ALARM bells are ringing for farmers over BHP Billiton’s underground coal plans on the Liverpool Plains.
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The State's Gateway Panel, which is comprised of agricultural and scientific experts, assessed the Caroona Coal longwall project’s potential impacts on local farmland.
The Panel's report is based on a preliminary assessment on the project by BHP.
Caroona coal mine will extract coal from underneath some of Australia’s most productive black soil cropping country.
The Panel’s findings included:
- The project would have “direct and significant” impacts on productive agricultural land
- “Significant indirect impacts” on groundwater levels would occur
- Assessment of longwall mining impacts on aquifers is insufficient
- Subsidence could pose risks for soil fertility, drainage and effective rooting depth, and that subsidence between 1.5 metres to 3m could occur
- No work has been done on site to determine potential impacts on groundwater-dependent ecosystems
- Impacts to cropping country outside the project boundary, from mining’s affect on groundwater, “are considered to be potentially significant”.
The Panel's findings are treated as advice only and it cannot halt the development or instruct BHP to provide more information.
But the Panel's work will inform future government assessment of the project.
BHP said in a statement its preliminary assessment of Caroona “indicated” the mine “will not materially impact” alluvial aquifers and it “will co-exist with agricultural enterprises”.
However, the Panel took the preliminary assessment to task.
“The Panel requires that more site studies and detailed modelling be carried out to improve the certainty of any predictions,” it said.
“The current level of work (in the preliminary assessment) is not sufficient for the Panel to be confident in the predictions.”
BHP’s president of NSW energy coal, Peter Sharpe, said the project will only progress “if strict environmental requirements can be met and real benefits for the economy and community can be demonstrated”.
Spokesman for the Caroona Coal Action Group, local farmer and councillor Tim Duddy, is particularly concerned about impacts to water resources.
“I have serious questions about the structure of the water models and about what the subsidence will do to the land," he said.
“Where we farm, 3cm is significant, let alone the 3m that is predicted.
“We rely on unregulated water flows to replenish aquifers and rivers.
“If you stat putting 1-3m subsidences across those areas the way those aquifers recharge will be severely impacted.”
Mr Duddy is worried that despite the Panel's adverse findings the project will progress through the system anyway.
“The most terrifying thing about all of this is BHP can use the Gateway’s recommendations as a method of flagging what they have to address and move on through the approval processes,” he said.
The Department of Planning requires that BHP now develop a comprehensive Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the Caroona project.
The Department’s independent approval body, the Planning and Assessment Commission, has final say over the approval and will base its findings on the EIS.
Mike Foley
Senior journalist for The Land.
Senior journalist for The Land.
