There are growing calls for a coal seam gas (CSG) project in the northwest of New South Wales to be scrapped after an aquifer was contaminated with uranium 20 times higher than safe drinking water levels.
The state’s Environment Protection Authority (EPA) issued a $1500 fine to energy giant Santos last month following the “pollution incident” at the company’s Narrabri gas field operations in the Pilliga.
AAP Newsagency reports the contamination was reportedly caused by water leaking from a pond, with lead, aluminium, arsenic, barium, boron, nickel and uranium detected in the aquifer at elevated levels.
Opposition Labor environment spokesman Luke Foley has strongly urged the conservative Liberal-National state government to tear up a memorandum of understanding it signed with Santos to fast-track the project.
“This is not the time, and the Pilliga’s not the place, for a sweetheart deal to fast-track a major coal seam gas project,” Mr Foley said.
Mark Robinson and his wife Cherie, who are grain growers in the Pilliga region, travelled to Sydney yesterday to demand a halt to all CSG operations in the state.
They’ve both been arrested recently during anti-CSG protests.
“Our groundwater is so, so precious to us,” Mr Robinson told AAP.
“Now to find that it’s been contaminated with uranium and arsenic and all sorts of things, it really is just devastating.”
AAP reports Santos said the elevated levels of uranium, arsenic and other naturally occurring minerals at the Bibblewindi site posed no risk to people or the environment.
Company vice president James Baulderstone said the site’s water treatment facilities put in by the previous owner did not meet Santos standards and were shut down in December 2011 shortly after the company took over from Eastern Star Gas.
“We remain confident to our commitment to running a safe and secure operation,” he told AAP.
He described the contamination as a “minor incident” and dismissed calls to ban CSG mining across NSW.
Meanwhile the EPA has revealed water for livestock is being extracted from an aquifer at a point less than five kilometres from where it was contaminated by the Santos CSG project in the Pilliga Forest.
The EPA has not told the user, as it says taking water from the aquifer so far from the point of contamination poses “almost no risk”.
However, the disclosure undermines claims by Santos that the affected ground water is not an aquifer but a “shallow perch layer” beneath the pond.
