The approval of Australia’s biggest coalmine by the Queensland state government was given despite concerns raised by environmental experts appointed by the federal government.
Queensland’s conservative Liberal National Party (LNP) state 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 Australia and one of the biggest in the world, covering 200 square kilometres and producing about 60 million tonnes of coal a year.
Australia’s conservative Liberal-National federal government must decide on final approval by early next month.
ABC News reports that 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.
ABC News reports 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.
ABC News reports 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.
It also expressed concern about the risk of flooding and discharges from the mine into creeks and rivers.
ABC News 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 employed 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.
ABC News reports 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.
However, 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”.
Environmentalist Drew Hutton, from the Lock The Gate Alliance, 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”.
ABC News reports that 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.
Analysts have predicted that Adani may 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.
