http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/10/25/3046980.htm?section=business

Federal government on Friday approved the projects, which BG Group and a consortium involving Santos, Petronas and Total will capture and pipe coal seam gas from the Surat and Bowen Basins to Gladstone in central Queensland.

“These 2 projects will see Queensland become a serious Global player in the export of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) to our Asian pacific neighbors,” Queensland Resources Council’s spokesperson Michael Roche said Saturday. “These projects together will be pumping out more LNG than the Gorgon Project in Western Australia so this is pretty big news for Queensland.”

According to Australia’s largest domestic Nat Gas producer, Santos, the company wants to work with the community and governments to create thousands of jobs and billions of dollars for the economy.

“It has take over 3 yrs so we are very excited to get to this point that’s for sure,” Santos spokesman James Purtill said. “The project has undergone a pretty thorough environmental approval and community consultation process, I would say it was one of the most comprehensive in Australian history.”

Meanwhile, Queensland Coal Seam Gas director Ross Dunn said if the projects proceed as planned Australia will become one of the World’s leading suppliers of LNG.

Dunn indicated that Australia is about the sixth largest producer of LNG around the world, and when BG Group’s projects come on stream and together with the Gorgon Project in Western Australia, that will take the nation to about the 2nd largest producer of LNG in the World.—Paul A. Ebeling, Jnr. www.livetradingnews.com

Brisbane – Schools in the Surat basin will benefit from a $720,000 contribution by Xstrata Coal made possible through a Queensland Minerals and Energy Academy (QMEA) partnership launched today.
The partnership will benefit the school communities from Miles State High School and Wandoan and Taroom State Schools, who were present at Parliament House for the launch by the Minister for Natural Resources, Mines and Energy and Minister for Trade the Hon. Stephen Robertson MP.

The Xstrata Coal Wandoan donation will allow the three QMEA schools to receive additional school equipment, curriculum enrichment and a position for a school-industry liaison. Xstrata Coal Wandoan Project
Executive General Manager Steve Bridger said that funding would allow the schools to invest in learning opportunities for their students.
“The partnership will allow the schools to provide new and exciting curriculum for students, provide support for literacy and numeracy programs and create closer relationships between school and industry,” Mr Bridger said.

“Through the funding, we are hoping to give young people in the Surat Basin the skills they need to build strong, thriving communities that can make the most of the resources industries that are entering their region. “It will be these young people who will show us that resources and agricultural industries can co-exist and thrive,” he said.
Queensland Resources Council Chief Executive Michael Roche said the industry partnership was another important step to ensure young people were aware of the career opportunities available to them in the
resources sector.
”The resources sector in Queensland is a $50 billion-a-year industry, and with a looming skills shortage, it is paramount that we have programs in place to ensure resource sector career options are made known,” Mr Roche said.
QMEA Director, Rodger Atkins said the three new QMEA schools would benefit immensely from Xstrata Coal’s donation and involvement.
“The expansion of the QMEA to Surat Basin schools means students will be able to have access to close industry relationships, to ensure resources sector careers and pathways are made obvious for students
making career decisions,” he said.

Xstrata Coal’s $720,000 donation to the Wandoan QMEA Partnership is part of the company’s Corporate Social Involvement (CSI) program, which is making a real difference to the lives of others across both
Queensland and New South Wales.
Xstrata Coal’s CSI partners, groups like CityCare and Lifeline, provide the ideas, foundations and support networks necessary to affect positive change across the areas of health, education, community, environment and the arts. In 2010 the company committed more than $12 million to assist over 50 CSI partners achieve their goals.

About the Xstrata Coal Wandoan QMEA Partnership

The Xstrata Coal Wandoan QMEA Partnership will improve the pathways from senior school to work in industry and help attract and retain dedicated, suitably qualified teaching staff. It will also provide funding, equipment, curriculum enrichment and school-industry liaison, specifically to:
○ Extend the Queensland Minerals and Energy Academy to Wandoan State School, Taroom State School and Miles State High School
○ Support the establishment of a Trade Training Centre in Miles with regional hubs at Wandoan and Taroom State Schools, including industry placement and teacher training
○ Begin a program for school-based or full-time apprenticeships or traineeships with Xstrata Coal and district employers.
In addition, Xstrata Coal will direct funding and other resources through Education Queensland to:
○ Support the establishment of a Science Centre at Wandoan State School
○ Employ teacher aides at the Wandoan State School to deliver literacy and numeracy programs
○ Establish a bursary fund at Wandoan State School for equipment, transport and tuition that supports student’s studies and extra-curricula activities.
○ Fund industry placement and teacher training for Trade Training Centre Staff
○ Provide incentive grants for Wandoan district employers to hire apprentices.

A US soil scientist and wastewater irrigation expert with experience in the US coal seam gas industry believes Queens-land landholders may gain from the emerging coal seam gas industry in the Surat Basin.

John Zupancic is a partner in the US company BeneTerra, which works as a water management intermediary between coalbed methane producers and land-owners in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.

BeneTerra contracts with energy companies to handle water from their wells and then designs and manages re-use systems which filter, treat and pump the water to subsurface drip irrigation networks on surrounding farms.

The process provides energy companies with a year-round water dispersal solution and gives landowners in semi-arid environments year-round access to free or low-cost water to grow hay and forage crops.

About 20 percent of all coalbed methane water produced in the Powder River Basin is beneficially reused, which results in 20-24 gigalitres (20,000-24,000 megalitres) delivered to local landowners for subsurface and sprinkler irrigation, stock water and aquifer recharge every year. Most produced water in the Powder River Basin still goes into infiltration/evaporation dams.

Mr Zupancic is currently overseeing a joint project between BeneTerra and Wood Group Wagners in Queensland to assess whether similar strategies can be applied in the Surat Basin.

The sandstone layers and hydrology of the Powder River Basin and Great Artesian Basin were very similar, Mr Zupancic said. But there were differences in soil type. Where calcareous loams predominated in the Powder River Basin, higher clay content soils were more common in the Surat Basin, and their susceptibility to damage from exposure to sodium presented a key challenge in re-using CSG water here.

The CSG industry is relatively new in Queensland, but has been operating for more than 20 years in the US.

A key point Mr Zupancic wished to emphasise was that much of the water produced from coal seams was of poor quality and was never likely to be put to beneficial use for purposes such as crop irrigation, aquifer recharge, stock watering or stream augmentation if the CSG industry did not exist to produce it.

The advent of the CSG industry presented a rare opportunity to use the coal seam water resource by allowing it to be desalinated for beneficial purposes.

“Without the revenues generated from gas sales this water would remain virtually useless for perpetuity,” Mr Zupancic said. He said Queensland landholders could further benefit from the CSG industry with improved roads, new gates and cattle grids, jobs for their children and cash payments for access.

Mr Zupancic said Queensland’s emerging CSG industry was being subjected to far stronger regulatory controls than those in the US in the 1980s and 1990s, when the coalbed methane industry was first developing.

He said he attended the State Government’s recent community consultation forum in Chinchilla and was impressed by what he saw.

“The level of thought that has gone into regulating the industry here is far greater than it ever was when we started the Coal Seam Gas industry in the Powder River Basin,” Mr Zupancic said.

“The level and the degree of consideration for all aspects from code of conduct and land access to make good provisions for water, those are pretty well thought out. In the US a lot of that was sorted out in the courtroom.”

He said that while there had been some negative impacts early in the industry’s development, the industry had come a long way in 20 years and the many landholders and energy companies that BeneTerra worked with today shared a harmonious and mutually beneficial relationship.

“We have 24,000 functioning wells in the Powder River Basin right now, and we have had very few problems where people have lost water supplies,” Mr Zupancic said. Where aquifer drain-age issues occurred in the Powder River Basin, make-good provisions had been effective at dealing with them, he said.

“There is one case with a lawsuit. I think the company was unjustly accused of draining down a very thin shallow coal aquifer that some people were using for drinking water, and in this case the energy company hauled water to this small community of about six homes. And then they brought well water from a nearby aquifer and set up the pipes and the pumps and so forth to supply them with a water system.

“I know of some cases where the energy company went in and drilled a new bore and that seemed to work. I don’t know of any cases in the Powder River Basin where there is an unresolved issue over drainage.”

However he added there were no easy answers where slow vertical flow rates meant a time-lag between extraction activities and declines in upper aquifers, a problem identified in a study of the Condamine Alluvium and Walloon Coal Measures by hydro-geologist John Hillier.

“There is one issue that Hillier brings up – that drainage of the sandstone occurs long after the drainage of the coal. I don’t have an answer for that. But I would hope that more study will go into that issue and that concern and an answer will be derived.”

The Queensland Government has nominated reinjection of coal seam gas water into underground structures as a preferred method for CSG water.

About 5pc of all coalbed methane water produced in the Powder River Basin was re-injected. While it did work in places, results had been mixed.

“It is not a highly used option because we have been able to irrigate with a lot of it and because of a lot of the higher quality water is put into streams over there. But people have been successful at injection, and there have been some failures.”

“My drilling friends tell me it is probably more difficulty to predict which aquifers will take water than it is to predict how much we can extract.

“One of the problems is that there are fine particulates and clays that come out of the coal seam and if you pump those back into the aquifer you plug them up, you plug up the sandstone or the coal seam.

“But I think it will be a viable option frankly.”

By Ivor Ries

This is an article in today’s Courier Mail.

You will see that the deal is still subject to federal government environmental approval.  Once again, from a pure immediate commercial perspective, this deal is great for the Surat Basin.

However, with the recent fears on the safety of our aquifers, and the impacts that coal seam gas extraction may have on the long term viability of farming, it will be interesting to see what the federal government’s position is (and what impact will the Greens have on it?)

The attached link sends you to an article from the Queensland Country Life following the release of a report at the Ag Show.  I have commented previously in this blog about the potentially damaging effects that CSG may have on the groundwater aquifers.  At that stage, I hilighted that insufficient research had been done in this area but we needed to be careful to balance the interests of farmers and the mining companies.  It’s early days but does this report slow the CSG industry down again???

The attached link is an ABC story on how the economy grew faster than expected over the past 12 months.  First quarter GDP was also higher than expected.  However the last paragraph of the article is on the money in my opinion – we need to see a move away from public sector stimulus growth ro the private sector.  The article does make the point however that the private sector is starting to grow and dwelling investment has turned the corner.

In my time as President of the Chamber of Commerce, I was talking up the economy of Toowoomba saying that we had not been affected (too much) by the GFC.  Since then however, Toowoomba has fallen in a hole – retail is down, real estate is not moving, commercial development is slow, and the list goes on.

Through our firm, we can report that dwelling sales appear to have jumped a bit in the past few months.  The Federal Government Stimulus Package is seeming to save a number of the larger commercial builders in town.  (Let’s leave aside the argument of whether schools was the best way of spending the stimulus).

It’s hard to know where we are going at present.  Many economists are still warning of more pain to come, and I must admit I tend to agree with them – but I have no real science to back this up, just my gut call.  I do know that Toowoomba is doing it tough . . . let’s hope growth in the economy finds us here in Toowoomba.

The difficulty in Queensland of course is that the Government needs to reduce some debt.  I sense that they are reluctant at present to give any serious money back to the regions.  Local Government needs revenue, especially after the abolition in subsidies payable by the State Government for infrastructure which was implemented at the time of amalgamation.

The Energy Sector has not taken off yet in our region.  However, to take but one example, the state of our roads are already appalling.  The Warrego Highway between Brisbane and Tooowoomba, and especially going further west is the worst I have ever witnessed in my time as a local resident.

Local Governments cop a bad rap for increasing water charges and rates, yet are not being assisted anywhere near enough by our State and Federal Governments.  Let’s hope this report from the Local Government Association gets some traction.

The portal also maps the locations of private water bores and springs along with gas production sites and exploration wells.

It lists historic water levels and salinity records for the various local water sources.

The portal is a Bligh Government initiative undertaken by the Department of Environment and Resource Management in partnership with coal seam gas ( CSG ) companies.

“This is another initiative to support the government’s on-going commitment to manage groundwater impacts and allow the public to access important and relevant information on CSG activities,’’ said the Minister for Natural Resources, Mines and Energy, Stephen Robertson.

“It reaffirms the government’s commitment to openness and transparency for the industry.”

The portal is now available at www.derm.qld.gov.au/environmental_management/coal-seam-gas/groundwater.html.

The portal shows the locations of existing water bores and their purpose and maps springs and baseflow-fed watercourses.

It also details historical water levels and salinity records ( measured as conductivity ) from the four major CSG explorers and producers in the Surat and Bowen basins – Santos, Origin Energy, Queensland Gas Company ( QGC ) and Arrow Energy.

Water levels and salinity records from selected monitoring bores operated by the Department of Environment and Resource Management are also available.

“A help file is available to provide guidance on how to access this important information,” Mr Robertson said.

Mr Robertson said the government had increased its monitoring of the coal seam gas industry.

“The department will sample approximately 300 bores in 2011 and 2012 to further monitor the accuracy of information provided by coal seam gas operators,” Mr Robertson said.

The Minister said the Department of Environment and Resource Management would further address the concerns of some landowners by conducting additional proactive compliance inspections of CSG operations.

He said DERM also would commit additional resources to investigate environmental complaints received from the public; investigate alleged or apparent non-compliance by CSG companies; and, enforce compliance through penalty infringement notices and ultimately prosecution.

Mr Robertson said the Government’s CSG community information forums were continuing this week. Remaining venues are Miles ( September 1 ), Toowoomba ( September 2 ) and Chinchilla ( September 9 ).