Tooraweenah farmer Heath Webb says the NSW government’s proposed coal seam gas (CSG) policy has allowed him to “get on with life”.
The Tooraweenah Coal Seam Action Group spokesman is battling one of the nation’s biggest gas companies and their CSG exploration licence covering his parents’ farm at the foot of the Warrumbungles.
The 7000-hectare property, about 100 kilometres north of Dubbo, sits on the southern end of Australia’s largest underground water source - the Great Artesian Basin.
Between 100 and 250 million years old, the basin stores as much as 65 million gigalitres of water and has sustained generations of landholders from Aborigines to first settlers over thousands of years.
In 2007 it supported production worth $3.5 billion to the national economy.
It is a body of water which farmers like Mr Webb and others, most notably in the Liverpool Plains, say is under threat from CSG projects.
Mr Webb said he believed many of the gas companies display a drill-first-ask-questions-later-m entality which has had irreversible consequences.
“With this sort of thing you can’t make a mistake - it’s somebody’s water, somebody’s livelihood. You don’t want to be playing play Russian roulette with it,” he said.
Santos has Australia’s largest exploration portfolio covering 146,800 square kilometres, including the Webb property.
Last year it ran seismic testing in the licensed area and wants to push ahead with drilling, Mr Webb said.
Mr Webb, whose relationship with Santos has ranged from combative to co-operative, said the government’s interim land use policy couldn’t have come sooner.
“Now it is almost like normal, you can go on with life,” he said.
Until the government fine-tunes specific land use policies for certain areas - a process which could take several years - miners will have to lodge agricultural impact statements before drilling. A new regulation would also aim to protect ground water sources such as aquifers in the basin.
Both environmentalists and farmers have welcomed the measures, which were announced in addition to the 60-day moratorium on new CSG exploration licences.
But with 70 per cent of NSW already covered by mineral and petroleum titles the moratorium, which does not ban production, is considered more symbolic than anything else.
“People who are concerned about proposals about to reach the production stage, this moratorium won’t offer anything,” said Pepe Clarke, CEO of the Nature Conservation Council of NSW.
However the moratorium did send a “strong signal” that the government was serious about its “political position on this”.
Mr Clarke was worried about a lack of priority given to “state forests, state conservation areas and travelling stock routes”.
State conservation areas are a type of compromise between environmentalists and miners: surface areas remain protected, managed by conservationists, while mining is permitted underground.
Most state conservation areas have been given the listing because they have coal underneath them, Mr Clarke said.
However no restrictions apply to CSG projects being carried out in conservation areas like the Pilliga Scrub - the largest native inland forest west of the Blue Mountains - about 200km north of Dubbo.
Part of the 3000 square kilometre Pilliga will be subject to the largest CSG project ever proposed in NSW - a 550 well $3.6 billion joint venture between Eastern Star Gas and Santos.
The venture, due to begin early next year if approved, has startled farmers and environmentalists alike.
Farmers are concerned about the companies dropping a 272km gas pipeline worth $275 million from Narrabri that will funnel the gas eastward. The pipeline would feed Wellington’s proposed gas fired power station as well as delivering gas to Newcastle for export.
Conservationists say the Pilliga would be turned into a forest wasteland with a “grid like network of gas holes and access roads”.
“The Pilliga is an area of extensive conservation value but there is nothing in NSW law to prevent an entire gas field being set up,” Mr Clarke said.
Eastern rejected Mr Clarke’s assessment saying only 3 per cent of the project’s area would need clearing. According to the company “1100 man-hours” of flora and fauna studies have already been carried out; a figure set to increase when the company’s environmental impact statement is lodged. Each gas well in the Pilliga will last about 20 years with complete rehabilitation of the landscape to take place after they are shut down.
After a well was dropped the company could carry out “partial’ rehabilitation of the surrounding forest.
Half of the gas wells would be built immediately with the rest being dropped over the next two decades.
The project would provide 500 jobs during the construction phase and another 200 to run the plant, which would deliver “significant royalties to the state”.
Eastern’s general manager of stakeholder relations, Peter Fox, said fears about underground water contamination were unfounded.
When drilling in to the coal seams Eastern would drop the wells, which are reinforced with cement, below the Great Artesian Basin, he said.
“So the well is completely isolated from the aquifers, with no connection to aquifers people use water from,” he said.
Mr Fox said the company was “absolutely comfortable” with the government’s new land use policy as long as it was “fair and equitable”.
“In other words we get the chance to show what we do is of minimal impact. And we are a totally confident we can do that,” he said.
Mr Webb will meet the state Minister for Natural Resources Katrina Hodgkinson tomorrow about the proposed groundwater regulations. Meanwhile Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan has spoken out about the “cowboy regulation” of the CSG industry after the blowout of a Queensland gas well operated by Arrow Energy last week.
Senator Heffernan will head an inquiry into the impact of coal seam gas mining on the Murray-Darling Basin.
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