The Devastating CSG Industry

Hey everyone!

My name is Alex Delaney, I am 16 years old and live near Geelong in Victoria. I am incredibly passionate about advocating on behalf of our generation to protect our future and stopping toxic, unsustainable industries that are destroying our climate, communities & future.

There are quite a few things I’d like to share in upcoming blogs, but for my first FED blog I would like to show why we must stop the devastating CSG industry.

I live in Victoria, where we have a moratorium (ban) on CSG extraction whilst a government inquiry makes a decision. It has already postponed a final finding about twice, but is due to finalise it in several weeks. Here’s some photo’s of future environmental protectors in our state standing up for what matters (I need to start doing this stuff more!).

We are fortunate that so far we have been almost unscathed by the industry. However, the industry has rapidly overrun massive parts of Queensland and New South Wales with around 10,000 wells to this point, with 30,000 planned in the near future. A particularly sensitive place that has recently been subject of controversy is the Pilliga state forest, in NSW where gas company wants wants to drill hundreds of wells. It is a major recharge point for the Great Artesian Basin, that farmers all over the country rely on. So this affects all of us and if people think that living away from any proposed gas exploration/production means they don’t have to worry, they’re kidding themselves.

First of all I will provide some very brief context to developments that have given this industry the power it has and how the gas is extracted for export overseas.

I will then use a google earth flyover to demonstrate the scale of the industry in Queensland, something that anyone with a desktop computer can do (I will leave a link for instructions at the bottom of this blog).

Finally I will correct some misconceptions that have been spread by the industry lobby APPEA and discuss the recent mass decline in jobs in the industry, that have actually been acknowledged by the industry,

In an upcoming blog I will share a few stories of Australian communities that have been sold out by corrupt governments and the devastation caused to their health, homes, agricultural industries and the sensitive environment. However since this is a big issue I have decided that these issues are deserving of their own blog post and in this blog I will focus more on setting the groundwork.

In the past decade, Australia has seen rapid development of a new, dangerous type of fossil fuel mining, known as ‘fracking’. It is well described in this video from America, where fracking has been by far most prevalent and has has an untold impact on communities. (According to frack tracker alliance, the U.S. have well over 1 million wells producing oil & gas, yet that is only for states that provided data!) https://www.fractracker.org/2015/08/1-7-million-wells/

To explain all the lines are pipelines and yellow triangles are gas wells, I didn’t include oil wells because well it’s confronting enough as is.

In the 2000s, over several years of sustained demand from energy hungry markets in Asia lead to a wave of $190 billion investment in Australia, mainly Queensland to extract and export staggering volumes of the fossil fuel methane (known as ‘gas’). These companies in the pockets of governments like Campbell Newman, offering huge donations in return for dodgy approvals (where the public servants didn’t even have a chance to read the proposals) got their way very quickly.

As part of the rapid development of the CSG industry, investors have spent tens of billions on developing LNG production and export infrastructure.

To date dozens of gas fields have been constructed in Australia, that contain around 10,000 CSG wells across Australia. In the fields plants are constructed to desalinate the ‘produced water’ (that is a byproduct of the drilling process) and huge ponds are formed to hold the toxic slurry produced from this process.

Additionally each gas field contains a plant to clean all the contaminants in the gas and these plants have created huge conflict with neighbours due to pollution and noise.

The gas companies have also installed huge pipelines and pumping stations to bring the gas from these fields under pressure down very long pipelines to 3 megaplants on Curtis Island in Gladstone for export. Below is a photo of a smaller pipeline being installed (notice the clearing of land, all pipelines do that for hundred of kilometres grrrr).

This segment on abc 7:30 shows some good aerial footage of these plants, as well as some good news about low oil prices affecting the gas companies.

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2016/s4505111.htm

Once it reaches Gladstone, the gas is exported by freezing it into a liquid form (LNG) to save space, where it occupies just 1/600th of the space it would in the form of gas. It is then pumped into specialised tanker ships called LNG carriers. This is done by large volumes of gas through massive processing plants, called ‘LNG trains’ that essentially work in the same way as the compressor of a freezer or air conditioner on a gigantic scale. As a matter of fact, they consume such huge amounts of electricity that they require entire gas/coal fired power plants to operate!

These plants is a significant part of both major parties plans to make Australia the largest exporter of gas in the world. Normally new LNG plants would use several offshore wells that produce for decades to export. We already have several of these operating or under construction in WA and NT. They are the first in the world to take ‘fracked gas’ and freeze it, although it is been considered in Northern America where there is a huge oversupply.

Now that this is all explained, here is a flyover I made on google earth of Queensland's gas fields that I just discussed. I really noticed this on my way to Cairns from Melbourne on a holiday a few years ago to see the reef properly for perhaps the first and last time. It was so confronting to see the vast spiderweb of roads and ponds so visible from such a height and how extensive these gas knowing that many of those are on people’s private land, as landholders are powerless thanks to laws favouring these companies.

Take note of how close those wells are to Brisbane!

Now you have some idea of the scale of everything, let’s look at whether gas is what it’s cracked up to be as a solution to climate change

On the surface, to some the development taking us towards being the worlds largest gas exporter may seem to be positive. Gas produces less carbon when burnt then coal and can be used on demand when renewables aren’t producing power. However there is one major point the lobbyists don’t want you to know. Gas wells, pipelines have been found to leak enormous amounts of the potent free greenhouse gas methane, which is 50 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If just 3% leaks, it already is a more carbon intensive energy source than coal.

That is terrifying and there is evidence to suggest that it easily exceeds that already, but our government authorities are not bothering to monitor.

So not only is gas potentially a huge risk for our climate, as you’ll know if you saw the 7:30 link, so far despite the promises government has received next to no revenue from CSG royalties.

Our government has allowed the forced industrialisation huge chunks of our country over private land, it is making very little if any revenue in royalties. The justification for the invasion of private land is that ‘we need this valuable resource’, yet now even with huge exports to Asia little royalties are coming in! Yet that’s not happening!

Finally let’s look at another key promise of industry, that is jobs.

They claim that CSG is a big employer. At first the numbers look big, in the peak of the boom 45,000 people were employed by the drilling programs and infrastructure development. However, in the past 24 months this has fallen to around 6,000 across Australia and tens of thousands of workers have been made redundant. An important distinction to make is that these jobs are temporary. Unlike many mines where workers are full time and have a secure job to support their family, these workers are offered temporary positions that cease once a project is completed or work runs out. In reality, once infrastructure is established few people are employed. Once a gas field is producing, it does so practically without human intervention. Diagnosis of issues and control of plants is done remotely via the capital cities. Only a small amount of maintenance workers are required!

An important industry for Australia that is undoubtably affected by CSG and other fossil fuel extraction is tourism. It brings in many billions every year and according to the governments own agency Tourism Research Australia 531,000 people were employed in tourism in 2012 and that number is continually growing. A great deal of those people rely on the reef surviving to attract the tourists and we know that unless we take drastic action now we are sprinting towards 2 degrees, that will spell the end of it with cyclones, increased temperatures and acidity that comes with it.

So not only is gas potentially a huge risk for our climate, so far despite the promises government has received next to no revenue from CSG royalties desire it being the justification for the invasion of private land and huge water usage/contamination (as you’ll know if you saw the 7:30 link). It is not employing many people, so what is the benefits? Clearly the only benefits are going to either power stations in Asia or multinationals shareholders and the political parties who take donations from gas companies. This industry are a pack of reckless vandals who don’t have any sense of accountability at the poisoning of our country/planet so we must have a permanent ban on all CSG drilling in Australia and rapidly moving to renewables.

#Environment