Saving the Great Artesian Basin

One of Australia’s greatest hidden gifts to the life that colonised it is an enormous water resource far below the ground. Spanning a fifth of the continent across four states and territories and continuing into the Gulf of Carpentaria, the Great Artesian Basin is the largest and deepest artesian water basin in the world. In places it does resemble a basin, but it is mostly solid rock with water stored in the pores.

GAB water is ancient, falling as rain or leaks from rivers west of the Great Dividing Range over a million years ago. That water takes a slow journey of one to five metres a year percolating through cracks in sandstone sheets (aquifers) held together under pressure from the impermeable stones (aquitards) above and beneath. The water heads roughly west and also trickles down under gravity. Over time water is stored in vast quantities. It emerges to the ground naturally under pressure through springs and geological faults. Native plants and animals rely on springs in parched landscapes, particularly in the south-west where the Basin is shallower.

Humans arrived on the continent 50,000 years ago and quickly fanned out in every direction. It is likely they swiftly found this precious resource. Burial sites 20,000 years old show evidence of trading posts alongside artesian springs. Bore water use dramatically increased with the arrival of Europeans into central Australia. The first bore in 1878 found water 53m below the surface in north-west New South Wales. Within ten years, substantial finds were made at Cunnamulla and Barcaldine, both in Queensland. The Barcaldine bore pumped 700,000 litres a day unleashing a drilling boom and pastoral settlement in the central west. By 1900 there were more than 500 bores in the Basin thought it wasn’t easy to find water and not all were successful.

Enough reliable water was pumped out to support 120 towns and hundreds of properties in Outback Australia. The pastoral industries took the most water but recently water release by oil and gas has caught up. Mining of copper, uranium, coal, bauxite and opals also depend on water, much of it artesian, while tourist spas are also an intensive user of Basin water.

Human activity will unlikely ever dry up the Basin. In 120 years of bores about 0.1 percent of the total water was extracted from the Basin. But it has lowered the pressure, declining the flow of water, sometimes by 80%. A third of bores have stopped flowing altogether. The springs have been severely damaged by excavation, stock and humans while exotic pests degrade the area around springs. Early bore technology was flawed with many leaking and most were uncontrolled in their discharge of water, 95% ending up in open drains.

Diminishing flow was recognised by 1912 when New South Wales introduced bore licensing and eventually vested groundwater to the state. NSW also brought in bore construction standards. In 1990 governments agreed on a Great Artesian Basin Sustainability Initiative to cap and pipe bores. Across Australia capping programs rehabilitated free-flowing bores and replaced drains with pipes but most of the 3000 uncontrolled bores and 34,000km of open drains remain in place.

A Strategic Management Plan was put in place in 2000 and agreed by the Council Of Australian Governments. But like the Murray Darling Basin plan, the issue of licences and multiple jurisdictions means the issue is inescapably political. The jury remains out on the impact of the extraction of large use of water for mining, especially coal seam gas mining. Graziers have to be convinced capping and piping will help decrease their operating costs as well as increasing the pressure of the water and the reliability of its supply.

In Queensland the GAB is managed by a 10-year-plan which expires in June. Queensland’s government wants to cap and pipe all uncapped bores and bore drains in the next 10-year cycle. It is, as a government policy maker told me, “an aspirational target” but it helps show the state is serious about the problem. The new draft plan (now out for community consultation) allows for action if a licence holder fails to comply with conditions.

There are 25,000 bores tapping the Queensland GAB, taking 315,000 ML a year. A diagram from the draft plan I saw at a Mount Isa community meeting showed that in 2016 around 90,400 ML was lost through seepage and evaporation from uncontrolled bores and open bore drains. This exceeds the amount extracted by stock and domestic of 66,000 ML and the oil and gas industries 64,000 ML with other uses accounting for 93,000 ML.

Since 1989 almost 1000 bores have been rehabilitated under the government-funded program but one in five uncapped bores in Queensland remain untreated while 28% of bore drains have yet to be replaced with pipelines. All stock and domestic water users will be required to deliver water through water-tight delivery systems by the time the plan expires in 2027. Stock and domestic licences that permit free flowing bores or bore drains will require a bore management plan outlining what steps will be taken to deliver a water-tight delivery system.

The future of the Great Artesian Basin is exciting, if managed properly. GAB water has a role as an energy source. Birdsville has a geothermal power plant and other towns such as Winton are looking to copy it. It will make water available for future development and social and cultural activities that depend on water, including for the aspirations of Indigenous peoples in native title areas. It is crucial it is not destroyed in the same way humans are destroying Australia’s other natural wonder: the Great Barrier Reef.

Draft Surat Underground Water Impact Report – part 3: Bubbling gas issues

The Lock the Gate Alliance which represents a coalition of landholders opposed to coal seam gas in the Surat Basin has released a video called Condamine River Gas Leak. It shows footage from an organisation called Gasileaks taken along the river at an “undisclosed location”. There was bubbling activity at the surface and some kind of meter that went berserk when placed near the bubbles.

The footage was filmed by local landholder Dayne Pratzsky who has been a long-term critic of the industry. I remember Pratzsky as “frackman” for his wonderful attention-grabbing outfit he wore as he heckled the State Government Community Cabinet in Roma in June 2010. When we published the Lock the Gate footage on our Facebook page today, a local man named Andrew Thomas pointed out this phenomenon was not uncommon in the gasfields region. “I grew up at a location near Orallo and all the bores would light up if you wanted them to – the gas comes out of most bore holes,” Andrew said. “It has been happening for well over 150 years around Roma and Surat and lots of other places – get a life and move on.”

It might be difficult for Pratzky and other blockies in the Lock the Gate Alliance to do exactly that. This is their life and they don’t want to move on. Yet I fear they – and others who want an industry moratorium – are placing themselves outside the conversation about how the industry should evolve. Origin Energy, the petroleum tenure holder in the location where Pretsky filmed (a fishing spot south west of Chinchilla known as the “coal hole”) confirmed what Thomas told us. “According to local knowledge it goes back at least 30 years and naturally occurring gas has been a phenomenon in the Queensland Western Downs region for more than 100 years,” Origin said.

The public face of Lock the Gate Alliance is media-savvy president Drew Hutton. He was the one who publicly announced the Chinchilla leak.  Hutton, a prominent member of Queensland Greens, said he was unconvinced by Origin’s response and challenged them to prove it. Hutton said Origin should “release its seismic and other data…to establish whether or not the leak is linked to the company’s coal seam gas operations.” Hutton said he consulted “several highly competent hydro-geologists” who told him there was a good chance the leaks were “linked to the de-watering of the coal seam aquifers and possibly fracking opening up pathways for the methane.”

With neither Origin nor Hutton willing to offer their sources, it is difficult to know who is right. Water quality remains one of the great unknowns of this massive new industry. Yet this problem can be solved just as land access and now water depletion. The 2010 Queensland land access laws redressed the power imbalance between gas companies and landholders and the new Draft Surat Basin Underground Water Impact Report which I reported about on Monday (Part 1) and Tuesday (part 2) deals with water depletion. The report ruled out a role for monitoring water quality. That prompted an anonymous respondent to my Tuesday piece to ask the legitimate question: if “it will not monitor water quality (eg for contamination from fracking)”, who WILL monitor water quality?”

The answer is the same as who will monitor water depletion: a mix of the Queensland Government Department of Natural Resources and Mining and the petroleum tenure holders. Many in the Roma forum I attended asked if this was leaving the fox in the charge of the henhouse. The Queensland Water Commission’s response was that if holders did something wrong, they’d be found out. There would be anomalies in the results that would stand out.

If this is correct then we need to maintain trust. Trust of the companies to do the right thing and trust of the regulator to pick up the anomalies if the companies don’t do the right thing. The gas majors all have the profit imperative but are bound by strict rules and environment conditions to get the green light for their enterprises. With the pressure to meet their export commitments once the gas comes online in 2014, those companies will need to be squeaky clean so the regulator does not have a reason to hold them up.

What does need to be looked at is the quick gobbling up of Australia’s natural resources. According to mining critic Paul Cleary, Australia has the 12^th largest reserve of gas but is the world’s second largest exporter and heading towards number one. Gladstone Port in Queensland is the home of four of the eight big LNG plants and Bligh Government incentives drove gas consumption for the local market. Now the high oil price is driving massive investment in coal seam methane for LNG. The problem is the price of natural gas on the New York-based Henry Hub has been declining for over a year and will mean the companies will have to reforecast earnings or else dig for more gas.

With governments greedy for royalties, knowing the saturation point will be critical for the success of the industry and the regions. As the Surat DWIR proves, having good legislation supported by science will be critical in keeping an even keel.

Surat Underground Water Impact Report – part 2

This is the second post on the Draft Surat Underground Water Impact Report now out for review. The Queensland Water Commission took its findings to Roma yesterday and Chinchilla today. See yesterday’s post on the background to the report and the geological formations involved.

This post looks at how the model was derived and examines QWC’s monitoring regime. There were three key steps in designing the flow model: conceptualisation, construction and calibration. In the conceptualisation phase, designers looked at geological data and formation contacts in databases held by the Geological Survey of Queensland and the Department of Natural Resources Groundwater Database.

They also took into account the distribution and depth of the geological layers of the Walloon Coal Measures based on previous studies and developed hydraulic parameter estimates based on pump and drill tests, existing models and reported results. They devised 19 model layers based the formations from the shallowest (Condamine Alluvium) to the deepest (Permian Sediments) and mapped out the groundwater flow between the layers. The layers are recharged by rain in the outcrop areas on the edges of the Basin. The model is complicated by the Walloon Coal Measures (the main CSG-bearing formation in the Surat Basin) which contains sediment layers of varying permeability. The model allocates three layers to the Walloon for simplicity.

The model covers an area 550km x 660km divided into 1.5sq km cells stacked into 19 layers. Once constructed with hydraulic parameters, the model was calibrated to replicate pre-CSG conditions in 1995 using groundwater levels from 1500 bores in the groundwater database. The model was designed to make predictions from the 1995 data including and excluding petroleum impacts.  They added uncertainty analysis to provide 200 predictions of drawdown for each model cell at different time periods. The upper and lower five percent of the 200 were discarded as outliers and the maximum value of the remaining predictions was used in the report.

The report estimates the CSG industry will draw an average of 95,000 megalitres of water a year over the life of the industry.  It will be 125,000 ML a year in the first three years as the industry ramps up. This is why getting the water monitoring strategy right is so important.

 

The water monitoring strategy involves monitoring of water levels in coal seams and surrounding aquifers. It will not monitor water quality (eg for contamination from fracking) or the volume of water extracted from wells. QWC will not conduct the monitoring – that is left to the gas companies. Someone said to me today that was like leaving Ned Kelly in charge of the bank vault but the QWC says the companies have legal responsibilities and anomalies will quickly be exposed.

The monitoring has six broad objectives. 1. Establish background trends not attributable to CSG. 2.Identify changes in aquifer conditions in petroleum development areas. 3. Identify changes in aquifer conditions near critical groundwater use (eg towns relying on groundwater), 4. Identify changes in aquifer conditions near springs. 5. Improve future groundwater flow monitoring 6. Improve understanding of connectivity between aquifers.

There will be a regional monitoring network with 142 monitoring sites (27 already exist) which will have 498 monitoring points (104 already exist). These sites will target different strata of the Surat and Bowen Basin including the Condamine Alluvium, Main Range Volcanics, Mooga Sandstone, Orallo Formation, Gubberamunda Sandstone, Westbourne Formation, Springbok Sandstone, Walloon Coal Measures, Hutton Sandstone, Evergreen Formation, Precipice Sandstone, Clematis Sandstone and Bandanna Formation.

At each site, water data is collected at least once a fortnight.  Queensland’s regulatory requirements require a UWIR update every three years but there will also be an annual report.

Draft Surat Underground Water Impact Report – part 1

Surat Cumulative Management Area

I had a lot of underground water on my mind today.  That was because I attended both sessions today in Roma where the Qld Water Commission were explaining their Draft Underground Water Impact Report (pdf, 8 meg) for the Surat Cumulative Management Area. The quick and dirty bottom line is that I don’t think the data supports a moratorium of the industry and as a worst-case scenario says the impact is moderate and manageable. However this is the first of several posts that will drill down into the report in some detail.

The Surat Cumulative Management Area is a rough triangle drawn between Emerald in the north, Roma in the west and Toowoomba in the south-east. The geology of the region is complicated as the nature of the water. I had several concepts challenged including what are the Bowen and Surat Basins, what is the Great Artesian Basin and where the gas is stored. The Great Artesian Basin is not a continuous geological formation but a hydrogeological basin across many alternating geological layers. I used to think the Bowen Basin as the land roughly inland of Mackay including all the big coalmining areas of Emerald and Moranbah while the Surat Basin roughly went from Dalby to Roma. But it turns out my understanding of that is faulty too. The Bowen Basin lives below the Surat Basin, it is only in the strip-mining areas at Moranbah where its coal formations come to the surface.

Petrol and gas is a different mining process to coal and covered by different legislation. The Draft Underground Water Report was required because the law allows petroleum tenure owners to explore for petrol and gas on private property and by necessity, there is some interference with the water on those tenures including the removal of the water. This is particularly so in coal seam gas production which works by reducing water pressure in the seams to release the gas. In the Surat Cumulative Management Area most of the mining is done in the Walloon Coal Measures (Surat Basin) or Bandanna Formation (Bowen Basin) which are geological layers of the Great Artesian Basin which have low permeability rocks alternating with high economic value aquifers and feed important springs.

The problem is that when water is removed, it affects a wide area around the gas well. This is compounded if there are nearby wells also drawing out water. Most of the groundwater in the Surat Region that comes to the surface is used by agriculture, industry, stock and domestic – 215,000 megalitres a year. CSG is only responsible for 17,000 ML at the moment but that will rise sharply in the coming years as the four big projects (Santos GLNG, Origin APLNG, British Gas QCLNG and Arrow Surat Gas Project) take off.

When water is removed from the coal formations, water from surrounding aquifers will flow in.  So when the water pressure is reduced, it doesn’t necessarily mean less water. However it does mean there will be a decline in the water level of the bore that taps that aquifer. The question is by why how much and to answer that question the Queensland Water Commission developed a groundwater model to predict the impacts of the CSG industry. They used vast reams of already known data on water levels and bores which they added to the known plans of tenure holders plus science about the way underground water moves through the region.

The resulting flow model was complex. There are 19 interacting layers and three million individual cells in the model. It was calibrated to get close matches with known 1995 results from bores giving the team a high degree of certainty they were in the ballpark. They also added ‘uncertainty analysis’ taking the 95 percentile of 200 different predictions for each well. In other words,  they were taking the worst case scenario in 20.

For each well the QWC set a trigger threshold of drawdown. For consolidated aquifers such as sandstone, the trigger was of five metres for consolidated aquifers, it was two metres for unconsolidated (shallow alluvial) aquifers such as the Condamine Alluvium and just 0.2 metre drop for springs, including watercourses connected to springs.

If the modelling showed the “Immediate Affected Area” (an IAA) of that well exceeded that threshold in the next three years, then the responsible CSG company must undertake restoration measures to restore the bore’s capacity to supply water, or provide the bore owner with an alternative water supply. The latter is known in the legislation as “make good” requirements. It could mean adjusting the bore, improving the pressure, drilling a new bore or finding an alternative source. QWC have identified 85 bores in the Surat Region which will exceed the trigger, all of them in the Walloon Coal Measures.

There was a secondary measure of long-term impact if an IAA exceeded the threshold at any time in the future. This modelling identified 528 bores affected, mostly in the Walloon but some in the Springbok Sandstone (104), Hutton Sandstone (23) and Gubberamunda Sandstone (1).  It is less clear what the Commission expects to happen with these bores though the Roma session talked about gas tenure holders being “proactive” with bore owners in this category.

Part 2 will discuss the monitoring regime QWC is putting into place to determine the trigger points.

Lot’s lot: The Death of the Jordan

“You can almost jump across this river. In other places, you don’t need to even jump. You can just cross it. It’s ankle deep.” This was an Israeli scientist’s assessment of the dying Jordan River. Gidon Bromberg’s anecdotal evidence was backed by his team of Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian environmental scientists which says large stretches of the Jordan River could dry up by 2011.

A report from the EcoPeace / Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME) says the river is in danger from excessive water diversion and pollution as well as being treated as a backyard dump. An astonishing 98 percent of its fresh water is currently diverted while discharge of large quantities of untreated sewage is threatening to cause irreversible damage to the river valley. In 50 years, the river’s annual flow has dropped from more than 1.3 billion cubic meters to less than 30 million cubic meters and it has lost half its biodiversity in habitat loss and the high salinity of the water.

FoEME is an unique environmental peacemaking movement and a tri-lateral organisation of Jordanian, Palestinian, and Israeli environmentalists. FoEME say their objective is cooperative efforts to protect a shared environmental heritage. This has a double purpose, advancing sustainable regional development and the creation of conditions for lasting peace in the region.

The Jordan River is sacred to three religions. It is mentioned in Genesis: “And Lot lifted up his eyes, and saw that the Jordan Valley was well watered everywhere like the garden of the Lord.” A pillar of salt near Deir Ain Abata in the Dead Sea is said to be Lot’s wife, after she turned to watch the destruction of Sodom. The Jordan is also the traditional baptismal site of Jesus and many of Mohammad’s venerable companions are buried near its banks, making it a holy site for Muslims as well.

The Jordan Valley has immense ecological significance. The Valley is part of the 7200-kilometre Great Rift Valley and is at the centre of one of the most important bird migration flyways on the planet. Over 500 million birds migrate annually through this narrow corridor between Europe and Africa. The area is also an important Middle Eastern wetland; Birdlife International and Wetland International have declared the entire river basin a significant bird and wetland area, maintaining many globally valuable species that are regionally or globally threatened or endangered species.

FoEME’s Israeli co-director Gidon Bromberg took journalists on a tour of the region to tell them how much water is needed to save it and where the water would come from. Al Jazeera’s Orly Halpern said the river “was a narrow foul brownish stream that gurgled its way south”. Bromberg said the sewage from an additional 15,000 Israelis living in the upper Jordan Valley, 6000 Israeli settlers, 60,000 Palestinians and 250,000 Jordanians provides the Lower Jordan with most of its water. “No one can say this is holy water,” said Bromberg. “The Jordan River has become holy shit.”

In their water quality study released 3 May entitled “Towards a Living River Jordan” FoEME said the Lower Jordan needed 400 million cubic metres of fresh water annually to return to life. They suggest 220 mcm should be provided by Israel, 100 by Syria and 90 by Jordan based on historical usage of the water. The report said the river needed an annual minor flood event to flush out the salinity of the water. Israel and Jordan are building new waste water treatment plants to remove the pollutants but further action is required to allocate fresh water.

FoEME is pleased by the first steps. Earlier this year, the Israeli Ministry of Environment released the Terms of Reference to rehabilitate the river from the Sea of Galilee to Bezeq Stream at the border with the Palestinian West Bank. FoEME praised this as a “first step towards rehabilitation and encourages the international community to support Jordan and Palestine in the development of their own ToRs as partners to the rehabilitation effort.”

FoEME say a billion cubic metres of water could be saved if appropriate economies were introduced in Israel, Jordan and Palestine. “In the middle of the desert we continue to flush our toilets with fresh water rather than using grey water or even better – waterless toilets; and we grow tropical fruit for export,” Bromberg said. “We can do much better in reducing water loss and we need to treat and reuse all of the sewage water that we produce.”