FARMERS were fuming last Thursday after losing the penultimate round of a fight which lasted the best part of a decade.
Shenhua’s open cut Watermark coal mine, perched in the ridges running down to the Liverpool Plains at Breeza, got the go ahead from NSW government late last week.
Water is the key concern. Farmers fear great mine pits dug into the ridge country will alter water flow from the surface into underground reservoirs, or aquifers, which feed the pumps of the highly productive farms across some of the best cropping land in Australia, if not the world.
Typical of local farmers, John Hamparsum, “Drayton”, Breeza, fears for his land.
“This mine is in the wrong place,” he said.
"I am devastated, just gutted it has gone this far."
Nevertheless, the independent project approval panel, the Planning and Assessment Commission (PAC), declared the Chinese miner’s giant project was good to go.
“For some reason they (PAC) say the mine is isolated from the floodplain because it is on a ridge, but we all know and the hydrologists agree that all the groundwater here is interconnected," Mr Hamparsum said.
But big coal’s opponents feel like they’ve been fighting with one arm tied behind their back.
Caroona Coal Action Group’s Tim Duddy helped lead the resistance.
He claimed modelling of groundwater systems submitted by Shenhua was insufficient.
“Shenhua has modelled its entire water study on a model that it doesn’t have scientific basis for,” he said.
“In actual fact, it has created an artist’s impression of the local geology, instead of building a model with complete understanding, which means ‘yes’ the model is perfect in terms of what its artist assumes it is like.
“But Shenhua doesn’t understand what the permeability and interlayers of the aquifers actually are.”
Chinese miner Shenhua has boxed on through the approval process, fronting up to two rounds of PAC public hearings, government assessments and the Mining Gateway Panel.
“We have been through a detailed and independent assessment process over many years which has placed significant emphasis on ensuring there are no unacceptable risks to groundwater,” Watermark project manager Paul Jackson said.
“Our modelling shows there will be no consequential impacts on the regional groundwater and this has now been confirmed by two independent peer reviews and by the PAC’s own independent water expert.”
Watermark mine will have a 150m buffer between it and the black soil and 900m between the productive aquifer.
However, a new $1 million research project by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, which covers the Liverpool Plains, indicates a knowledge gap in groundwater.
“The understandings of groundwater is nowhere near as sophisticated as surface water,” said the authority’s chief Rhondda Dickson.
NSW Farmers president Fiona Simson, along with NSW Irrigators and Caroona Coal Action Group, commissioned the University of NSW water research lab to assess Shenhua’s modelling.
UNSW’s principal groundwater and water resources engineer Doug Anderson addressed a public hearing run by the PAC in Gunnedah in June.
The research lab found Shenhua’s environmental impact statement hydrogeological models were inadequate, overly simplified, did not sufficiently assess how aquifers were connected and “likely” offered poor predictions of impacts to groundwater.
“The point to recognise among this confusion is nobody agrees on the science, even though you have the best hydrologists looking at it,” Mrs Simson said.
There are examples of mining and agriculture co-existing in NSW, she said and cited the Northparkes mine in the Central West, but she feared coal would hit the Liverpool Plains farmers like it had in the Hunter Valley.
NSW Department of Primary Industries figures show annual milk production had fallen from 180 million litres in 2002 to 120m litres in 2014.
Dairy technical specialist Kerry Kempton said a contributing factor to the decline, which equates to the equivalent of 60 NSW dairy enterprises, was competition from coal for water and labour in the Hunter Valley.
Now the PAC has given its green light, there’s just one more round left in the bout – with the Federal Environment Department and including Water Trigger laws.
Mr Jackson said “the science is in and (Watermark) has been tested, and re-tested time after time”.
Visit www.theland.com.au on Saturday for special feature on the Watermark mine