The Clarence Valley Conservation Coalition Inc. website published this post on 30 November 2016:
Nanna Lynette's Report
I found that although I’d seen many photos and movies of gasfields and had heard people talk about them, nothing prepared me for visiting a gasfield and walking around the infrastructure and hearing the massive amount of noise. The size of the Kenya gasfield and the amount of infrastructure was mind-blowing.
The gas from the field is piped to the Kenya processing plant and after processing is piped to Gladstone. The processing plant, which covers an area of a couple of acres, consists of three massive metal structures about five storeys high. The noise coming from this was horrendous. We were standing about a kilometre away and where we were the noise was deafening.
The next part of the tour was a visit to the State Forest where some of the actual Kenya gaswells are. Initially they were about a kilometre apart but when production slowed they drilled other wells in between the existing ones so that the wells were then 500 metres apart. Each well sits in a cleared pad of at least a quarter of an acre. This means you’ve a fractured environment because the ground is bare except for some gravel over it. And each well makes a horrific noise as well.
The whole area is massively noisy and dusty because of all the clearing.
The cleared pipeline corridors are about 100 metres wide and have been taken over by weeds like fireweed. Along the main pipeline there are vents – high point vents and low point vents about 400 metres apart.
The high point vents vent raw gas 24 hours a day. Of course this smells. It just goes straight into the atmosphere. The low point vents expel moisture which is collected in troughs and presumably evaporates if it doesn’t overflow….
Read the full post here.
This is a timely reminder of what could still happen here as the Baird Government has not guaranteed the permanent gas-free status of the NSW Northern Rivers region, has reserved the right to once again issue petroleum exploration licenses [PELs] and, As part of a deal that extinguished previous applications for CSG leases, the government agreed to insert a clause in legislation giving priority to previous claimants. This was on behalf of the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, which had made four applications for gas exploration leases.
As late as March 2016 the Baird Government has been telling overseas mining interests that "The Clarence-Morton basin has very good petroleum potential……Almost all wells drilled … have yielded gas and/or oil".
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