In 2015 I interviewed farmers, scientists and environmentalists about coal seam gas mining, an industry with big plans for NSW. From their different standpoints they painted an alarming picture of disruption to farming practices and impacts on surface and groundwater supplies, particularly the Great Artesian Basin. How could the Australian state and federal governments allow this to happen? I was told to go to Brisbane to find out ……
I arranged to meet Simone Marsh, the environmental scientist who had assessed the Environmental Impact Statements for the first two coal seam gas projects in Australia. The friend I was staying with tagged along too.
Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) Process
Proponents of new projects with the potential to cause environmental, social or economic impacts, were required to submit an EIS to the Queensland Government to obtain approval. If the EIS adequately addressed general and specific matters in the terms of reference, the EIS was released for public comment for a limited time. Then various departmental officers assessed the parts of the EIS and the public comments pertaining to their expertise, and wrote draft text for the Project Director’s final assessment report. A department’s resources, priorities and existing workloads dictated the time taken for an assessment, and when complete, the development was either rejected by the government or approved, sometimes with extra conditions.
An EIS usually included the following
- A baseline study to understand the physical, chemical, and biological environment of the defined area before work began.
- A map of where the proposed infrastructure was to be built
- A report on the impacts or disturbances which were likely to occur
Simone coordinated the environmental impact assessments for major projects, deemed to be of ‘State Significance’, such as large coal mines or ash disposal for power stations. However, by the time the EIS documents landed on her desk, these projects were too far down the engineering pathway to make any substantial design changes. Instead of compromising or making changes, she believed proponents simply applied pressure at upper government levels.
In 2007, disillusioned with working for the government, Simone decided to join an engineering company which incorporated sustainable development aspects into projects from the first stage of the engineering design process.
In early 2010, many project assessment positions became available in the Queensland Government’s Coordinator-General’s Office but there were not enough trained people to fill the roles. Simone was seconded from the engineering company to work for the Queensland Department of Infrastructure and Planning. During Simone’s secondment, the engineering company paid Simone’s regular wage and the government paid the engineering company.
Santos Assessment
Santos’ EIS was the first of the Gladstone Harbour gas projects to be assessed because it was an Australian company. Santos’ final EIS for the Gladstone Liquid Natural Gas plant (GLNG) was on display for public comment from December 2009 to February 2010, summer holidays, a time when controversial projects draw little attention.
Simone resumed work for the government in February and was directed to a metre long shelf of folders on the Santos GLNG Environmental Impact Statement. She was informed that the Coordinator-General (CG) wanted his assessment report signed off by the end of March. As the only environmental specialist, she was supposed to read, analyse, check and report on a 15,000 page document about coal seam gas, a new type of mining in Australia, in less than eight weeks, an impossible task.
The GLNG project was unprecedented. For the first time the CG was being asked to consider and assess unknown, and yet extensive, areas of disturbance across large numbers of tenements, and unprecedented volumes of waste.
The EIS did not provide details of where the wells would be drilled, to what depth and which ones would be hydrologically fractured. Baseline studies and basic information like mapping of pipelines and other infrastructure were required under the Environmental Protection Act but they were not provided. Simone suggested her superiors get legal advice because she believed the companies were breaking the law. Lawyers backed up what she said and wrote a memorandum to the department, advising them to seek information from Santos.
A Santos representative told Simone they would not have maps until a drilling contractor was appointed. Simone suggested a buffer zone around the towns of Roma, Rolleston, Bauhinia and Wandoan, which were wholly within the gas fields. Later, a bill was introduced by the Bligh Labor government to restrict mining within a 2km buffer zone around townships. It was never enacted and was abandoned in 2013.[1] Planning powers were handed over to local councils, a conflict of interest, as they rely on the money mining companies brought to their regions.
Simone said Santos was aware of the project’s very large volumes of fugitive emissions. However, she was not confident that the figures in the EIS and their assumptions were accurate, but she did not have time to check them.
When she asked about studies on the impacts on groundwater, one of the biggest issues for the project, she was taken into a meeting room, sat down and told that there was not going to be a chapter on groundwater in the CG’s report. When she asked why, she was again told that there was not going to be a chapter on this.
Simone emailed the CG and his Deputies in May, outlining twenty-six concerns she had about the project. They ignored the email and instead pushed her to finish the report without the relevant information required.
The Santos project was signed off by the CG on 28 May 2010. Conditions to offset greenhouse gas emissions were struck out and instead a greenhouse gas reduction strategy was required. Her draft of a chapter on cumulative greenhouse gas estimates for the emerging LNG industry was deleted. Simone had witnessed the downward spiral of policies and operations within the EPA for a decade, but she had never before witnessed blatant breaking of the law.
QGC’s Assessment
Straight after the Santos project was signed off, the Coordinator General wanted the same team to assess another 10,000 page document for the QGC coal seam gas project, now owned by the BG Group.
There was no time to read that document. Simone was told to start drafting conditions with an expectation they would cut and paste from the Santos documents. A lot of Simone’s work was drafting text for the project directors, but it was not being utilised.
QGC’s EIS had no peer review of specialist reports, no signature of a responsible person for overall conclusions, and commitments were typically not written in a legally binding manner. Conclusions regarding economic impacts were made without undertaking a detailed assessment. Economic costs analysis, baseline studies, maps of infrastructure and disturbance information were missing. These deficiencies were noted by Simone but were not in the final report.
To show the enormity of the project, Simone consulted with Dr Ian Wilson from the Department of Environment to calculate the volumes of contaminated water and salts coming up to the surface, and the volumes of the accumulative greenhouse gases. Her figures were changed to make it look as if there would be a lot less impact.
Simone was very stressed, so stressed she became unwell. On 23 June she called in sick but her superiors asked her to come in anyway and she arrived at the office at ten o’clock. One of the project directors said that he wanted her to write the greenhouse gas chapter of the QGC’s report by three o’clock that day. She said that was unreasonable because she had not read the documentation properly, had not looked at the calculations, and did not understand the assumptions that had been made.
She was told that the Coordinator-General wanted a copy of her report in his bag that evening. She asked to see the Coordinator-General to explain that it was unreasonable, but she was not given the opportunity to speak with him on that day, or any other day. The project director told her to do what she could and that is what she did. Then, at the end of the day, she packed up all her belongings and walked out.
The Coordinator-General, Colin Jensen, signed off the QGC project on 23 June. Earlier he had announced he was to leave his position to become Chief Executive of Brisbane City Council.
Simone hoped that the projects would not be approved by the federal government. While assessing the Santos project she had flown to Canberra at her own expense to spend a day with the people responsible for Queensland’s mining projects. At the end of the day the lead from that team said there was no way her minister would sign off on this project given the amount of unknowns.
Peter Garrett, the Federal Minister for the Environment at the time, stalled his decisions on the two projects. In his memoir Big Blue Sky he states that he ‘suspected it was difficult, if not impossible, to manage the impacts of large-scale dredging on the waters adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park’ for Gladstone’s major port upgrade.[2] Also, ‘advice from Geosciences Australia had been unambiguous: “The impact of coal seam gas development on the Great Artesian Basin is not sufficiently addressed.” The Federal Treasurer, Wayne Swan, and Resources Minister, Martin Ferguson, were ‘acutely focused on the decision’. Ferguson had even requested the attorney-general’s department to ‘monitor the activity of green activists’.
On 24 June, the day after the Queensland Government signed off on the QGC project, Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, resigned. The new Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, appointed a new Minister for the Environment, Tony Burke and both projects were signed off on 22 October.
Simone’s second hope was that the National Party would not allow this to happen to farmers. Later, a search through AgForce Queensland’s media releases, revealed that when farmers should have been hearing lots about the developments of a gas industry only one media release was issued in the first half of 2010. There were no media statements from the head of AgForce Queensland, John Cotter. He must have known of the emerging coal seam gas industry as his son, John Cotter Jnr, had set up a planning and approval business in Brisbane called PAD Partners and QGC was a major client.
After the Santos and QGC approvals, PAD Partners expanded from twenty to seventy employees within a year, and its name was changed to the Flinders Group. Not long after the signing off of the Santos and QGC projects, both Deputy Coordinator-Generals and the Assistant Coordinator-General, went to work for the Flinders Group.
Simone returned to work for the private engineering company and was considered to be an environmental expert in coal seam gas but she did not want to work in this field. When the federal government approved both projects, her stress and anxiety increased and she could no longer work.
Envisaging the environmental consequences, she contacted Drew Hutton, President of the Lock the Gate Alliance. She refused to give him her name, but she told him about AgForce not informing the farmers. One of the western newspapers ran the story and John Cotter Snr was replaced as president of Agforce in September 2010. Farmers called for a moratorium on all coal seam gas development but the approvals had already been given.
Simone was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome and continued to worry about the impacts of coal seam gas. She contacted Drew Hutton again, and this time told him her name and her story. But to heal she needed to understand what had happened.
She searched the Queensland parliamentary record of March 2010 and found a letter about the signing of a large contract with China for liquefied gas from Catherine Tanna, Executive Vice President, BG Group and Managing Director, QGC Pty Limited. This partly explained the haste for approval. Then under the Right to Information Act she obtained an email that disclosed a “drop-dead date” of June 2010 for the approval of the QGC LNG project.
Listening to Simone was a turning point for me. My friend and I were stunned. We had both travelled in third world countries where business is done this way, but we didn’t think it happened in Australia. We hardly talked on the way home. It was this interview that made me decide I was going to stop this industry in NSW.
Sydney Coal Seam Gas Rally
When: Thursday, 14 September ⋅11:30am – 1:00pm
Where: Customs House, 31 Alfred St, near Circular Quay, Sydney
What: March from Customs House to Parliament House
The Gomeroi, NSW Farmers, NSW Country Women’s Association (CWA), Unions NSW and Lock the Gate are organising this rally to show politicians the diverse range of people against coal seam gas and to stop it expanding further in NSW.
Santos’ coal seam gas (CSG) plans for north-west NSW include the Pilliga Narrabri Gas Project, the Hunter Gas Pipeline and the Pilliga Lateral Pipeline. These developments will have a detrimental impact on groundwater, including the Great Artesian Basin, the Pilliga Forest and the prime agricultural land of Liverpool Plains.
Please ask your friends to join you and share the event on social media. I hope to see you there.
Gas Yarn 1 – Roma oil and gas discovery 1900
Gas Yarn 2 – Know your enemy
References: Simone Marsh – Submission to Senate Select Committee Inquiry into Certain Aspects of Queensland Government Administration related to Commonwealth Government Affairs 2014
[1] ABC RN https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/archived/bushtelegraph/csg-changes/5079162
[2] Garrett, Peter, Chapter 33, Big Blue Sky, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2015
Nanna Kathy has been researching and campaigning against coal seam gas since February 2011.