JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – A community group is taking on Federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt’s approval of 6 100 coal seam gas (CSG) wells in Queensland, a move which the industry has slammed as “delaying tactics”.

The Western Downs Alliance on Thursday started legal proceedings to challenge oil and gas major Santos’s Gladstone liquefied natural gas (GLNG) gas field development, which was related to the GLNG project and involved the progressive development of CSG resources in Surat and Bowen basins.

The community group lodged a case in the Federal Court of Australia against the approval under the national environmental law, arguing that the Minister’s approval was unlawful because he ignored plans by Santos to discharge large volumes of CSG wastewater into the Dawson river.

“The Santos plan for 6 100 new CSG wells in Queensland is a recipe for disaster for the Great Artesian basin and for land-holders who depend on it,” said Western Downs Alliance spokesperson Sarah Moles.

She stated that the environmental-impact statement for the project predicted that it would impact on 73 water bores used by land-holders in the area, and would extract 219-billion litres of water over the life of the project, producing 22-billion litres of salty brine as waste.

“Minister Hunt assessed and approved this development under the Water Trigger that was put into the national environmental law in June 2013 specifically to protect our water resources from large coal and CSG development.

“However, in this case it appears from the documents that Minister Hunt didn’t assess the impact that the inevitable release of large volumes of wastewater from the CSG project into the Dawson river would have,” Moles stated.

The Queensland Resources Council (QRC) slammed the legal action as more “green activist lawfare” and stated that it appeared that tactics to disrupt and delay coal projects were now being deployed in the gas sector.

“This action shows that no commodity is safe from the anti-resources activists,” the QRC stated.

The QRC stated, however, that the legal challenge came as no surprise, saying that it was aware of the activists’ strategy handbook ‘Stopping the Coal Export Boom', which detailed tactics such as litigation, to disrupt and delay resources projects.

Last year, Origin Energy CEO Grant King said during a speech, that if the green activist tactics deployed against coal projects had also been used against the gas sector, Queensland would have been unlikely to have seen the creation of an entirely new LNG export industry, which was delivering faster growth to Queensland, than any other state, in 2016/17.

Santos GLNG is undertaking the gas field development project on behalf of the same joint venture arrangement that was established for the GLNG project, namely Santos, Petroliam Nasional Berhad, Total, and Korean Gas Corporation.

Western Downs Alliance would be represented by public interest environmental lawyers EDO NSW.