MONTANA rancher Art Hayes Junior farms 65 kilometres – and across a State boundary – from the nearest coal seam gas (CSG) wells in Wyoming.
But in the past 15 years he and other local ranchers have seen CSG’s ugly side wash downstream and into Montana.
Mr Hayes says the effects of CSG – known as coalbed methane in the US – have been a constant source of frustration for him and other south east Montana farmers, since the CSG boom started in the Powder River Basin in the late 1990s.
Mr Hayes runs a 200-hectare ranch at Birney and is president of the Tongue River Water Users Association which executes regular contracts to distribute water for about 100 irrigated farmers and other commercial users like him, operating downstream.
While some of the farms were as far as 225km from the nearest discharges from the Wyoming gas wells, it hadn’t been far enough to escape the flow-on effects which were carried downstream with rain and snow melt, destroying soils and killing crops.
The land was once an inland sea and is naturally saline, he said, but the CSG mining discharges have intensified the salinity problems and now tipped the soil and water balance from being healthy to putrid.
Stock & Land
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