To What End!

It is not often that I use my own blog to discuss events outside the book industry, but please indulge me today as this is about a very serious and pressing matter. It’s one that affects all of us. It affects the water we drink and the food we eat. I’m talking about COAL SEAM GAS extraction.

I am no scientist — actually biology was as good as it got, for me — but I do know one thing: in this country, the most precious commodity we have is water. We don’t have much of it and what we do have we need to use wisely. So why is it that our governments are allowing this precious commodity to be potentially contaminated by the extraction of coal seam gas?

Briefly, this is more or less what happens. Mining companies take out exploration licences on land where they suspect there may be the potential to extract methane gas from coal seams. These licences are often granted over rich, fertile agricultural land or environmentally significant areas (more on that in a minute). Wells are then drilled into the coal seam and stimulated by hydraulic ‘fracking’. This is achieved by pumping a fracturing fluid into the coal seam at pressures sufficient to crack open the rock, and this ‘fracking fluid’ contains chemicals including acids, solvents, surfactants, biocides and hydrocarbans. It’s pretty toxic stuff. Some of it flows back out and resurfaces but much remains underground. The next step is to de-pressurise the coal seam, so that the gas can be released, by pumping out both the fracking fluid and the water already present in the coal — and we’re talking thousands and thousands of litres of water a day from each well! The water is generally saline (salty) and contains a range of carcinogens, heavy metals and radionuclides present in coal seams as well as the man-made chemicals used in the drilling and fracking processes. As you can imagine, if any of this water manages to make its way into bores, aquifers or rivers, the risks to the environment are enormous. There’s also the potential to permanently damage the water table of the mined regions.

Farmers are understandably worried about the damage that could be done to soils, crops and livestock. Salinity problems could arise. Water quality could be severely compromised. And this isn’t scaremongering. All of this and more has happened wherever coal seam gas extraction has been allowed to occur. If you haven’t seen the film Gasland, you really should!

So wherever we let coal seam gas exploration go ahead we risk ending up with contaminated water and crap soil — and that can’t be good for our future. And that’s without even talking about the endangered species and the environmentally sensitive areas that are also threatened by this.

But hey, maybe it’s all worth it for the money we’ll be making! Oh, that’s right, we won’t be! Our dumb-ass Australian governments have allowed so many foreign investors into this little mining bonanza that virtually all the profits now go offshore. So when Australia is a wrinkly dried-up old prune and we are having to buy in food and water from other countries, we can rest assured that China, Korea, Japan, the United States and India will be living the good life because they will have been allowed to get away with our natural resources while effectively stealing our food and water.

And don’t get me started on the more conventional forms of mining, such as open-cut and underground coal mines! Communities are destroyed. The health impacts are frightening. And it all seems to be carried out in an atmosphere of subterfuge and deception.

If you would like to be involved and really take a stand then I suggest a number of things. Join LOCK THE GATE — it’s a terrific organisation. Write to your own local member and tell them how you feel. And best of all make a noise and rally people to make even more noise — from little things big things grow!

Happy Noise, Happy Reading!

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