Where’s the WATER coming from – Rob McCreath

Rob McCreath is Chairman of Friends of Felton. He writes ….
LIQUID FUEL: Mike Horan obviously isn't aware of the full details of Ambre's proposal. The company does not intend to export coal from Felton They plan to put all of it through a petrochemical plant to produce liquid fuel (dimethyl ether), and gas to supply a power station. Ambre plans refer to the initial stage of the project (800,000t coal/yr). At full production, they intend to mine 12million t coal/yr, an expansion of 16 times.

The figures charted are in tonnes/day. You will see that they expect to produce 3t CO2 for every 1t DME (fuel). They have the nerve to call this the Felton Clean Coal Project! According to my sums, they'll produce 7.8 million t CO2/yr from the petrochemical plant alone, nevermind the fugitive emissions of methane & CO2 from the mine itself.

This project will certainly have a big effect on Toowoomba & local traffic. The DME produced will have to be transported by tanker, at least until a pipeline is built (where will that go?). The workforce will be on the roads day & night.

WATER: Ambre say they'll need 10 000 Ml water/yr. Some of that will come from the underground aquifers they drain when they start digging. Ambre told a public meeting in Pittsworth recently that they would be able to get some waste water from Toowoomba. TRC says they don't have any spare.

Ambre's other source of water is the coal seam gas industry. They have had talks with Arrow Energy about piping this water to Felton. This water is causing major problems around Dalby & Chinchilla because it is very salty, and mostly unsuitable for anything without costly desalination. At present, most of it is contained in evaporation ponds.

If this water is brought to Felton, there is a high risk of polluting Hodgson Creek (headwaters of Murray-Darling). There is also a high risk of polluting underground aquifers, the basaltic hills around Felton are major recharge areas. The mine itself will leak contaminated water into these aquifers too.

We feel that the future of the Darling Downs is at stake here. Coal lies under much of our very best farmland. Ambre have exploration leases covering over 100 000Ha, all the way from Pittsworth to Warwick, via Clifton & Allora. New Hope Coal are cashed up after selling a coal deposit in CQ to BMA for $2.5 billion. They have leases here too. Coalworks has done a drilling program at Hodgson Vale and raised $20m in a share sale a couple of months ago.

These companies are all waiting for the "missing link" rail line to be built between Wandoan & Banana. This will allow coal to be put on a train on the Darling Downs, and transported to Gladstone for export. A representative from Xstrata boasted at a meeting at Dalby last month that the missing link rail would open up billions of tonnes of thermal coal reserves for export "all the way to the southern downs".

If we can't stop the Felton project, what chance is there of stopping all the others that will follow.