perform slightly better than coal. It excluded the possibility of major or ongoing serious methane leaks from coal seam gas wells, and relied on data from the American Petroleum Institute.

The Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, which commissioned the study, has previously said studies questioning the greenhouse performance of coal seam gas were ”trumped-up rubbish”.

An independent study of the life-cycle emissions of coal seam gas has just been completed by Beyond Zero Emissions. The group’s executive director, Matthew Wright, was critical of the industry’s report.

”It shows that they are actually relying on out-of-date data from the American Petroleum Institute to come up with their emissions scenarios,” Mr Wright said.

”This shows that the industry’s claims have been grossly misleading. It is making comparisons to Chinese power plants, but China is not building inefficient power plants like that – they have binding energy efficiency targets for their provincial governments.”

Ben Cubby | Sydney Morning Herald | Friday 4 Nov, 2011

Gloucester Valley residents in northern NSW are fighting an approval for 330 wells and 100 kilometres of pipeline to extract and pump coal seam gas.

ABC 7pm News | Mon 17 October, 2011 | View footage here

The public meeting in Gunnedah on Wednesday exemplifies the growing wave of opinion, led by local landholders but increasingly backed by regional townspeople, environmentalists and the inevitable radio personalities, against coal seam gas mining. The issue is a populist’s dream: small landholders against big miners, idyllic rural landscape under threat from poisonous industrial processes.

Belatedly the miners have begun to try persuading the public that their operations are environmentally sound and have economic benefits for regional centres. Their advertising campaign resembles the effective anti-mining tax campaign, but this time the voices of all the ordinary citizens depicted are praising coal seam gas. The campaign is slick, but its glib factoids and talking points will probably be swept aside by the torrent of public opinion now rushing in the opposite direction. That torrent gains extra force because it appears to be part of the generalised anger directed at the federal government over, among other things, the carbon tax. It is a poisonous atmosphere in which to consider the legal position of mining on farmland, let alone the appropriate balance between farming and mining.

Despite a brief flirtation with this populist fad, even Tony Abbott has pulled back from attacking the miners. All politicians would do well to pause. Mining is necessary, though its consequences for the environment and landholders may at times be unsatisfactory. But if it comes to a choice, food must win out over energy.

Perhaps, as the coal seam gas miners would argue, there will never be a need to choose between the two. But if the choice does become necessary, it should not be made by default.

Decisions to exploit energy resources must not be made prematurely so that they pre-empt the decision to protect the best agricultural land in a continent where it is in short supply.

There should be no hurry. There is reason to believe Australia already has too many coal seam gas projects being developed all at once. It is time to pause. The gas does not degrade if it stays in the ground. There is plenty of time to devise a course of action which balances all interests.”

SMH Editorial | Friday 14 October, 2011

But the oil and gas industry is asking too much if it wants Australians to incur the costs of a coal seam gas (CSG) boom, without clearly identifying the benefits.

Until lately it has been widely assumed that gas is a cleaner-burning fuel than coal, with lower greenhouse gas emissions. The rise of unconventional gas extraction – whether from shale, coal seam or tight sand gas fields – has called that assumption into question and guess what, the answer is frightfully unclear.

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It would be fair to say most of the data is old or industry-funded or based on different practices used for extraction overseas. Or hidden.

The ”We Want CSG” ads sponsored by the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association say coal seam gas burned to produce baseload electricity produces ”up to” 70 per cent lower emissions than coal.

Of all the weasel words in the PR lexicon, that little phrase ”up to” may have the longest snout. ”Up to” literally means from nought to 70 per cent and that is so uncertain it leaves the debate wide open.

The basis for the assertion is a WorleyParsons study on the relative emissions intensity of CSG, which APPEA commissioned but has not released, except for a short executive summary, saying the full report is commercial-in-confidence.

This is completely untenable. Without rehashing the entire CSG debate, the industry wants us to accept that: depletion of precious groundwater resources such as the Great Artesian Basin will be tolerable and the gigalitres of produced water will be treated and put to good use, or reinjected back underground; there will not be contamination of freshwater aquifers used for drinking or agriculture, either by salty groundwater or by injection of fracking chemicals; the millions of tonnes of salt produced during desalination will be marketed, buried safely, or something; the environmental footprint of tens of thousands of gas wells, with interconnecting plastic and steel pipeline, will be minimal and will not ruin the landscape or interfere with food production, and; the social and amenity impacts of the boom will be manageable. We can trust this new-fangled ”adaptive” regulatory process the Queensland government has dreamed up and, yes, we might even be able to buy some of the gas in Australia, at a price, before it is liquefied and shipped offshore.

In short, the industry is asking a lot. And there are a lot of economic benefits to the CSG boom: jobs for workers, profits for shareholders in gas companies such as Origin and AGL and a new source of export income for Australia which, in theory if not in practice, could help reduce our dependence on coal.

But if we dare to ask whether a switch to gas, particularly from an unconventional source such as coal seam gas, will actually help us tackle climate change, the industry hides behind commercial confidentiality.

Worse, under scrutiny, they shoot the messenger: a tweet this week by APPEA’s Rick Wilkinson accused the Herald of ”denying the science” – laughable when APPEA is the very body hiding it. APPEA says it will release the Worley report ”soon” but won’t say when. What’s the delay? Is it being rewritten? Sanitised? What’s to hide? Such secrecy only fans suspicions and exposes the industry to accusations of hypocrisy.

What’s shaken the debate up is a controversial study by Cornell University professor Robert Howarth, published this year in peer-reviewed journal Climate Change Letters, which rocked the gas industry, finding shale gas may in fact be between 20-100 per cent dirtier than coal once the latest science on the higher global warming potential of methane was factored in, and fugitive emissions during flowback and routine venting are taken into account.

Howarth’s study didn’t even consider production of liquefied natural gas (LNG). ”Then you have real issues,” he told the Herald recently. ”The leakage from the compression and transport of LNG is incredible. That is probably the worst thing you can do with gas.”

Nor did his paper consider CSG, but Howarth says there is not enough information ”to really know”.

”In the US, the coal bed seams are pretty close to the surface so there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that when you fracture those wells you increase the methane leakage from the seams to the surface. It’s hard to put a number on that. It is just beginning to be looked at more carefully.”

The gas industry response has been to attack and discredit Howarth’s study but, if you actually read it, the author neither overstates his claims nor downplays the uncertainties around his findings. The truth is, Howarth was making a start on the difficult task of measuring fugitive gas emissions – work which should have been done, but hasn’t, because the industry hasn’t cared to.

Interestingly, fugitive emissions has been a ”sleeper” issue for the gas industry for years. In author Guy Pearse’s High and Dry (2007), a ”greenhouse mafia” insider replays a fascinating conversation between former Minerals Council boss Dick Wells and then Australian Gas Association chief Bill Nagle.

According to the insider, Wells, who was keen to ensure the gas lobby didn’t break ranks with the mining industry on climate change, took Nagle aside and said: ”You know you pursue this hard line and you scratch the coal industry too much harder and they will come out and we will start talking about nitrous oxide emissions, methane emissions, or pipe leakages … we know this is your Achilles heel, don’t do it, because if you do it we’ll have a big brawl between the energy industries in this country in the public arena which won’t do anybody any good.”

It’s high time we got it all out in the open.

We need unarguable, objective, Australian data on the relative emissions intensity of CSG – laser-equipped planes can accurately measure fugitive methane emissions – before we allow a massive industry scale-up to go ahead. The science should be independent, remembering engineering companies such as Worley are also service providers to the CSG industry, with contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Industry spokespeople claiming ”no uncertainty exists” on this subject, or that operators ”don’t lose one molecule”, only appear shrill.

Climate solutions think tank Beyond Zero Emissions has commissioned a study on the subject, to be released soon, which will take into account: lifecycle emissions from Australian conventional and unconventional gas sources; using real operating practice – not just best practice, but worst-yet-still-legal practice; including fugitive emissions from drilling, fracking, well completion and workover, gas transmission and distribution; and the greenhouse impact over a 20 and 100-year time scale, because methane is highly potent in the short-term and we need global greenhouse gas emissions to peak this decade if we are to avoid potentially unpredictable, runaway climate change.

They will be compared with emissions from ”new investment” coal – not the dirtiest brown coal plant operating now – and renewables, here and overseas.

Executive director Matthew Wright suspects greenhouse gas emissions from CSG burned for electricity are likely to be at least 20 per cent higher than conventional gas, though perhaps 30 per cent cleaner than a new black-coal-fired plant. After conversion to LNG, CSG is likely to prove at best marginally cleaner than new coal – and possibly worse. If that’s the case – and it needs official study, beyond anything tiny BZE might commission – the switch to CSG as a transitional fuel may does nothing for the climate, or even prove counterproductive.

More so, says Wright, because new gas generally does not displace investment in coal. Especially in Australia, it displaces renewables, as we saw yesterday when mining giant Xstrata decided to commission a new 242 megawatt gas-fired plant from a consortium including AGL, sinking hopes for a 1000 megawatt clean energy corridor in Queensland.

Forget gas v coal. It’s gas v renewables that counts.”

Paddy Manning | Sydney Morning Herald | Saturday October 8, 2011

This limited area for producing food for the nation is under threat from coal seam gas mining and so far the pendulum has been firmly tilted towards the miners’ interests. There is a way the two industries can co-exist, but it will require a moratorium on further mining exploration while a regional plan is formed.

I cannot overstate the importance to the country of our food producing areas. The Liverpool Plains in the north-west of NSW, where I am from, is an area of just 1.2 million hectares that produces about 37 per cent of the nation’s cereal crops. After 185 years of working the land, locals now use some of the most advanced broad-acre farming practices in the world, while local irrigators led the state in water reform.

Many Australians have their wealth tied up in mining stocks and it is in their own interests to imagine that these companies will never affect the agricultural viability of our nation. A few well-run media campaigns have ensured that Australians hold this view. I too felt the same way until mining came into my life six years ago.

The truth is far different – pollution, damage and destruction are the norm, and water resources are being compromised and destroyed on an hourly basis. For far too long, this industry has been able to fix any problem by waving the cheque book.

The legislation in this area is totally inadequate to deal with the coal and gas rush in this nation. Farmers in the Liverpool Plains engaged in the process as set out by the Acts, but the process failed to protect our property and water rights and interrupted our ability to work our own land. We then went to NSW Supreme Court and won, only to have the NSW Labor government of the time retrospectively change the laws, with the full support of the opposition.

Yet while agricultural areas are under siege, Queensland will protect urban areas from mining. NSW and Victoria say they will not follow suit, but the issue of urban mining and the controversial extraction method of fracking is gaining prominence.

The issue of mining in agricultural areas, leading to questions of how the country will feed itself, sits alongside broader questions about how the nation will generate heat and light into the next millennium.

The mining industry suggests that money justifies everything. But like the little boy who ate too much chocolate cake, we as a nation must think about tomorrow.

We still need a mining industry but, like other industries, it must be held accountable for the damage it inflicts. Until now, the nation has turned a blind eye – we love our wealth and we love our prosperity, and Australians have been unaware what they’ve been sacrificing to meet these ends.

Good fences make good neighbors, but at present the mining industry is not prepared to be fenced out of anywhere. They say they do no harm, but all around we see evidence to the contrary. Throughout the Hunter Valley wells are dry and rivers no longer run clean, while aquifers in central Queensland are predicted to drop more than 50 metres following coal seam gas extraction.

The only way agriculture and mining will be able to co-exist is if extractive industries are kept away from productive agricultural land and the precious water resources on which it relies. A regional plan is needed that sets out areas for certain land use, including agriculture, wine production, thoroughbred breeding and mining. Boundaries drawn in black are the only way to achieve a diverse regional Australia where the various industries can co-exist in peace.

Forcing the mining industry to be accountable could also serve to promote renewable energy policies and investment. We cannot eat money or coal, yet we still need light, warmth and industrial activity. Technologies to harvest energy from the sun, the wind and the ocean are advancing fast – if we cast our minds to it, who knows what wonders are ahead? The time to take action to preserve our future is now or there will be no turning back.

Timothy Duddy | Sydney Morning Herald | Thursday 18 August, 2011
Timothy Duddy is a Liverpool Plains farmer and stood as an independent candidate at the last NSW election.

David and megan baker would like to know if you’d be interested in buying their 1050-hectare property on south-east Queensland’s Darling Downs.

For half a century it’s been lovingly cared for in the face of just about everything nature and human endeavour could hurl at it: drought, flood, fire, the oil shocks of the early ’70s, commodity price crashes and escalating costs of production.

Today there are a few downsides the Bakers need to advise you of. Firstly, there’s an open-cut coal mine on two adjoining boundaries, operated by Peabody Wilkie Creek, a fully owned subsidiary of the world’s largest private-sector coal company, the American giant, Peabody Energy.

On their property are nine gas wells, managed by the coal seam gas company Arrow Energy, acquired last year in a joint venture between Royal Dutch Shell and PetroChina, China’s largest oil and gas producer. There are another 198 gas wells nearby, with drills boring 24 hours a day, up to 500 metres deep into the Great Artesian Basin.

The Bakers also feel obliged to point out that the fat lambs they used to proudly breed for the domestic market have been sold. That’s because the sheep kept falling into open trenches after Arrow Energy removed sections of the fencing. (Arrow Energy claims the property’s fencing was in poor condition when they arrived, and that at no time did they receive evidence of sheep “falling into open trenches”.)

The eucalypts and apple pines that formed a shady barrier outside the farm are no longer there. They were chopped down to make way for a power line. There’s the problem, too, of gas migration. David Baker’s 79-year-old father, David snr, was virtually confined to his home on the Baker property for three days recently because of methane leaking from an uncommissioned pipeline. (Arrow insists it was safe for David snr to “leave his house and drive off his property at any time”.)

One kilometre down the road, at Tom O’Connor’s cattle and grain farm, one of 12 coal seam gas wells on his property erupted, sending methane and water spewing nearly 100 metres into the air. It took Arrow Energy 27 hours to cap the well, and this was the fourth incident on O’Connor’s farm to date.

The Bakers are reluctant to admit it, but they no longer feel confident about their water or soil quality. David snr has kept a watchful eye on the structure of the creeks for half a century, but with all the earthworks going on, the tributaries have turned murky. There’s the risk, too, he believes, that contaminated waste water collected from the extraction process might have overflowed from ponds during recent flooding, or been re-injected into aquifers. (Arrow Energy says that at no stage did contaminated water overflow from their holding ponds, and that the only release of water ever authorised – in response to the flooding – was treated water from the company’s reverse osmosis plant. It was released across the Baker property.)

“I do have concerns about the water supply,” David snr tells Good Weekendwhen we visit the Baker property, 35 kilometres west of Dalby. “Any sensible, thinking person would. I’ve been in the country all my life and I can’t see how a sane person [could think] that you can keep on taking water out [of the Great Artesian Basin] and not have something happen under the ground. The mining and coal seam industries are coming in here and doing whatever they want. We’re being attacked from all sides.”

David snr’s concerns about water quality are not unwarranted. A report by the country’s peak non-government toxic and chemicals body, the National Toxics Network, revealed in June that Australia Pacific LNG Pty Ltd had been given permission by the Queensland government last year to dump treated water containing 80 different chemicals and radionuclides – at a maximum volume of 20 mega litres a day – into the Condamine River for an 18-month period. The Condamine River, which runs near the Baker property, flows into the Condamine Catchment, then links up with the headwaters of the Murray-Darling river system.

The chemicals included a range of toxic substances like lead, cadmium, chromium, mercury and BTEX – a combination of benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene that has since been banned in Queensland, although, at the time of writing, this ban had yet to come into effect.

Although benzene has been commonly linked to leukaemia, the report states “there was no requirement for an assessment of the cumulative load or the potential to contaminate sediments, plants, aquatic species and/or animals prior to release”.

The Bakers are now at their wits’ end, but they appreciate the terrible irony of their situation, given all three used to work for the company that has become the predator at their door. David jnr actually helped Arrow set up its first five-well pilot program eight years ago, and then spent six years co-ordinating the company’s access to other people’s properties, before Arrow terminated his services in September 2010.

At the time, they thought coal seam gas mining was a good idea. It was a new, exciting industry, offering a multitude of challenges to curious men like David Baker. It also offered extra income during difficult times.

“We were very naive,” says Baker snr. “We were the first private property they entered around here, so we were all sort of labouring in the dark.”

Megan Baker believes the family didn’t have much choice when it came to granting the company access. “I don’t remember the question, ‘Can we [come onto your land?]‘ It was, ‘We are.’ And our solicitor told us, ‘You can fight it but you will have a 99 per cent chance of losing.’ ”

For five months after the methane gas leak, the Bakers waited for an explanation from Arrow Energy. For six months they waited for compensation. The money they’re owed now for allowing the wells onto their property in the first place is currently 12 months overdue. (Arrow says the company has requested 2009 and 2010 invoices from the Bakers on numerous occasions, “but they have not been provided to date”.)

To add further to their woes, David Baker jnr has cancer – both Hodgkins and non-Hodgkins lymphoma – and the stress from dealing with a powerful, cashed-up gas company is not making him feel any better.

“We’re kind of stuck, aren’t we?” his wife says, her attractive face a weather map of fatigue and worry. “Would you like to buy our property? You wouldn’t, would you? Who the hell would buy it?”

NO ONE, IT SEEMS. NOT SINCE THE DARLING Downs became a new industrial park, as well as a metaphor for much of what is happening – or could happen – throughout Australia. In the past few years nearly 4000 coal seam gas wells have been sunk deep into the Surat and Bowen basins in Queensland, in what has been traditionally one of the great food bowls of the world.
In addition, approval has been granted for up to 40,000 more wells fanning out across the Sunshine State over the next decade, a pin cushion of drill sites across the black-soiled Darling Downs, up into the Arcadia Valley – a breathtaking stretch of farmland nestled between Expedition and Carnarvon national parks – then north into the central highlands of Queensland around Emerald – the Golden Triangle – where wheat, mung beans, safflower, corn and cotton flourish on the lush soil.
The wells have found their way into prime beef country around Wandoan, and there are plans for more in the hinterland behind Noosa, up the eastern seaboard to Proserpine, and down to the rainforest escapes of the Tweed Valley, where Macquarie Energy has an application for an exploration licence. Due west from there, at the spectacular Border Ranges, the Casino-based Metgasco Ltd plans to run a pipeline from the northern NSW town all the way through to Gladstone, passing directly through the bucolic village of Kyogle, near residential areas, then across a showground, under a lake, through the Richmond River – at three separate points – behind a primary school, along a series of fresh running creeks and streams, over green hills and valleys of high slip soil studded with dairy and hobby farms, then up through a private road that snakes through the middle of a World Heritage-listed national park.

It doesn’t stop there. Exploration leases have been granted for coal seam gas extraction from thousands of hectares of the Liverpool Plains in NSW, the best dry farming land in the country. There are leases over 22,000 square kilometres of the Gunnedah basin, up to Narrabri and into the north-western slopes around Moree, then south-west into the Pilliga Scrub forest, where former National Party leader John Anderson’s Eastern Star Gas (now under a takeover offer from Santos) is leading the charge for 550 gas wells and more than 1000 kilometres of pipeline in what is the most iconic temperate woodland in the state.

Other areas of NSW earmarked for coal seam gas exploration include the wine- and tourism-rich Hunter Valley, the Illawarra Plains – where Sydney gas company Apex Energy NL has an audacious scheme to drill beside Warragamba Dam, the reservoir for much of Sydney’s drinking water – and the Southern Highlands, where Planet Gas wants to start drilling near Berrima, and its sister company, Cockatoo Coal, intends mining for coal from Sutton Forest. At the historic town of Camden, 65 kilometres south-west of Sydney, 72 new gas wells are planned for the Scenic Hills in addition to 130 pre-existing ones, while right in the heart of Sydney, Dart Energy is due to begin exploratory drilling along the Alexandra Canal at St Peters. (Dart Energy currently holds an exploration licence for 2385 square kilometres of the Sydney basin.)

In Victoria, local and international companies have Gippsland firmly in their sights, plus the Dandenong Ranges and the region around the Bay of Islands Coastal Park, near the iconic Twelve Apostles. In fact, every Australian state is up for grabs in what is the nation’s 21st-century gold rush.

STATE GOVERNMENTS AND INDUSTRY GROUPS believe coal seam gas is the way of the future, cleaner than coal, a boon to employment, a revenue spinner worth billions of dollars. And there’s so much of it: 250 trillion cubic feet in Queensland and NSW alone, enough to power a city of one million people for 5000 years.

“We are looking at an additional $850 million a year in royalties for the Queensland government and 18,000 new jobs,” says Belinda Robinson, chief executive officer for the industry’s peak body, the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (APPEA).

“This is what is going to be the difference between where we are now in terms of climate change and where the government wants us to be [in reducing greenhouse gas emissions]. I think they’re projecting a 200 to 300 per cent increase in gas. Well, it’s got to come from somewhere.

“We’ve been wringing our hands for decades about how we can enliven and rejuvenate regional economies and there aren’t many industries that can provide really good careers and jobs in some of these disadvantaged areas. This industry is able to do that.”

That’s not what critics say. Beyond the issue of property rights (and we’ll come to that soon), concerns focus on the way coal seam gas is extracted from the Great Artesian Basin, and how this extraction process might threaten both surface and ground water.

The Great Artesian Basin is one of the geological wonders of the world, stretching over 1.7 million square kilometres, or 22 per cent of the continent. It is also the largest and deepest artesian basin on earth, a vast catacomb of interconnected aquifers and sedimentary rock layers from which farms, pastoral stations, towns, small communities and indigenous homelands throughout Australia have always derived their bore and spring water.

Without this underground reservoir, life as we know it on this sun-bleached continent could never have existed. But such has been the damage caused to it by wasteful practices of old that federal and state governments have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years trying to restore it to full health.

What causes near apoplexy among industry critics is the belief that the extraction process threatens the Great Artesian Basin as never before. In order to free the gas from the coal seams, bores need to be drilled up to a kilometre below ground, deep into this labyrinth of rock and aquifer.

To force the gas out, vast volumes of water must then be pumped into the coal seam so that the water pressure holding the gas in place can be released. If enough gas fails to come to the surface, a highly controversial process called hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, is then used. This involves blasting the coal seams with a high-pressure combination of water, sand and fracturing fluids.

The coal seam gas industry insists these fracturing fluids are safe, and that the risk of contamination of groundwater and aquifers is “minimal”. Organisations like Doctors for the Environment and the National Toxics Network (NTN) beg to differ. Last year, the NTN reviewed a number of industry environmental authorisations to look at their risk-assessment documents, as well as the list of chemicals the industry had provided. They were not impressed.

“I think the thing that shocked me most,” NTN’s Mariann Lloyd-Smith tells Good Weekend, “was that when we consolidated the lists, we came up with about 23 chemicals we could identify, and of those 23, only two had been assessed by our national chemical regulator. Those two had not been assessed for their use in fracking.”

The 23 chemicals included some that damaged the lungs and, in the case of ethylene glycol, were associated with spontaneous abortions among factory women. Others were endocrine disruptors, affecting hormones and the way the body functions. Still others were capable of producing degenerative changes in rat brains.

“These are not soft, non-toxic things that you will somehow find in your kitchen cupboard – which is a claim made by the industry,” Lloyd-Smith says.

APPEA’s Belinda Robinson insists fracking is safe and points to the fact it’s been around for 60 years (although in Queensland for just over a decade) and that two million wells have been fracked around the world, with “minimal threat to human and environmental health”.

Not according to France’s National Assembly, which banned fracking this year in response to a public outcry, or the South African government, which did similarly. The New York Times also reported this year that hundreds of millions of gallons of hazardous or carcinogenic chemicals had been injected into wells in more than 13 US states between 2005 and 2009, and in Blackpool, England, fracking was suspended in June because of earth tremors thought to be related to the process.

But Robinson argues the projects in Queensland have been through two years of environmental impact assessment and subjected to 1500 conditions. “And we support that,” she says, “because we want to be here for the long term … and no one is going to be here for the long term on a sustainable basis without being confident that what we’re doing is the right thing.”

QUEENSLAND’S NEW GREENS SENATOR, LARISSA WATERS, remains unconvinced. “Firstly, if you need 1500 conditions to make something safe, then it’s probably a pretty risky activity,” she tells Good Weekend. “Secondly, some of these conditions are often very vague. We don’t have the scientific capacity to know for sure … that this is not going to have a long-term impact on the Great Artesian Basin, either through the dropping of the water table, or through cross-contamination. Some of that water is two million years old and it is the crucial water source for our rural communities.”

As for fracking, Waters points to the “disastrous” American experience highlighted in the film Gasland, in which families across the United States were shown setting their tap water on fire, while others reported suffering a range of potentially methane-related illnesses. One woman claimed to have suffered burns and rashes from taking a shower.

The film has been attacked by its industry critics – here and in North America – as a “series of distortions, exaggerations and inaccuracies”, but it hasn’t stopped community halls across Australia from screening it, nor has it prevented Jeremy Buckingham, the NSW Greens MP, from hand-delivering a copy to nearly every member of the NSW Parliament, including Premier Barry O’Farrell. In May, the NSW Government imposed a 60-day moratorium on the granting of any new exploration licences for the production of coal seam gas until further assessments had been made. The moratorium said nothing about permits already granted.

As this moratorium was about to end (at the time of writing), NSW Resources and Energy Minister Chris Hartcher announced new conditions for the industry so that a better balance could be struck between agriculture and coal seam gas. He said these conditions would include a ban on fracking until December 31, and on the use of toxic chemicals such as BTEX, as well as changes to the way the industry uses water. Furthermore, an online database would be established so people could learn if there were exploration licences over their properties.

Buckingham wants a 12-month moratorium on the industry, a total halt to coal seam gas extraction in the Sydney metropolitan area, and a commission of inquiry held. “This industry doesn’t have a social licence to operate, and it is as clear as the nose on your face that it has not been proven safe,” he says. “We’ve got coal seam gas wells around Casino … with large volumes of produced [contaminated waste water] potentially moving into the floodplains. These are coal seam gas wells on a floodplain! We’ve got gas wells in Camden, 100 metres from schools and horse-riding camps and 50 metres from homes.

“We’ve actually filmed foam and fluid being vented into the air [from one of the well heads] and it was travelling hundreds of metres towards the suburb of Glen Alpine [in south-west Sydney]. This community is up in arms because they feel like guinea pigs.”

There is also growing dispute over industry claims that, because gas-fired power stations emit up to 70 per cent less greenhouse gases than existing coal-burning plants, coal seam gas is a cleaner form of energy than coal. According to a senate submission from groups opposed to coal seam gas, the footprint from coal seam gas is heavier than coal. That’s because the emissions involved in producing the gas – drilling, fracking, compressing, pumping, liquefying and transporting the gas, together with the loss of carbon-storing forests and woodlands cleared to make way for wells and pipes, as well as direct CO2 and fugitive methane emissions – makes its carbon footprint much bigger than previously thought.

As for the idea that the industrialisation of rural areas represents a “renewal and rejuvenation” of regional Australia – as claimed by the industry’s peak body, APPEA – that’s just a bad joke, according to Senator Waters. “This is not how rural communities feel,” she says. “They’re being bullied. Their land is being taken over. They feel like they’re being picked off one by one. They’re realising that their rights to resist this sort of activity on their land are incredibly few.

“It is certainly not a community unifier. This is actually destroying these communities and, in fact, the only thing that is keeping them unified is their opposition to coal seam gas on their land. It is laughable to suggest that this is a renewal of our rural communities. This is the death of our rural communities at the altar of short-term profit.”

AUSTRALIANS ARE NORMALLY A WELCOMING and law-abiding lot.However, as many resource companies are now finding out, this friendly disposition no longer applies to them. Around the country, thousands of farmers and environmentalists, urban rich and rural poor, left and right, young and old, are joining Greens activist and author Drew Hutton’s Lock the Gate Alliance, a gathering storm cloud of protest aimed squarely at the coal seam gas industry.

“We’ve got 1500 farmers in Queensland who’ve locked their gates,” Hutton tells Good Weekend as we tour the Darling Downs together. “They’re saying to these companies, ‘We don’t want to negotiate with you.’ This has turned into a huge movement, a non-co-operation movement, that’s built on people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

“These companies do not want to take farmers to court. The minute they do that, they’ve lost the battle. The first farmer who has a coal seam gas company call the police to cross the boundary of that farm – over the top of the farmer, his wife and kids and mother-in-law – is the moment we’ve won the campaign.”

Belinda Robinson says the industry must be doing something right, otherwise why the 2400 voluntary land-use agreements already signed or currently being negotiated with landholders? “And, of course,” she says, “there is an obligation to negotiate in good faith.”

That, of course, doesn’t wash with stunned property owners who are learning now that ownership of their land extends only to the top soil and ground surface, not the subsoil and mineral reserves below. These belong to the state, and in having granted companies an authority to prospect, state governments have effectively anointed them agents of the Crown.

“Companies are very sly about this,” Graeme Healy, president of the Barrington-Gloucester-Stroud Preservation Alliance in mid-northern NSW, tells Good Weekend. “They appear on your doorstep and ask whether they can have a look around, and if the person is a charming young man or woman, the landholders will try to do the right thing. But in letting them on, you’ve just given them access.”

Healy should know. There is now a proposal for 330 gas wells through the picturesque Gloucester Valley, home to grazing, dairy and boutique farming on the junction of three rivers, the Gloucester, Avon and Barrington. “This will industrialise the valley and change it forever,” he says. That’s why his organisation, representing 200 local landholders, has taken gas company AGL to court to challenge the NSW Planning Assessment Commission’s approval of this project, and why he and his members have joined Drew Hutton’s alliance.

As has Lee McNicholl, vice-chairman of the ultra-conservative Property Rights Australia group. For the past 12 months, McNicholl has been paving the way for Hutton to meet his members, men and women who only a few years ago would have gladly frogmarched the co-founder (with Bob Brown) of the Australian Greens from the room. “I have been working out different ways of introducing Drew to my members because we are an odd couple,” he explains. “But I say to them, ‘If you are really concerned about these issues, you have to get someone who knows about this, and Drew does.’ I consider him a friend.”

A former vet by training, McNicholl has been breeding cattle on his station in Queensland’s Western Downs district for 23 years. He disagrees strongly with Hutton on climate change, and is a fierce opponent of the federal government’s proposed carbon tax. But by his own careful reckoning, he sees coal seam gas as not just an assault on a man’s rights to his castle, but as an alarming threat to food security.

“It is insanity to destroy prime agricultural land for these activities, purely for short-term dollars,” McNicholl tells me as we stand in the soft early-morning light of his property, the whistling ducks, herons and black swans swooping through the brigalows.

“Drew and I have come together on the question of sustainability. There are food riots in Mozambique and Zimbabwe. There will be nine billion people in the world by 2050 and we will have to produce 70 per cent more food from a diminishing agricultural base. So it makes no sense to be wrecking prime agricultural land when we need to be ramping up food production.”

McNicholl has slammed shut his gate as well, and he’s ready for his area’s coal seam gas prospector, Queensland Gas Company, should they come knocking. “They’re coming this way,” he growls, “and I’ve told them they’re not welcome. I’ve also rung them and said, ‘I don’t want your compensation. I just want to continue farming sustainably.’ I’m not going to let them on here without a fight.”

LEE MCNICHOLL HAS TAKEN HIS CUE FROM Drew Hutton, who in March this year was arrested on a residential estate near Tara in the Darling Downs, trying to stop the Queensland Gas Company from entering the estate. (There are currently 200 gas wells on the estate, with another 800 to come.)

Says Hutton: “I sat down in front of the bulldozer and they arrested me under section 805 of the Petroleum and Gas Act – which says you can’t obstruct a mining company without a reasonable excuse. I’m going to argue I had reasonable excuse. Saving the planet, I think, is a pretty reasonable excuse.”

Hutton grew up on the Darling Downs, the son of a drover turned butcher. As a boy, he went looking for the wattle blooming in July. During the holidays, he would help his father muster cattle and go droving with friends for up to a week at a time. The wheat harvest was always a time of neighbourly collaboration.

“That’s all going to go,” he says, as we thread our way through the land of his childhood, a moonscape now of pipelines, service roads, holding ponds and gas wells. “We’re going to lose the expertise of a whole generation of farmers. They’re going to lose their properties. They’re going to lose their superannuation, because that’s what their property is. They won’t be able to sell it and they know it. That’s why they’re petrified.

“To us, the morality of this is clear. If you love this country, if you want to see it retain its integrity, if you believe in the cultural and natural heritage that we’ve inherited and wish to pass on to our children, if you love that, then you have no choice. You have to fight for it. You have to lock the gate.””

David Leser | Good Weekend | August 13, 2011 | pgs 14-20

The admission is likely to anger thousands of farmers in the Surat and Bowen basins of Queensland who promised to lock their gates against gas and coal mining.

In a sometimes fiery hearing, the inquiry into CSG also discovered a “gold-rush mentality” in which the state and federal governments would earn $1 billion a year in taxes and royalties from just one of the three approved CSG export projects, while the companies were making up to $4 million a year from each well.

It was also told that none of the companies had yet found a way to deal with the millions of tonnes of waste salt produced each year other than to bury it, which one senator said was like vandalism.

“How can you approve the industry without knowing what’s happening to the salt?” Senator Bill Heffernan asked Federal Government bureaucrats.

Maintenance inspection worker at Scotia coal seam methane gas plant, eastern Queensland.

“You don’t have to have much going wrong to cause a catastrophic change to the landscape.

“This industry is 3000 miles ahead of the regulators.”

Santos, the only company so far to reject the need to use the courts to force its way on to farms, said its LNG project would generate about $9 billion a year when in operation and it had paid out $17 million in compensation so far to about 180 landowners.

But it said it could not afford to “pay money on top of money”.

National Party Senator Bridget McKenzie said her calculations found that landowners would receive just 0.074 per cent in compensation, a figure Santos disputed as misleading.

“I think if someone was going to come on to my property to make $1000 and offered me 74 cents in return I would consider that grossly unfair,” Senator McKenzie said.

Queensland Gas managing director Catherine Tanna said the industry was the most heavily regulated of its type in the world.

“Based on our experience and plans we think it can be safely and reliably operated in the long term,” Ms Tanna said.

“The industry is good for Queensland and good for Australia.”

Ms Tanna said the royalties the company paid were the system of compensation for the Australian people.

The National Water Commission gave evidence that the CSG industry would extract up to 300 billion litres a year from the Great Artesian Basin.

“It’s a very significant figure,” the NWC acting chief executive James Cameron said.

John Mccarthy | The Courier-Mail | Wed August 10, 2011

Coverage of the Senate Enquiry at Narrabri NSW, and the recent Leichhardt Town Hall meeting in Sydney’s inner west.

Channel 7 | Tues 2 Aug, 2011

That’s a big problem because (a) there is a high degree of uncertainty about the potential impacts of coal seam gas (CSG) mining on Australia’s groundwater and food security, and (b) it is far from clear whether extraction of CSG and other unconventional sources such as shale gas offer much, if any, reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over coal once leaks and other fugitive emissions, and the latest science on the warming potential of methane, are factored in.

We are entering what the International Energy Agency recently called a ”golden age of gas”, with estimated global demand doubling by 2050. Gas has become even more attractive as a baseload energy source, as alternatives to coal such as nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage (CCS) appear riskier or more expensive.

We should ramp up renewables as fast and hard as possible but every official forecast or model I’ve seen assumes gas will provide a transition to a zero-emissions economy. The unnerving prospect is that the world turns to gas only to find we have constructed an expensive new fleet of long-lived power stations that scarcely help tackle climate change and soon become an obstacle to more rapid decarbonisation.

At existing prices, converting electricity generation from coal to gas – especially in Victoria and South Australia, where power stations rely on brown coal, which produces about 30 per cent to 50 per cent more carbon dioxide than black coal – is seen to be one of the quickest, cheapest ways to cut Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions in bulk.

Whether through the government’s tender for closure of 2000 megawatts of brown-coal generating capacity, or the opposition’s direct action plan, both major parties are interested in going down this path.

A carbon tax at $23 a tonne and rising incrementally won’t, by itself, be enough to force an immediate switch from coal to gas. The price would need to rise to $40 a tonne or higher, according to most observers, depending on how high you think gas prices might go as domestic users compete with offshore buyers.

But many in the industry believe it is already unlikely that a new coal-fired power station without CCS can be built in Australia – it would be hard to get finance, for a start – and introduction of a carbon tax should tip the scales even further against coal (which is what Treasury’s modelling suggests).

If it is passed, most people expect a wave of investment in gas. This week energy giant Alstom calculated the carbon tax would unleash investment of $3.5 billion a year in utility-scale electricity generation over the next five years, of which half, or roughly 1500 megawatts of capacity each year, would be gas-fired plant.

By comparison, investment fell from $4 billion a year in 2008 to just $1 billion a year in 2010 due to ”crippling” uncertainty about a carbon price, Alstom’s Australian chief, Chris Raine, said.

Modelling last year by Australian Energy Market Operator Ltd forecast that, with a relatively low carbon price of around mid-$20, weak emissions reduction targets and a 20 per cent renewable energy target, Australia would build an additional 30,000 megawatts of gas-fired generation capacity over the next two decades. That’s a lot.

Where will all that gas come from? Natural gas on the eastern seaboard has traditionally been sourced from Bass Strait, the Otway Basin or the Cooper Basin. These reserves – roughly 7200 petajoules (PJ) as of 2010, according to AEMO stats – are in decline.

On the other hand the eastern states’ unconventional reserves are exploding. CSG is already at 36,598PJ and will rise as Queensland’s massive export liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects come on stream. In Queensland and NSW alone, an area 10 times the size of Tasmania is now under permit for CSG exploration or development.

Shale-gas extraction may also be ready to take off in Australia with Beach Petroleum reporting initial gas flow from a well in the Cooper Basin and ConocoPhillips investing $110 million in the Canning Basin, just this week.

Unconventional gas is not just another mining boom. By now many of us have seen the hit doco Gasland. CSG and shale-gas extraction both use controversial hydraulic fracturing or ”fracking” techniques – injecting a mix of water, sand and (sometimes highly toxic) chemicals to stimulate gas production – potentially contaminating aquifers.

Vast quantities of brackish water are produced during CSG production and must be treated and disposed of – then there are millions of tonnes of salt to deal with. The impact on the Great Artesian Basin and Murray-Darling Basin is unclear and the National Water Commission has sounded the alarm.

Both the Queensland and NSW governments are reviewing strategic land use to try to reconcile conflicts between agriculture and mining. A Senate inquiry is under way, chaired by Liberal Bill Heffernan, amid a grass-roots backlash by farmers and greenies rallying nationally under the ”Lock the Gate” banner.

Although export LNG contracts worth tens of billions have been signed in Queensland and the scramble to produce first gas is under way – an estimated 40,000 CSG wells are set to be drilled in that state alone – the rollout is taking place under an unusual ”adaptive” regulatory approach, which means that state approvals may be modified if unintended environmental impacts occur down the track.

So far, the federal government is along for the ride. But, as Senator Heffernan has warned, we must not allow the energy task to subsume the food task. It’s a brewing storm.

Let’s be clear: in ballpark terms, international demand for our gas is at least an order of magnitude greater than domestic demand and that’s what’s driving the unconventional gas boom.

It would be ridiculous to blame the carbon tax for every CSG or shale-gas well drilled in Australia. But there is a genuine debate to be had – power station by power station, gas field by gas field – about where we want our electricity supply to come from.

That debate must be informed by the best science on the full life-cycle emissions of new gas-fired plant, take into account all the environmental implications and opt for renewables wherever possible.

Yes, put a price on carbon – but let’s not dash for coal seam gas. Let’s take it step by step.”

Padding Manning | The Sydney Morning Herald | Sat 16 July, 2011