The impact of thousands of coal seam gas wells

Steve Austin from 612 ABC Radio interviewed Drew Hutton on the 19th April on the impact of 40,000 proposed coal seam gas wells across rural Queensland.  Download the interview here. 

Excerpt from the interview

DREW HUTTON: 

There's going to be something like 40,000 gas wells, and that's at a minimum. I think you'll find that the number is going to go much higher than that in this area alone. It's just going to be a massive development. And when you ally that with the open cut coal mining that's going across good quality agricultural land in that area, the whole fossil fuel industry threatens to turn rural Queensland basically into an industrial wasteland.

STEVE AUSTIN: 

Sorry, how many coal seam gas-wells will there be? 40,000? 

DREW HUTTON: 

At least, the companies are admitting to that number, but it could be anything. We could be looking at 100,000. There already are a large number out there now. But its nothing compared with what it's going to be. And then when you combine that with the pipes across land that are going to take the gas up to Gladstone for export.

The amount of infrastructure, the amount of intrusion on the land, is just going to be enormous.

...

For the last twenty years in this state, I've been trying to get the regulators and the environmental authorities in this state to properly regulate the mining industry in the public interest. With, I might add, a spectacular degree of failure. The regulators simply do not force the mining companies to do what they are supposed to do.

I have no confidence whatsoever that the huge developments that are going to occur in this area are going to protect the health of the local communities. I have no confidence that they will protect the aquifers or the Great Artesian Basin that covers this whole area. I have no confidence that the surface water will be protected, remembering that a lot of this area is within the Murray-Darling Basin.

We are talking about the potential for this to become the single biggest environmental issue in Queensland's history.

You can download the interview here.