Another 'game-over' scenario for climate change.

Those here watching and cheering those determined protestors against the Keystone Dilbit pipeline for the Tar Sands environmental horror in the US, characterised as preventing a 'game-over' scenario for climate change, have their own bigger job to do here in Australia. It is necessary for having a chance of future climate and environmental secuirty to have an effective and permanent halt to all Coal Seam Gas mining here.

The NSW Minister for Planning and Infrastructure, Mr Barry Hazard, has on his desk some Coal Seam Gas Projects awaiting signature for approval. One is in the Camden area, with the AGL frackers amoungst new housing estate land. Another is in the NSW State Forests of The Pilliga, commonly known as the "Pilliga Scrub" . This constitutes the largest continuous remnant of semi-arid woodland in temperate NSW. The forest contains at least 300 native animal species, and at least 900 plant species, and extends over 3,000 square kilometres. Around it are towns of Narrabri, Coonabarabran.

The company Eastern Star conducted coal seam gas exploration and production activities without seeking Federal government assessment on matters of national environmental significance.

". . .cleared more than 150ha and fragmented 1,700ha of bushland, drilled 92 coal seam gas wells, constructed 56.6km of pipelines, and operated 35 production wells without seeking approval under the Federal EPBC Act. These activities have occurred in habitat for federally-listed threatened species, such as the South-Eastern Long-eared Bat. . . ."

". . . A review of it's considerations as contained in numerous Reviews of Environmental Factors conducted under s111 of the NSW Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979, indicates that each small activity has only ever been considered in isolation and the entire action has never been addressed in accordance with the Guidelines. . . ."

This is the kind of environmental oversight that the NSW government has been applying in general to all Coal Seam Gas Projects. The strategy of secretive, clandestine behaviour by Corporations involved in Gas Fracking Corporations indicates they have a lot to hide. Nearly all the big names in supplying energy in NSW are angling for a piece of the action, working with international energy giants to suck out Australia Coal Seam Methane, convert it to Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), and ship it to a world where an growing oil supply gap means rising energy prices. The Australian population, growing bigger as it is, cannot possibly hope to consume all that gas at the rates at which extraction in planned.

Each tiny piece of a gigantic plan to extract and export gas for overseas markets for trillions of profits is installed on the quiet, as if it is only this one tiny piece and its impact is hardly going to matter. Corporate signers sneak access to individual private land holding and farms, and go behind councils backs. They lie and cheat about their fugitive emissions regarding the proposed carbon tax.

Eastern Star has been well rewarded for its environmental sins. It was bought out by Santos for $924 million, making Santos the holder of the largest amount of gas reserves in NSW. So there is big money and dirty deals at stake. Private energy supplier TRUenergy takes up 20 percent of the Narribri permits. This amount of money probably means the company thinks the NSW politicians have been stitched up in a deal. Such confidence was enhanced at the time, by knowledge of the impending electoral landslide for the Liberal Party.

Queensland is well underway, with established CSG extraction and LNG conversion interests now acquired by Shell and PetroChina, as the big vultures go in for the CSG feast.

Oh they are not really in it just for the money are they? They say that CSG is "cleaner energy". The Origin web site tells us (http://www.originenergy.com.au/1143/Coal-seam-gas). And Origin is teaming up with ConacoPhillips, as Australia Pacific LNG. Origin holds 36,000 km2 of permits in Queensland. And just how can it be cleaner, when CSG is actually Methane that is found in Coal Seams. This is a much more dangerous greenhouse gas than Carbon Dioxide. There is unavoidable leakage of methane during the processes of drilling, fracking, compression, piping, processing and shipping. And all these processes cost energy, also provided mostly by fossil fuels, all the way before the gas arrives at its final point of use or burning. Summed over the entire process energy and emissions lifecycle, it has been measured to be more carbon dirty than coal.[2]

Those who have seen the movie "Gas Lands", will have seen the film documented affects on water supplies, rivers, local air quality, and the effects on the health of those animals and humans condemned to drink and breath it. No mention of these problems can be found on the website of Origin Energy. The dirty parts of the process also include the problem of breaking up the boundaries between rock layers, so that underground adquifers and water tables become contaminated. The coal seam beds naturally already contain large amounts of toxic carbon chemicals such as benzene. The fracking process adds huge volumes of water with extra hundreds of toxic chemicals that the corporations prefer to keep secret. The high pressures push the chemicals up and down the rock layers. Once breached, the reservoirs of toxic chemicals in the coal seam bed water can mix up easily with all the other layers, because impermeable rock barriers have been made permeable. These barriers are replaced with a network of drilled holes and lateral tunnels, going for kilometres in all directions from each well access point.

Lots of wells are required, peppering the landscape like an overused dart board. Each well requires near-surface pipes to storage collection points, if there are no pre-existing natural gas line pipes. Because the Sydney Basin has a good Natural Gas pipeline infrastructure, its a lot easier to place a well on a small block of land in any suburb, and pump it straight into the existing gas system. But for natural wilderness areas, such as the Pillaga Scrub, pipes, and roads need to be laid down, so the entire state conservation area needs to be wrecked. And the toxic waste water, which needs to be pumped and drained to allow gas flow, gets placed in ponds for evaporation, also as seen in "Gaslands". If water removal is not fast enough, or there is no pond space available, it has to be trucked out regularly in big tankers, or piped out. All those toxics have to go somewhere. Pumping back into the ground near the well site is not an option. Further away increases the risks of aquifer poisoning.

The CSG is embedded in the rock beds, and can only be extracted locally, so long as local gas reserves provide pressure. Production in a single well peaks early and declines exponentially, even with repeated unblocking and frackings, which are required. No royalties are given to government over the initial years of peak production. After five years there is small percentage tax of the tail end of production. By 10 years, when the royalty might kick in a bit, the well has already been abandoned. Profits continue by repeating the process in parallel in new areas, untill the gas runs out. Rates of extraction and profits will ultimately depend on how fast it can be shipped overseas as LNG.

At http://origintogether.com/, its "Looking for the facts . . .Then you’ve come to the right place.
At Origin, we’re happy to show you the facts about coal seam gas any time, so you can draw your own conclusions. We’re also regularly updating this website with answers to any new questions as they are raised. . . . Theres an almost endless supply of CSG out here . . . and lots of new jobs in the area coming up. . . ." The website offers links to business opportunities, Community Skills Scholarships, Sponsorships and Programs.

The direct contribution of mining companies to employment and Australian Government income is less than 2%. Kevin Rudd was knifed out of his Prime Ministership, because of the heavily funded campaign of mining corporations to prevent Australians from getting a better return. The mining boon has raised the value of the Australian dollar, due to amount of money invested in mining, and expected investment returns to overseas. This makes it harder for agriculture, manufacturing and other industries to survive as they compete with overseas pricing.

Of course these energy companies are happy to offer jobs at good rates in helping them, because they plan to make a mint for a few decades, cash up, ship out with their money overseas, after the exported energy. They will be able to afford to leave their stinking toxic mess behind, and migrate to a land where food can still be grown. When the cancer cases and nueronal degeneration conditions come out in the decades ahead, and climate change is running rampant, their corporate executives will be immune to personal responsibility, and the money will be untracable. But will leave behind many unfortunates whose properties have been devalued by toxicity, ground cave-in, and lives bankrupted by unaffordable ill health, will just have to die sick and poor. The natural forests and scrub will be ruined, burned by drought and climate change. Inland Australia will be hot, dry and barren, with intensively mined CSG areas a moonscape of abandoned rusty pipes, wells and dried toxic waste, devoid of plant, animal and human life.

If you do not want this grim future brought about by these CSG Ponzi scheme scammers and climate criminals, then get out there now and berate your local member until they start listening or call the police and have them arrested. Its about time the real criminals were arrested, instead of increasingly angry protesters. Or how about having CSG proponents placed in a Psychiatric Insitution, because they are Insane. Another way to look at it, considering that really clean renewable energy investment is possible and sustainable, is that CSG is attempted planetary suicide.
And it to the current generations that live today, that falls the ethical duty to prevent this happening.

[1] Under the Radar report: http://www.nccnsw.org.au/sites/default/files/110719%20Under%20the%20Radar%20Eastern%20Star%20Gas%20EPBC%20Report%20email.pdf

[2]Methane and the Greenhouse-Gas Footprint of Natural Gas
from Shale Formations : http://thehill.com/images/stories/blogs/energy/howarth.pdf