John Tierney's defence of coal seam gas and Santos' Narrabri gas project (Australia can supply the world with gas, but not itself, NH 17/10) ignored a number of important arguments - at least 16,000 of them, in fact.
That's the number of coal seam gas wells that have been drilled across inland Queensland. They've been drilled through priority farmland, through aquifers that sustain agricultural enterprises and towns, draining water bores and pockmarking the landscape. Farmland has sunk as companies have extracted huge quantities of both gas and groundwater from underneath.
There have been wastewater spills and other contamination incidents, pipelines have exploded, and legacy coal exploration boreholes from the 1800s have suddenly erupted, spewing salty water across farmland. It's no wonder farmers living in the gasfields struggle to obtain public liability insurance cover.
Gas wells have also been drilled through state forests similar to the Pilliga and right up to the border of national parks, industrialising once natural landscapes. Communities at the centre of these gas fields report negative health impacts - and university studies confirm their accounts. Reports have found a direct link between unconventional gas extraction and higher rates of cancer, birth defects, and respiratory illnesses in communities living near gas wells.
Yet Tierney scoffs at the community groups fighting the gas projects he claims are needed. But it is Santos - the same company behind the Hunter and Narrabri gas projects - that engineered the supply problems plaguing Australia's domestic gas sector. In the 2000s, Santos, Shell, PetroChina, Origin Energy and other multinational gas companies decided to export huge quantities of coal seam gas via three big gas terminals carved into the side of Curtis Island in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.
There were never enough coal seam gas reserves to meet the long-term export deals the companies signed, so they dipped into Australia's reserves and bought up all the gas they could. At the same time, the price of domestic gas in Australia skyrocketed because it was suddenly linked to the international market. Let's not forget too that the second biggest user of gas in Australia is the gas industry itself. It burns vast quantities to power its gas export terminals.
So I'm sceptical when companies such as Santos position themselves as the saviour to Australia's energy woes. More than 16,000 gas wells have been drilled, but we're worse off than before. Now we're being told that more wells is the solution? Which leads me to Tierney's most glaring omission. What's increasingly clear is that gas will play a diminishing role in Australia's east coast energy grid as cheap renewable energy, firmed with big batteries, takes over from the expensive, polluting fossil fuels of the past. Earlier this month, renewable energy powered a record 74 per cent of the entire east coast energy mix, and this share is expected to continue growing rapidly.
There is also the burning issue of climate change. Research from Cornell University, released just last week, shows fossil gas to be just as polluting, if not worse, than coal. Over a 20-year period, methane is more than 80 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2. It's why the International Energy Agency says the world has just five years to cut methane emissions by 75 per cent, or risk overshooting the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees. The NSW government formally committed to Paris Agreement targets in 2016 and has since implemented commendable emissions reduction laws - laws that would seem unaccommodating of Santos' polluting Narrabri Gas Project, which would be responsible for more than 120 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. This is almost the total amount of annual emissions NSW produces.
NSW can't afford Santos' Narrabri gas project, or its Hunter gas pipeline. The communities that would be affected can't afford the health impacts, the farmers can't afford to lose their water, and the energy users of NSW can't afford to be chained to an expensive, outdated, and polluting form of power that supercharges the climate crisis and leads to ever more destructive and expensive extreme weather disasters.
