After years of delays, the NSW state government has approved the expansion of the controversial Narrabri gas project, despite opposition from many in the local community. 

The project, which was opposed by the vast majority of submissions during the consultation process, could involve up to 850 new coal seam gas wells being drilled on 1,000 hectares of a 95,000 hectare site covering the Pilliga forest and nearby farm land.

If you've never seen a gas drilling site up close, they're not pretty. 

Towers being raised across the countryside, orange flames from gas flares, glaring floodlights, constant noise from the grind of the drill - and that's not even touching on the potential for land and water pollution from fugitive emissions during the drilling process.

The fate of a controversial coal seam gas project in north-west New South Wales will be decided within 12 weeks.

Santos's Narrabri Gas Project has received backing from the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment, recommending its "approval with strict conditions".

After three years of consideration, the department has referred the multi-billion-dollar project to the state's Independent Planning Commission, and Minister Rob Stokes has requested a determination within 12 weeks.

More than 23,000 submissions were made to the department during its assessment.

A public hearing will be held as part of the IPC's deliberations.

The Berejiklian government has given its support for the proposed $3.6 billion Santos coal seam gasfield in northern NSW, saying it was critical for energy security and that it had limited environmental impacts.

In its assessment released on Friday, the Planning Department said its "comprehensive suite of strict conditions" would ensure the controversial project was "in the public interest and is approvable".

Environmental groups and some MPs have pleaded with an independent planning body to oppose a controversial coal seam gas project after it was recommended for approval by the NSW government.

The NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment on Friday recommended the Narrabri coal seam gas project be approved and referred it to the Independent Planning Commission for a final assessment.

Oil and gas giant Santos wants to develop the $3.6 billion project over 95,000 hectares in the Pilliga forest and nearby grazing land in the state's northwest.

It involves drilling 850 new gas wells over 20 years, with Santos saying it has the potential to satisfy up to half of NSW's natural gas demand.

Do you have Hudson pear on your property or mining claim?

The new biocontrol mass-rearing facility at Lightning Ridge is stocked with the Hudson pear cochineal and they are ready to be released.

Contact Mat Savage on 0427 253 463 to collect your plastic tub (for collecting clean Hudson pear segments - no ants or soil). Swap your tub of clean segments for a tub of cochineal-infected ssegments. Mat will advise you on how to release the cochineal and record the release data.
North West Local Land Services Walgett Shire Council North West Plains Sustainability Group

Farmers in north-west New South Wales are furious at the defeat of a bill to temporarily put a stop to Coal Seam Gas activity in the state.

The Bill passed the NSW Upper House late on Wednesday night, and the Government unexpectedly brought it to a vote in the Legislative Assembly yesterday afternoon.

It was defeated 38 votes to 36.

The legislation had the support of Labor, the Greens, the Shooters Fishers and Farmers (SFF) and other independents.

The Deputy Premier John Barilaro has accused the SFF of having "sold out jobs in regional NSW to align themselves with the Greens, not because of outcomes, but because of politics".

Key points:

• The State Government defeated a bill that would have temporarily stopped all coal seam gas activity
• Farmers in the state's north-west are worried about the implications for the impending Narrabri Gas Project
• The government insists it has the community on its side

Coal seam gas (CSG) mining at just one Queensland site will produce three million tonnes of salt - enough to raise a pile 10 metres high and 11 kilometres long, senators have been told.

A parliamentary committee yesterday took evidence in Canberra looking at the impact of mining CSG on the Murray Darling Basin.

Liberal senator Bill Heffernan told the hearing of the salt produced by one approved Queensland project.

"Eleven-point-three kilometres by 30m wide by 10m high - that'll be the pile of salt that'll be produced from this one mining approval," Senator Heffernan told representatives of the NSW Department of Trade and Investment, Regional Infrastructure and Services (DTIRIS) attending the hearing.

"This is for you to think about because we don't want this to happen in NSW - that's approved under the onerous provisions of the Queensland DERM (Department of Environment and Resource Management).

"I wouldn't like that on my landscape."

Think about this — Australia is now the world's biggest exporter of natural gas, yet we're looking at importing gas to deal with a domestic "shortage".

If this happens, Australia will be using huge amounts of energy and spending large sums of money to compress, liquify and ship its abundant gas reserves to markets overseas.

Then gas will be shipped back, with all the costs and resources involved, to supply the local market.

Does that make sense? Go figure.

But there's money to be made from it.

Andrew Twiggy Forest, iron ore baron, philanthropist and one of the nation's shrewdest businessmen, is backing a proposal to import gas through Port Kembla, NSW.

Welcome to the world of Australian gas policy.

'Pure stupidity'

Alistair Donaldson, a fourth-generation farmer from outside Boggabri, north-west of Newcastle, has been fighting coal seam gas development in the region for 10 years, but he's equally appalled by the gas importation plan.

"It would have to be the purest form of stupidity imaginable," the plain-talking cattleman says.

• Farmers raise concerns over coal seam gas but the Nationals say water and agricultural land will be protested by the planning process
• World environment day sees solar dairy and tree production pushing ahead
• Brumby control of 4000 head set to go underway despite appeals from deputy premier John Barilaro.

The Berejiklian government has rushed to defeat a private member's bill to derail the controversial Narrabri gas project as anti-coal seam gas groups were preparing to target National party seats.

In a rare move, the Coalition suspended the day's parliamentary agenda on Thursday to debate a coal seam gas moratorium bill in a bid to fast-track its demise in the Legislative Assembly.

It comes after the bill, put forward by independent MP Justin Field, passed the NSW upper house on Wednesday night with the support of Labor and the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party.

Governments were generally caught short by COVID-19. Scott Morrison boasts that he saw it earlier, and acted quicker and more decisively, than most – that he relied on medical and scientific advice, forged a “national” response, ignored ideology.

But his government has a split personality on the need to rely on science. It so easily ignores climate science, still swayed by a small rump of Coalition deniers.

In a sense, the experience of the pandemic is a dress rehearsal of what will happen with climate, if governments continue to ignore the science. There had been imprecise warnings of possible pandemics, but these had been ignored. Climate science is far more substantive, peer-assessed and uniform than that relied on to support the COVID responses; the predicted catastrophic weather events have become more frequent and more intense, and over decades.

Multinational corporations have captured the national polity and continue to push last-century energy solutions on Australia, in defiance of sound policy and due process. The US fracking industry has collapsed. Yet the Covid Commission forges ahead with coal seam gas plans for Santos at Narrabri. Callum Footereports.

As if a tradie-led recovery wasn’t bizarre enough, the COVID Commission and Liberals and Nationals in NSW are forging ahead with plans to open up Narrabri for coal seam gas fracking.

This is despite:

• warnings only a day ago that the global glut could force natural gas prices into negative;
• the science telling us clearly that for the sake of the planet we need to move on from fossil fuels, especially given that renewable energy can compete on cost with oil, coal and natural gas-fired power plants;
• figures showing that fugitive emissions from natural gas production are driving massive increases in greenhouse gas; and
• the fact that domestic gas users are massively price gouged because the East Coast gas market is controlled by a cartel of three producers, Santos, Origin Energy and Exxon/BHP, who starve the domestic market to force up prices and make super profits  Meanwhile overseas buyers of Australian gas pay far less than the domestic buyers do.

The Member for Barwon, Roy Butler today carried the historic Coal Seam Gas Moratorium Bill in the NSW Parliament’s Legislative Assembly.

“Much will be made of me carrying the CSG Moratorium Bill, but it should not surprise to people that I have followed through on my commitment to not support any extractive industry that puts water, our most precious resource at risk,” said Mr Butler. 

“I committed to do it through the campaign, and I kept my word.

PERTH (miningweekly.com) – The Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (Appea) is lamenting the passing of the Coal Seam Gas (CSG) Moratorium Bill through the New South Wales Legislative Assembly late on Wednesday.

Appea CEO Andrew McConville said on Thursday that if the Bill was implemented, it would condemn New South Wales to higher gas prices and a slower economic recovery, particularly in regions like Narrabri that are already struggling after years of drought and the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Floodplain graziers and environmental groups are considering legal action against the NSW government if it signs off on controversial water sharing plans, arguing the plans do not adequately take into account the needs of downstream users and the environment.

The Australian Floodplain Association, Macquarie Marshes Environmental Landholders Association and Inland Rivers Network have not ruled out litigation in the Land and Environment Court or the Federal Court if the plans are not amended to more evenly share the pain of a drier climate.

New South Wales water officials have acknowledged that decades of unregulated and unmeasured floodplain harvesting by irrigators was illegal, the minutes of recent meetings show.

At a January meeting, a week before the first drenching rains in northern NSW, members of a senior government water group discussed the legal implications of irrigators harvesting floodwaters, a widespread but unregulated method that accounts for up to a third of the water used by operators in the northern part of the Murray-Darling Basin.

The practice of irrigators collecting floodwaters using banks and levees to divert the water into large storages and dams has been blamed for contributing to declining flows further down the Murray-Darling River system. The 2018 South Australian royal commission described floodplain harvesting as “one of the most significant threats to water security in the Northern Murray-Darling Basin to both licence holders and downstream states”.

The Coronavirus pandemic means the Independent Planning Commission will not be scheduling any public consultation meetings into two of the region's biggest proposed projects, for the foreseeable future.

The IPC has been asked to hold hearings for both Whitehaven Coal's Vickery coal mine extension project and Santos' Narrabri gas fields project.

However, due to the federal government's restrictions around public gatherings and social distancing, the IPC is unable to plan any public meetings at this stage.

THE NSW government is nearly ready to pass over its assessment of the controversial Narrabri Gas Project to the independent body that will have the final say on the development.

NSW Planning Minister Rob Stokes formally requested to the Independent Planning Commission (IPC) to hold a public meeting in Narrabri, in anticipation of his department wrapping up its assessment.

Water Management in NSW is not transparent. We have seen in the last few weeks the issues that this lack of transparency creates for everyone, be it communities or people holding water access licences.

1) The world no longer has the head room to use gas a transitional fuel. If gas replaced all coal in electricity generation, an impossibility in of itself, the world would still have well over 2°C of average global warming.

The idea of gas as a “transition” fuel arose in the time when wind and solar energy were expensive and little used. But we have passed that point. The cost of solar has plunged 90 per cent in the past decade, wind more than 60 per cent. Exactly what role is gas supposed to serve in electricity generation in Australia?

2) Extracting gas from the Narrabri field in NSW at the mooted rate of 60 petajoules (PJ) a year is likely to require a price of at least $6 a gigajoule, and probably more like $7-$8 GJ to be economic. Imported LNG is likely to cost a bare minimum of $A7.50/GJ and no-one’s going to build an import terminal without a higher price than that. Nor do we see Narrabri as increasing price competition, mainly because its owned by Santos, and so the producer oligopoly remains in place.

FEARS have been raised the independent approval process of the controversial Narrabri Gas Project has been destroyed by a $3 billion deal, which some have labelled a "bribe".

The state government has committed to injecting an additional 70 petajoules (PJ) of gas per annum into the east coast market in return for $3 billion from the Commonwealth government.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian flagged two possibilities to supply the gas; import it or source it from the yet-to-be-approved Santos Narrabri Gas Project, which will create 70 PJ a year.

STATE government officials will be grilled about a number of "leaks" at Santos' Narrabri Gas Projects at a parliamentary inquiry on Tuesday.

It's the second hearing into whether the NSW Chief Scientist's 16 coal seam gas recommendations have been implemented by the NSW government, after the first hearing in December was described as a "train wreck", with many questions going unanswered.
The first hearing did uncover that eight leaks at the Narrabri Gas Project were found by the NSW Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) during 2018-19.

Two of the leaks were repaired within 24 hours, however the EPA is still investigating if the remaining six were "gas releases" that were part of the wells' operation or whether they "should be classified as leaks and further action taken".

“There is no shortage of gas in Australia, there’s a shortage of common sense in Canberra when it comes to gas export policy and domestic gas reservation policy,” says Member for Barwon, Roy Butler. 

Mr Butler’s comments follow the new energy deal struck by Prime Minister Scott Morrison and NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian.

Farmers near the proposed Narrabri gas development in northern New South Wales fear they will be “sold out” by a federal-state energy deal that promises to dramatically increase supplies of the fossil fuel in the state.

Announcing the $2bn deal alongside the prime minister, Scott Morrison, on Friday, the NSW premier, Gladys Berejiklian, nominated Santos’s long-promised Narrabri coal-seam gas project as a way to deliver 70 petajoules of new gas a year as promised under the agreement.

The chief executives of Santos, Beach Energy and manufacturer Qenos have backed calls by Prime Minister Scott Morrison to open up gas markets on the east coast, noting it would help lower energy prices.

Qenos boss Stephen Bell warned that gas-based manufacturing doesn't have a long-term future on the east coast unless a solution is found that will offer a reliable supply of cheaper gas.

Welcome to our Business and Infrastructure Funding Opportunities Newsletter

Welcome to our Business and Infrastructure Funding Opportunities Newsletter where you will find details of grant and funding programs that are available for the Northern Inland Region for businesses and infrastructure projects.

Due to the number of grants that are available, we send two funding opportunities newsletters a month; one for Business and Infrastructure and another for Community Projects and Award Programs. These newsletters are a free service that we provide, and can you can add the Community Funding Opportunities and Awards Programs newsletter to your subscriptions by filling your details into on the left hand side of our website: www.rdani.org.au

Businesses have threatened to pull $2 billion of planned investmen­t from NSW as frustrations mount that delays approving Santos’s Narrabri project will cripple the viability of their operations.

Gas giant Santos issued a plea yesterday for the NSW government to outline its approval timeline for its $3bn coal-seam gas project in the Gunnedah Basin just days after the Queensland government agreed on a deadline to make a call on Adani’s long-delaye­d ­Carmichael coalmine.

Santos’s demand has been reinforced­ by industrial gas custom­ers, who have agreed to preliminary deals to buy gas from Narrabri, which could meet half the gas needs of the state.

Boggabri Coal will be able to transport small amounts of coal by road and realign its mine boundaries under approval from the Independent Planning Commission (IPC).

On Monday, the IPC signed off on modifications to five parts of the company's existing project approval for Boggabri Coal Mine including a coal stockpile area, drilling and exploration in the approved disturbance area, and an extension of the time frame for securing biodiversity offsets.

The map that does not make sense (unless you are the owner of the red box ie Santos).

No business case has been released for this greenfield rerouting of the Inland Rail right through the Pilliga forest (no farms in there!) and the CWA have now joined NSW Farmers and Labor in the call for an inquiry.

"The conference voted to request the federal government hold an independent inquiry into the green field routes and funding for the inland rail project."

https://www.bordermail.com.au/story/6117549/what-we-are-lobbying-for-just-makes-sense-cwa-leader-says/

Farmers and concerned citizens in north west NSW say the latest submission made by Santos about its controversial Narrabri CSG project is “arrogant” and “dangerous”, with the company refusing to provide information and commitments requested by the State Government and Narrabri Council.

Santos recently submitted a “Supplementary Response to Submissions” to 14 NSW Government agencies’ requests for information, data, and commitments from the gas company regarding the environmental risks of its proposed coal seam gas project.

GAS giant Santos has a memoranda of understanding with two companies to supply them with gas, should the company's Narrabri Gas Project get the green tick.

SANTOS has been given a further 1000 day royalty-free handout for coal seam gas extraction in Narrabri.

The Coalition and Labor Party voted on Tuesday to grant another 1000 days of royalty-free exploration to the gas giant for 17 wells at its Wilga Park Power Station.

Greens’ MP Jeremy Buckingham’s disallowance motion for what he calls a ‘royalty-free holiday’ was shot down in parliament.

Barnaby Joyce has called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) recommendation to phase out coal by 2050 as “wrong and ridiculous”, while once again suggesting Australians need to look at nuclear power.

Last weekend the IPCC, the world’s foremost panel on climate change, issued a report stating global greenhouse gas emissions must reach zero by 2050 in order to stop global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Analysts say four proposed new gas import terminals around Australia have ended Santos’ contentious NSW Narrabri coal seam gas project.

Santos’ Narrabri project is a proposed $3 billion gas operation that has been consistently opposed by environmental groups, and now Macquarie Bank analysts believe the rise of Australian gas import terminals will end all potential government support.