Government Advisory Committee worried about coal seam gas industry

The Great Artesian Basin Co-ordinating Committee, a group set up to advise state and federal governments on the Great Artesian Basin (GAB) says it is worried coal seam gas and coal mining and exploration activities could damage the resource unless guidelines are in place to protect it.

The basin underlies more than 20 per cent of Australia, including most of Queensland, and is the only reliable source of water for much of the inland.

According to the report by the ABC,  the Committee is meeting this week in Longreach to discuss issues around the contamination of this resource by the explosive expansion of the coal seam gas sector.

Chairman Jeff Austin says proposed guidelines under the National Water Initiative need to be tightened to ensure mining companies protect water resources:

It's virtually saying if the Government is going to approve these activities, [the mining companies] should consider the effects on water.

I don't think that's good enough and these guidelines should be tightened up considerably. There are issues that have not yet been addressed. In some areas these are serious concerns and the government ministers need to be made aware of these before we go too far. 

Especially where the hundreds of drill holes that are going down are actually penetrating through the aquifers. There have been issues of contamination from some of the chemicals used.

These are all of great concern where they may impact on the aquifiers and actually shatter them and cause the aquifiers to fail, because the GAB aquifiers are the lifeblood in a wide area.

The mining industry, including the coal seam gas sector, is currently exempt from the National Water Initiative, an agreement signed by all levels of government across Australia as the pathway for water reform and water security. In effect, this means that mining does not have to operate according to the water management rules that every other industry and sector must abide by. 

This has been subject to much criticism by the National Water Commission, with its CEO Mr Ken Mathews calling for reform: 

The National Water Commission takes the view that mining activities should operate under the same rules as other water users.

When the National Water Initiative was signed in 2004, it was agreed that there may be special circumstances facing the mineral and petroleum sectors that require specific management arrangements outside its scope. However, little progress has been made since to spell out those special circumstances.

This has meant that the minerals, petroleum, coal seam gas and related industries have almost by default been left out of broader water markets and water planning processes.

The National Water Commission has outlined a list of recommendations for including mining in water management: 

These include moving to a nationally consistent risk-based approach for considering local and cumulative effects of mining on groundwater, improving communication and coordination between agencies involved in planning and approvals, and developing nationally consistent water accounting, data collection, storage and sharing protocols.

These reforms are yet to be implemented in Queensland.