Farmers and activists have slammed a decision allowing waste salt from coal seam gas extraction to be buried at lined landfill sites in Queensland, saying it risks contaminating the Murray-Darling river system.
The state’s action plan to manage highly salty waste brine was released last week, 26 years after the first CSG project began in the Bowen Basin and after a decade of rapid expansion.
Gas companies have stored brine in 36 tailings dams as a temporary measure, but those reservoirs are more than 67 percent full, according to the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association.
The Department of Environment and Science action plan has accepted the industry’s suggested solution for the estimated five million tonnes of waste brine, which is encapsulation - this involves evaporating the water and depositing leftover salt in lined landfill sites.
Grazier Glen Beasley said the government and industry don’t want to talk about the potential dangers of the compounds in the salt, such as benzene, toluene, ethyl-benzene and xylene.
He said allowing CSG companies to store brine waste in a lined landfill would put entire river systems at risk of contamination.
“The capacity for this toxin to spread into the Murray-Darling river system is obvious,” Beasley said in a statement on Monday.
“It seems it’s only a matter of time if this facility does go ahead and stores the toxic waste that we have a human health and environmental disaster. At the end of the day, clean air, clean soil, and clean food is a basic requirement for all of humanity.”
The department will establish a process to report brine and salt volumes stored by the end of this year and how to provide that data to the public by the end of next year.
It also plans to review existing regulations to work out how to conduct environmental assessments for salt encapsulation and options to make rules consistent.
An APPEA report ruled out other options, including salt recovery and ocean outfall, saying they were either unsafe or that transporting chemicals was too dangerous or too expensive or impacted local salt producers’ profits.
Lock the Gate Alliance Queensland co-ordinator Ellie Smith said it was unsurprising the gas industry had pushed for brine waste to the dumped in landfill.
“Simply dumping it in a landfill will mean future generations of Queenslanders will be forced to grapple with a toxic contamination disaster,” she said.
“We'd prefer to see the gas industry deal with its waste now, through beneficial reuse, rather than burying it, which will impact generations of Queenslanders into the future.”
Smith said burying the brine was not a proper solution, but another example of the impact gas production was having on Queensland communities which also included land sinking, water table drawdown and climate change.
