Across the spectacular valley sprawling before Eden Anthony’s Australian homestead, a new mountain has risen in the gritty distance — a towering heap of coal-mine waste.
It is a cautionary tale for the Hunter Valley, a picturesque wine-making area northwest of Sydney, which finds itself at the center of a growing resources controversy: the hunt for coal seam gas (CSG).
Mining is not new to the coal-rich Hunter region: Vast open-cut pits dot the landscape, linked to power stations and the nearby Newcastle docks — the world’s biggest coal export port — by a complex network of rail and road.
However, CSG has got people worried, and a growing backlash which began in Queensland, the epicenter of Australia’s new gas rush, has seen landholders across the country uniting under a simple mantra: Lock the gate.
“It’s the most radical transformation of rural Australia we’ve seen since the expansion of the pastoral frontier in the 19th century,” said Drew Hutton, founder of the Lock the Gate alliance.
“And the Hunter Valley’s the tipping point. If coal seam gas comes into this region, you can forget about it being an iconic area for farming, for vineyards, thoroughbred racing or tourism,” Hutton said. “It’ll just be a great big industrial wasteland.”
The fears are about water, and they are big. Most Australian farms rely on underground bores to grow crops and raise stock, and gas fields are popping up along the edges of the world’s largest underground aquifer, the Great Artesian Basin.
Farmers and scientists fear CSG mining — a highly invasive process in which the rock is hydraulically fractured or “fracked” with a toxic cocktail of chemicals and water to release the gas — could devastate underground water supplies.
Some properties in Queensland have already seen aquifer levels drop by two-thirds because of CSG mining and the water left is so salty it is toxic to animals and plants.
However, what is of deeper concern are the unknowns, says Anthony, a proud member of Lock the Gate and long-time campaigner against CSG.
“They need to put chemicals down there to create the fractures that are needed to release the gas, and the chemicals that they use are a secret,” he said.
“And it’s a pretty rough science as we’ve seen in Queensland, people turn their kitchen taps on and can set fire to the water because of the gas coming out,” he said.
Limited testing by activists of what is used or can be released from the seam during fracking has shown cyanide, arsenic and a group of carcinogenic and nerve-damaging agents known as BTEX in the mix, they say.
A recent BTEX scare at Arrow Energy’s Queensland operations and a blowout at a well on the outskirts of Sydney have reinforced unease about the industry’s untested environmental impacts, Federal Senator Larissa Waters said.
Waters has traveled the country as part of a government panel examining the CSG industry’s impacts and says “communities are up in arms” about water issues and their limited rights to keep miners out.
Anything below topsoil is considered state property and farmers cannot stop mining on their land.
A six-month moratorium on fracking by the New South Wales Government has seen projects halted in the Hunter — a “small win” for Anthony and his neighbors, but Waters thinks it should be national and more lasting.
A landmark court challenge against CSG firm AGL could provide some hope, with lawyers from the non-profit Environmental Defender’s Office (EDO) challenging a development in the Upper Hunter region on groundwater and contamination issues.
“Ideally we’d like to see it stopped basically because the risks are too great,” said the EDO’s Natasha Hammond-Deakin, who is leading next month’s case in the Land and Environment Court.
A victory in the case would have significant implications, requiring CSG firms to satisfy state planners to a much higher standard.
Recommendations from Waters’ panel, due in November, could also see water become an environmental protection trigger meaning Canberra would have to review and green-light all future CSG projects.
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