UNTIL now Shenhua was sharing the spotlight of coal controversy in the Liverpool Plains with BHP’s Caroona project.
Exit BHP stage left last week with a government-funded $220 million buy-out and the Chinese miner’s Watermark project takes sole billing – and the full brunt of the farmer’s fight.
One down, one to go, says Susan Lyle, chairwoman of the Caroona Coal Action Group, which took centre stage in the agricultural community’s decade-long battle against the Big Australian and the Chinese behemoth.
“If anything goes wrong with noise limits, dust on the crops, salt in the water or the aquifers fall, it is solely (Shenhua’s) fault now,” she said.
Green-lighted in 2015 by NSW and federal governments after a fraught eight-year approval process, Shenhua commissioned an unprecedented number of studies stating its proposed mine would do minimal environmental damage.
But farmers and a range of experts questioned the process and its findings, which were essentially a long running public review of science paid for by Shenhua.
A key concern is the coal pits’ impacts to the precious surface and groundwater flows from the mine site on Mount Water down the slope and onto Australia’s best farmland, a few hundred metres below the proposed mine on the black soil plains.
Mrs Lyle and husband John’s farm, “Ranken Park”, is a stone’s throw from Mount Watermark. Mr Lyle said his wife’s “efforts have been massive and watching her, well its been awful to be honest”.
Mrs Lyle downplayed the personal toll, but conceded she often “went to bed thinking about it and woke up in the middle of the night thinking about it.”
Like many farming families on the Liverpool Plains, the Lyles have succession planning in place. Their son, Tim, runs the farm enterprise and Mrs Lyle can’t fathom “why on earth would the best farming country in the world would be put at risk for a short term mine”.
“We are looking after it because we want it to be here for the next generation.”
Another prominent coal opponent, Tim Duddy, “Rossmar Park”, Caroona, said the exit of BHP had been won through an “unbelievably big community effort”.
More than 50 of them turned out at short notice (pictured on The Land’s cover), celebrating in front of a cracking canola crop (grown in BHP-owned land). The Lyles agree the collective push was “massive” and Mrs Lyle wondered what more could be done to knock-off Shenhua.
“We fight on, continue the pressure... we just have to stay hopeful it will go.”
Fears for partial mine buyback
CROPPER Andrew Pursehouse, whose Breeza Station is flanked by the Caroona and Watermark coal tenements, says NSW government’s negotiations with Shenhua to excise high value agricultural land from its exploration licence may dig a deep hole into quality country.
“Cotton is booming on the Liverpool Plains. We are blessed will layers and layers of alluvial aquifers and it wouldn’t take much to damage them,” Mr Pursehouse said.
Premier Mike Baird said government was negotiating to buy back licence holdings near high quality farmland.
This would likely leave in place the area planned for the Shenhua’s westernmost of three open-cut coal pits – which has been approved under the planning process to remain an open void after mining. The current mine plan taps about one third of the coal resource. Most is too deep for open cut mining.
“reducing Shenhua’s footprint leaves potential for an extension into an underground longwall mine,” Mr Pursehouse said.
