"Water Is Life" anti-fracking campaign hit Australia's highways on 8 July 2017

Some images from the Water Is Life anti-fracking event held along the nation's highways on Sauturday, 8 July 2017.

Well done, one and all!

*All images found on Twitter

People Power in The Pilliga

HuffPost, 8 June 2017:

It's easily the largest dryland forest in NSW (and indeed eastern Australia). The area is a treasure. In addition to its inherent natural beauty, it has a rare far-inland koala population, as well as almost unbelievably pure groundwater…..

The Department of Planning & Environment told HuffPost Australia that Santos will now be asked to provide a detailed response to the issues raised in submissions, and that the Department will seek advice from a range of independent scientific experts.

"There is no fixed time frame for the assessment of the project, but a final decision is not likely until next year," a Department spokesman told us.

You get the impression that Kennedy and many people like her will continue to agitate while they await the decision.

"I would say that this unprecedented enormous number of submissions objecting to this would clearly say to our government that they are wrong, and that they failed to listen to the people," Kennedy said.

"Not failed, but deliberately ignored our constant visits, our endless supply of information and science we provided to them over many years, proving that this industry would destroy our land and water.

"They constantly said that there were just a few selfish ratbag farmers, who wanted to protect their land and water from being destroyed by this industry, and who wanted to be able to continue to supply clean food and water to future generations of Australians.

"They said we were a tiny minority, that most people supported this gas project. The 23,000 submissions prove that its not just a handful of selfish farmers. It is the public. It is all the people who live here and want to continue to eat clean food, drink clean water, and have healthy lives."…..

In addition to threatening the water supply of farmers like Anne Kennedy, contaminated water would have terrible implications for the fauna of the Pilliga, like this adorable little threatened eastern pygmy possum.

PHIL SPARK

Coal Seam Gas Exploration and Mining potentially allowable in the NSW Northern Rivers region once more

“The Minister must not grant a petroleum title over any of the following land (the excluded areas):

(a)  an area designated by the Minister, by notification published in the Gazette, as an area in respect of which a petroleum title is not to be granted,”  [Petroleum (Onshore) Act 1991 No 84, current version for 6 January 2017 to date] 

In 2015 the NSW Baird Coalition Government announced that its NSW Gas Plan included:

Action 4 of the NSW Gas Plan  [2.84 MB] is to establish a one-off buy-back of petroleum exploration licences (PELs) for titleholders across the state. This provides an opportunity for holders of PELs to surrender their titles. The NSW Government commenced the buy-back program on 11 December 2014. 

To date, the NSW Government has bought back the following PELs:

PEL 2 (AGL Upstream Investments Pty Ltd) view map  [5549 KB] & view map  [1762 KB]

PEL 4 (AGL Upstream Investments Pty Ltd) view map  [2854 KB]

PEL 5 (AGL Upstream Investments Pty Ltd) view map  [352 KB]

PEL 267 (AGL Upstream Investments Pty Ltd) view map  [4434 KB]

PEL 437 (Pangaea PEL 437 Pty Ltd) view map  [426 KB]

PEL 442 (Apex Energy NL & Sydney Basin CBM Pty Ltd) view map  [418 KB]

PEL 444 (Apex Energy NL & Sydney Basin CBM Pty Ltd) view map  [392 KB]

PEL 445 (Dart Energy (Bruxner) Pty Ltd) view map  [2.64MB]

PEL 454 (Apex Energy NL & Sydney Basin CBM Pty Ltd) view map  [381 KB]

PEL 457 (ERM Gas Pty Ltd) view map  [1 MB]

PEL 459 (Dart Energy (Apollo) Pty Ltd) view map  [432 KB]

PEL 460 (Dart Energy (Apollo) Pty Ltd) view map  [280 KB]

PEL 463 (Dart Energy (Apollo) Pty Ltd) view map  [362 KB]

PEL 464 (Dart Energy (Apollo) Pty Ltd) view map  [403 KB]

PEL 476 (Pangaea Oil & Gas Pty Ltd) view map  [450 KB]

PEL 478 (Clarence Moreton Resources Pty Ltd ERM Gas Pty Ltd) view map  [425 KB]

PEL 479 (Clarence Moreton Resources Pty Ltd ERM Gas Pty Ltd) view map  [694 KB]

In November 2015 the Baird Government added Metgasco Limited’s PEL 13, PEL 16 and PEL 426 to this buyback list.

The NSW Nationals Member for Clarence Chris Gulaptis called on communities to “trust the NSW Gas Plan” to make the Northern Rivers gas field free.

Although buybacks occurred, to date the NSW Northern Rivers region does not appear to have been gazetted as an area in respect of which a petroleum title is not to be granted.

In June 2017 the NSW Berejiklian Coalition Government released its NSW STRATEGIC RELEASE FRAMEWORK FOR COAL AND PETROLEUM and surprise, surprise, the Northern Rivers region is once again potentially available for exploitation by unconventional gas mining corporations by way of an exploration licence auction process – highest bidder above the government reserve declared the ‘lucky winner’.

The strategic release framework also states; The expunged petroleum title applications provisions under the Petroleum (Onshore) Act 1991, if triggered, still necessitate compliance this two part auction process…….An exception to this process is prescribed under the Petroleum (Onshore) Act 1991, Schedule 2, Expunged petroleum title applications. Expunged petroleum title applicants are required to be given first opportunity to make new applications, where the proposed new release area was the subject of an expunged application. To trigger this provision, the expunged title applicant must be the same entity. The two part auction process still applies. An expunged title applicant must satisfy the minimum standards, work program and reserve price requirements. There is no automatic granting of a prospecting title. An expunged title applicant may choose not to apply

In other words Gladys Berejiklian & Co are merrily inviting the same environmental vandals to return to the very land from which concerned local communities fought so hard to remove them.

This was Lock The Gate Alliance on the subject on 6 June 2017:

Lock the Gate Alliance says the NSW Government’s ‘Strategic release framework’ for coal and gas exploration, announced today, leaves the state’s groundwater and farmland unprotected.

Under the framework, parts of the state will be made available for coal and gas exploration and it has been announced that the new framework will immediately be applied to two areas in the state’s far west where explorers have sought access to unconventional gas. 

The new framework also allows holders of “expunged petroleum titles” to reapply for areas where licences have been bought back or cancelled, including in the Northern Rivers and Sydney’s drinking water catchment.

"There’s nothing in this framework that will prevent the Minister and the Cabinet opening up the Northern Rivers or Sydney’s drinking water catchment to new gas exploration” said Lock the Gate Alliance spokesperson Georgina Woods.

"The public is still waiting for long-overdue promises to protect farmland, water and communities from coal and unconventional gas mining to be delivered.

"Without those protections in place, this Strategic Release Framework is a major threat to our land and water resources.

"With a state election coming up in a year and a half, this failure is likely to lead to an electoral backlash from affected communities if it is not quickly addressed," she said.

The Framework is partly a response to ICAC made nearly four years ago and warning that the process for releasing coal exploration licences was "conducive to corruption” but Lock the Gate says there are important elements of these recommendations unfulfilled.

The final Strategic Release Framework is available here: http://www.resourcesandenergy.nsw.gov.au/miners-and-explorers/programs-and-initiatives/strategic-release-framework-for-coal-and-petroleum-exploration

The Ladies Who Bake (and organize, lobby, raise funds & volunteer) come out against coal seam gas exploration, mining and production

The Country Women’s Association (CWA) of New South Wales came together for its annual conference on 22-25th May 2017 for the 95th time and debated policy.

Photograph: The Land, 25 May 2017

At this conference the CWA passed the following motion:

Maules Creek Branch (Namoi Group):

Preamble: The results of hosting unconventional gas on farms are properties devalued, mortgages refused, insurance covers rejected, destroys families, divides communities, drains aquifers and turns land into dead zones, sick children, suicide and mental breakdowns.

“That the policy of CWA of NSW shall be to support a ban on unconventional gas exploration, extraction and production”.

With the largest women’s organisation in Australia now having this policy endorsed by one of its founding chapters, NSW Nationals leader and MP for Monaro John Barilaro’s statement that he saw no reason why the coal seam gas industry should not be supported in areas of the state where it would not affect prime agricultural land is not looking as robust a proposition as he perhaps thought two weeks ago.

NSW nurses & midwives stand with Pilliga-Narrabri communities against Santos coal seam gas project

“Santos expects to build 850 production wells over the next two decades” within the mining lease. ABC NEWS, 10 April 2017, PHOTO: An aerial shot of the Santos CSG exploration project in the Pilliga. (Audience supplied: Dean Sewell)

Echo NetDaily, 19 May 2017:

Local nurses are voicing their concerns about the threat to health in a submission to the government objecting not only to the Santos Narrabri Coal Seam Gas Project, but to all CSG mining across NSW.

It was following a successful motion put forward by the Lismore Base Hospital branch of the New South Wales Nurses and Midwives Association that the a submission was lodged.

‘As nurses and midwives we believe that an ecologically sustainable environment promotes health and wellbeing. We are greatly concerned about the health of communities impacted by CSG’, said Heather Ryan Dunn, midwife and Vice President of the Lismore Base branch of the NSWNMA. ‘We also know that climate change is the biggest threat we are currently facing and that decisions made today will impact greatly on future generations.’

The 20 page submission which includes references to CSG well accidents and risks to human health via contaminated water and air pollution, is one of approximately 12,000 already submitted in response to the EIS, a record breaking and resounding ‘no’ from objectors to the project.

Memo to all federal and state members of parliament: The Great Artesian Basin is not a vast underground sea of fresh water so stop treating it as if it is

Figure 1. The Great Artesian Basin; spring cluster data sourced from Fensham (2006Fensham, R. 2006. Spring wetlands of the Great Artesian Basin. Paper for the 2006 Australian State of the Environment Committee, Department of Environment and Heritage, Canberra.http://www.deh.gov.au/soe/2006/emerging/wetlands/index.html(accessed December 16, 2014). ).

It is long past time that all parliamentarians of every political persuasion ceased robbing the nation of its present and future water security with their petty partisan politics and insane reliance on ideology over scientific fact.

In simple language Kim de Rijke, Paul Munro & Maria de Lourdes Melo Zurita point out that the Great Artesian Basin is not an endless supply of fresh water and to treat it as such is dangerous.

Taylor & Francis Online, 11 February 2016:

Excerpt from Society & Natural Resources, An International Journal  Volume 29, 2016 - Issue 6: Thinking Relationships Through Water

With regard to the process of extracting gas and subterranean water, a commonality in the submissions of CSG companies and state governments is the simplification of the GAB. It is constructed as a large, well-understood, and unproblematic body of underground water:

[The GAB is] equivalent to approximately 22% of Australia’s land mass. Compared to the total storage capacity of the GAB, the amount of water projected to be extracted during CSG production is very small … the annual water extraction is likely to be less than 0.0002% of total storage. This is the equivalent of taking approximately 5 litres out of an Olympic sized swimming pool. (Australia Pacific LNG 2011, The Senate Inquiry, Submission 368).

Water, in such submissions, is a simplified and abstracted object of nature to be represented solely in terms of volumes and percentages. It is exemplar of Jamie Linton’s (2014 Linton, J. 2014. Modern water and its discontents: A history of hydrosocial renewal. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water1 (1):111–20. doi:10.1002/wat2.1009 [CrossRef], [Google Scholar]) notion of “modern water’” a particular way of knowing and relating to water abstracted from its local, social, cultural, religious, and ecological contexts. The anxiety-riddled relationships between the arid region overlying the GAB and water resources are posited as insignificant to extractive practices. Such instrumental and rationalist simplification is part of discursive strategies to produce a view of subterranean water amenable to the (economic) growth of the modern state (Linton 2010 Linton, J. 2010. What is water? The history of a modern abstraction. Vancouver, BC, Canada: UBC Press. [Google Scholar]; 2014 Linton, J. 2014. Modern water and its discontents: A history of hydrosocial renewal. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water1 (1):111–20. doi:10.1002/wat2.1009 [CrossRef], [Google Scholar]; Finewood and Stroup 2012 Finewood, M. H., and L. J. Stroup. 2012. Fracking and the neoliberalization of the hydro-social cycle in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale. Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education 147 (1):72–79. doi:10.1111/j.1936-704x.2012.03104.x[CrossRef], [Google Scholar]). The final Senate Inquiry report, however, chided some CSG company submissions, noting that

[The GAB] is not a vast underground ‘sea’ in which levels and pressures quickly and uniformly adjust to the extraction of water from one part. Rather it is a highly complex system of geological formations at a range of depths, of variable permeability holding water of different quality, at different pressures and through which water flows at very different rates, if it flows at all. The reduction in pressure in a coal seam will result in a local fall in the water level and pressure in that particular area which may alter the rate and direction of the movement of groundwater in adjacent formations. The impact of this change may take many years to have a measurable impact on adjacent aquifers. Similarly the contingent loss of water from adjacent aquifers may not be made good by natural recharge for decades or even centuries. (RATRC 2011, 19)

Discursive attempts by CSG proponents to portray a simplified body of subterranean water thus sit uneasily alongside broader scientific narratives of the GAB. A critical scientific challenge, as the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO, cited in RATRC 2011 Management of the Murray Darling Basin interim report: The impact of mining coal seam gas on the management of the Murray Darling Basin. Commonwealth of Australia 2011 Rural Affairs and Transport References Committee. (accessed February 8, 2016). , 19) notes, is “to visualize its exact structure.” While the GAB is no longer described as a source of “mystery water” (Powell 2011 Powell, O. C. 2011, Great Artesian Basin: Water from deeper down. In Queensland historical atlas: Histories, cultures, landscapes.(accessed February 8, 2016).), disparities point to continuing knowledge contests fuelled by the limitations of geological modeling technologies that aim to make “darkness visible” (Shortland 1994 Shortland, M. 1994. Darkness visible: Underground culture in the golden age of geology. History of Science 31 (1):1–61. doi:10.1177/007327539403200101 [CrossRef], [Google Scholar]).

Read the full article here.

The most obscene sentence in Australian modern history

The Adani Group’s Carmichael Coal Mine complex will draw an estimated 26 million litres of water per day by 2029, up to 4.55 gigalitres of ground water a year and over the mine’s life it will use approximately 335 billion litres of water – with unlimited access to The Great Artesian Basin.

Dear Mr. Hogan, What is your position on your leader's plan to encourage the gas industry by mandating that landowners "hosting" wells be given 10% of royalties?

  

Knitting Nannas Against Gas

Grafton Loop

c/- PO Box 763

Grafton 2460

knaggrafton@gmail.com

_____________________________

24th March 2017

Mr Kevin Hogan MP

Member for Page

63 Molesworth St

LISMORE 2480

Dear Mr Hogan

Barnaby Joyce’s Gas Royalty Plan

The Grafton Loop of the Knitting Nannas was surprised to hear that the National Party Leader, Barnaby Joyce, is promoting a plan which he believes will lead to community acceptance of CSG and unconventional gas mining in areas of our nation where there has been strong resistance to this invasive and polluting industry.

We believe that Mr Joyce has no appreciation of the deleterious impacts of gas-mining which have been overwhelmingly demonstrated in Queensland as well as in other parts of the world. We also believe that his attempt to bribe landowners will not lead to community acceptance of the industry.

Some of the Nannas in our Loop have experience of what a Queensland gasfield is like and how appalling living in or near a gasfield is to local communities. You might care to read Nanna Lynette’s gasfield inspection report on the Nannas’ blog at: http://knaggrafton.blogspot.com.au/2016/12/queensland-gasfield-tour-knitting.html

Mr Hogan, you previously supported those who opposed the industry in your electorate. (We are uncertain whether this concern about the industry extended beyond your electorate to other parts of the nation.)

What is your position on your leader’s plan to encourage the gas industry by mandating that landowners “hosting” wells be given 10% of royalties?

Do you believe that this bribe will ensure that neighbouring landowners (as differing from directly impacted landowners) will accept the industry in their areas? Do you believe that the rest of the community will accept the industry?

We look forward to your response.

Regards

Leonie Blain

on behalf of the Grafton Nannas