Activists have warned that the Queensland authorities’s approval of dozens of latest gasoline wells close to a contaminated website dangers everlasting air pollution of groundwater and farming land within the state’s west.
Arrow Energy was on Friday granted environmental approval to drill 55 coal seam gasoline wells at Hopeland, close to Chinchilla, about 300km west of Brisbane.
The challenge to increase the Shell and PetroChina three way partnership’s current six-well facility is close to the location of Linc Energy’s failed underground coal gasification challenge, which is contaminated with benzene, naphthalene and cyanide.
The Department of Environment and Science says it has positioned “strict conditions” on the environmental authority obligating Arrow to observe any potential motion of contaminants from the Linc website.
The Lock the Gate Alliance condemned the approval saying the federal government’s personal scientists had raised considerations about groundwater contamination.
“Any conditions attached to this project are unlikely to mitigate the risk of contaminants spreading in groundwater because once the damage is done, it can’t be undone,” Lock the Gate coordinator Ellie Smith stated in an announcement.
“Arrow Energy also has a terrible track record obeying the law in Queensland, and was fined $1 million last year for illegally drilling directional gas wells beneath farmland without access agreements with the landholders.
“The Palaszczuk authorities has as soon as once more demonstrated how keen it’s to sacrifice Queensland farmland and the water that sustains it with a purpose to appease multinational coal seam gasoline corporations.”
The department has said that under the conditions, Arrow must expand the number of bores in its existing groundwater monitoring network, have a program to detect changes to groundwater, and monitor all groundwater points at identified locations every quarter.
Linc operated four underground coal gasification sites where it burned coal to produce gas between 2007 and 2013, but that caused the ground to fracture allowing toxic gasses to leak into the groundwater.
Linc went into voluntary administration in April 2016 before being slapped with a $4.5 million penalty in 2018 on five counts of wilfully and unlawfully causing environmental harm.
Brisbane District Court found the company guilty in 2018 of causing damage by allowing toxic gas to leak from its underground coal gasification sites.
The department said in November 2022 that more than 180 groundwater samples from Linc Energy sites had tested positive for contaminants including benzene, naphthalene and cyanide.
However, it said, a further 130 samples from nearby landholder bores taken since 2015 showed they had not been contaminated and landholders were notified as recently as late 2021.
Arrow utilized for an environmental authority to extend the variety of gasoline wells by 55 and the floor space of its close by Hopeland challenge in October 2021.
Source: www.perthnow.com.au
