Media Release : Save Our Darling Downs

MEDIA RELEASE                         7th June 2012

Save our Darling Downs

C/o The Secretary, 6410 Toowoomba-Cecil Plains Road, Cecil Plains 4407. www.sodd.com.au

Arrow Energy’s environmental salt-bomb

Community group Save our Darling Downs has called on Arrow Energy to admit its plans for coal seam gas (CSG) extraction on the Darling Downs are in disarray after details emerged that the company has no idea how to handle the huge quantities of water and salt forecast to be produced as by-products.

Figures in the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for Arrow Energy’s Surat Gas project reveal that the company estimates it would pump out 770 Gigalitres of water from coal seams – enough to fill Sydney Harbour one and a half times. This water would contain 3.5 million tonnes of salt.

Among the options being considered by Arrow for this water are ‘disposal to watercourses’ and ‘ocean outfall’ (pumping the water to the ocean). Either would likely have serious environmental implications.

The Arrow EIS discusses treating the CSG water to allow ‘beneficial re-use’, but has no workable processes in place to achieve this for the huge volumes of water to be extracted.

Arrow’s EIS states:

 Assuming an average salt concentration of 4,500 mg/L, Arrow expects that treatment of coal seam gas water will generate in the order of 4.5 t of salt per megalitre of coal seam gas water.

Arrow estimates the salt concentration of the resulting brine to be ‘2-3%’, or 150 – 225 tonnes of brine per megalite of water. If all the water produced over the life of the project was treated (770Gl), a total of 117 – 175 million tonnes would be produced. The EIS states:

for the purposes of this impact assessment it is assumed that brine will be stored in dams and disposed to a suitably licenced landfill. The closest currently available suitably licenced waste disposal facility is located at Swanbank, near Ipswich. This EIS has assumed that all brine concentrate will be trucked to Swanbank.

The best case estimate of 117 million tonnes of brine equates to 2.9 million B-Double truck loads of 40 tonnes each, travelling through Toowoomba and down the Warrego Highway to Swanbank.

SODD spokesperson Ruth Armstrong said ‘Arrow Energy’s Surat Gas Project, if approved, will effectively be mining groundwater from the Great Artesian Basin and Murray Darling Basin. By the industry’s and the state government’s own admissions’, this water mining is not sustainable. Arrow Energy’s plan for disposal of the salt produced by its Surat Gas Project is plainly ridiculous and impractical. The truth is, Arrow has no idea what to do with the salt, and the likely outcome would be storage in dams across the Darling Downs. This would be a ticking environmental time-bomb, posing a great risk to the Murray-Darling Basin’.

Media contact: Ruth Armstrong  0429 700 291

Editor's Note:  I posted this Media Release this morning and wanted to come back and say something about it. 

Does Arrow really think that the good people of the Darling Downs will sit back and let this happen without a murmur? 

Will Campbell Newman honour his word about no CSG Mining on the Darling Downs or will he follow most Australian politicians and just lie.  This is a real test for Can Do and the people of Queensland are watching - closely.