QLD:Gas company defends disposal plans

AAP General News (Australia)
04-21-2011
QLD:Gas company defends disposal plans

BRISBANE, April 21 AAP - Coal seam gas company QGC has defended its plans for the disposal
of mineralised water and salt brought to the surface during mining operations.

The company was responding to claims from Friends of the Earth that QGC is seeking
to have the Queensland government water down environmental approvals for the disposal
of coal seam gas (CSG) water and to build more evaporation ponds to increase its brine
storage.

The company admits that it is still seeking a viable commercial plan to dispose of
brine and salt extracted in CSG mining.

A QGC spokesman said the company intends to invest A$1 billon in treating water.

"We are currently improving our water management by building water treatment plants
to treat all of our water so that it can be used by the community for things such as irrigation,
town water supply and industry," the spokesman said in a statement.

"This work requires some changes to our environmental authorities, including for temporary
discharge of treated water to surface waters while a pipeline is built.

"This discharge will actually prevent the need for more large dams.

"Future operations for the LNG project will include water aggregation and brine ponds
to enable water treatment to occur.

"We are presently studying commercial applications for the use of brine and salt."

Friends of the Earth organiser Drew Hutton said QGC wants to amend its environmental
authority (EA) to allow it to dispose of more CSG water into the Murray Darling Basin
at Wieambilla Creek, near Chinchilla, despite doubts by experts that the gas companies
can meet the standards at an acceptable cost.

Mr Hutton said these developments showed the inadequacy of the state government's regulatory
approach.

"The state government's much-vaunted 'adaptive management' approach to regulating the
coal seam gas industry means little more than the government watering down sections of
the environmental authorities when the companies don't want to meet the standards," Mr
Hutton told AAP.

"As more and more water gets extracted from the coal seam, QGC is having trouble dealing
effectively with it, so they are wanting the government to amend their environmental authority
to enable easier solutions."

Mr Hutton said an expert in waste water management, Dr Konstantinos Athanasiadis, told
the recent Future Gas conference in Brisbane that he did not believe existing technology
would enable the CSG water to reach the regulatory standard for discharge into waterways
at an acceptable cost.

"If treated to an inferior level then discharges of CSG water to inland waterways would
not only disrupt water-flow regimes in those streams but also would potentially contaminate
them," Mr Hutton said.

He said Dr Athanasiadis also made it clear there was also no feasible solution to the
problem of disposing of the one million tonnes of salt brought to the surface, other than
landfill.

AAP stg/crh/jl

KEYWORD: CSG

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