Galilee Basin coalmine: Queensland Government grants approval despite expert environmental concerns

Updated

Australia's biggest coalmine project has been given the green light despite serious environmental concerns raised by experts appointed by the Commonwealth.

The Queensland Government last week approved Indian company Adani's plan for a giant mine in the Galilee Basin west of Rockhampton.

The $16.5 billion Carmichael project would be the largest coal mine in the nation and one of the biggest in the world, covering 200 square kilometres and producing about 60 million tonnes of coal a year.

The Federal Government must decide on final approval by early next month.

In giving it the go-ahead with conditions, the State Government sided with Adani against the Independent Expert Scientific Committee (IESC) on coal seam gas and large coal mining developments, set up in 2012 to advise state and federal governments.

The committee was mainly worried about the impact of the mine on groundwater in the underlying and adjacent Great Artesian Basin.

It said it had "little confidence" in much of the modelling used by Adani and highlighted gaps in its data.

The IESC said not enough was known about how the coal seams connect to the Great Artesian Basin, or the likely effects of mining.

The committee also said it was worried about the cumulative impacts of the Carmichael project when added to other large mining schemes in the area, as well as the risk of flooding and discharges from the mine into creeks and rivers.

The ABC has obtained the 150-page response by Adani's consultant, engineering firm GHD, to the concerns raised by the IESC.

It shows that Adani's experts rejected some of the committee's findings as scientifically flawed and proposed to deal with many of the gaps in data it identified by monitoring conditions after mining begins.

The State Government also hired its own expert, hydrologist Dr Noel Merrick, to rebut some of the IESC's concerns.

Dr Merrick wrote a short but damning paper, in which he agreed with the state mines department that some of the IESC's concerns about groundwater flow should be "ignored".

All of the matters he had been asked to look at "have been shown to be false", Dr Merrick wrote.

He argued that the IESC had fundamentally misunderstood how water flows underground.

The Queensland coordinator-general, approving the mine with 190 conditions, accepted there were gaps in data relating to groundwater, particularly regarding the Doongmabulla Springs Complex, a nationally important wetland that is already under threat.

But the coordinator-general shifted responsibility for the missing information to Adani, requiring it to implement "a groundwater monitoring plan in order to address groundwater modelling uncertainties".

Environmental monitoring 'in doubt'

Environmentalist Drew Hutton, from the Lock The Gate Alliance, said Carmichael was "a huge project".

"We're talking about six pits, two underground mines, without knowing what the impact will be," he said.

Mr Hutton described the IESC as an "independent committee, that's full of the best brains in this country when it comes to knowledge about water, not the donkeys up here in Queensland who just simply tick off any half-baked project put before them".

The IESC declined to provide its chair, Lisa Corbyn, former chief executive of the New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage, for interview.

Asked whether the State Government had ignored the IESC's concerns, Queensland Premier Campbell Newman said "there are different views on these things all the time".

"But I can assure people that all the necessary conditions to protect the environment are there and that decision is there for all to see, there are hundreds of pages of conditions," he said.

Mr Newman has signed a 30-year "partnership agreement" with the mining industry, saying: "I have said famously or infamously that we are in the coal business - I again reiterate that today".

Queensland's ability to monitor the compliance of mining projects with their environmental conditions is in doubt after a damning report by the state's auditor-general earlier this year.

It found the state's environment department was "not fully effective in its supervision, monitoring and enforcement of environmental conditions and is exposing the state to liability and the environment to harm unnecessarily".

The Federal Government's pre-budget National Commission of Audit, which recommended dozens of government bodies be abolished or merged, marked the IESC for "other action" but did not specify what it was recommending.

Analysts have predicted that Adani might delay or even drop the Carmichael project because of a collapse in the international coal price and high levels of debt at its Australian subsidiary.

However, the company could be boosted by the expected victory of Narendra Modi in the general elections in India that reach their climax tonight.

Adani founder Gautam Adani is a close associate of Mr Modi and their careers have been closely intertwined.

The share price of Adani's Indian parent company has been rising along with Mr Modi's political fortunes.

A Modi victory could lead to new contracts for Adani to sell foreign coal in India.

Adani did not respond to a request for comment.

Do you know more? Email investigations@abc.net.au

Topics: coal, environmental-impact, mining-environmental-issues, regional, regulation, regional-development, mining-rural, mining-industry, public-sector, federal---state-issues, government-and-politics, qld

First posted