Many concerns have been raised in the first few days of the public hearing for the Narrabri Gas Project, currently before the Independent Planning Commission.
Among the top criticisms so far have been a lack of answers on salt waste treatment and an an admission by the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment executive director David Kitto that the project was unlikely to force "downward pressure" on Australian gas prices because it wasn't big enough to do so (see p9).
The projected gas volumes for the project also work out at less than half a per cent of the volume of liquid natural gas exported through the Gladstone Port from June 2019 to June 2020.
This is based on the Narrabri project's predicted volume of production in Santos' (the proponent of the Narrabri project) environmental impact statement, which predicts a maximum production of 200 terajoules a day (equal to 0.2 petajoules a day, or 73 petajoules a year).
Queensland's Gladstone LNG export terminal in the past year exported about 4534 petajoules (based on the export volume in an Offshore Energy article, published July 17, 2020, that said: "Australian LNG projects exported 79.3 million tonnes during the 12 months to June 2020").
This means the Narrabri project's production would be about 1.6 per cent of Gladstone's annual export total - barely a drop in the ocean.
There is also no clarity around the disposal of the salt waste. In it's EIS, Santos said there would be, on average, 47t of salt produced per day as waste and this volume could peak as high as 115t/day (in years two and four).
The government seems hellbent on getting this project through, which was evident when it shut down the CSG moratorium that was designed to allow the 2014 NSW Chief Scientist's recommendations to safeguard the industry to be implemented.
Even Santos said in its own EIS fact sheet: "In 2014 the NSW Chief Scientist and Engineer concluded that, with appropriate safeguards and controls, natural gas from coal seams can be safely extracted".
But those safeguards have been ditched by the government.
CSG may be a practical source of energy and even useful to aid the transition to cleaner sources like hydrogen, but with strong export demand it's not going to be cheap and there are also no guarantees it won't damage our precious groundwater.
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Andrew Norris
Editor at The Land
Editor at The Land
