Wednesday, June 13

Coal seam effluent salts sewerage

A COAL seam gas company has disposed of over a million litres of dirty water at a sewage treatment plant in northern NSW, breaching the plant’s license conditions, the NSW Environment Protection Authority said.

Metgasco, which operates a few dozen exploratory gas wells and hopes to drill up to 1000 in the next decade, trucked about 1.36 million litres of excess water from its storage ponds to the Casino sewage station in the 10 months to March.

The sewage plant, operated by Richmond Valley Council, has no license to process ‘‘produced water’’ from coal seam gas wells, which is salty and sometimes carries traces of drilling chemicals, but can be filtered into potable water. Large volumes of water are drawn up from underground at most coal seam gas sites as a by-product of the gas extraction process.

SMH

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