Noise & Air Pollution

'Beneficial water' is pumped into the dam
 in the distance for irrigation

Karen Auty from Chinchilla describes the noise generated by the infrastructure. ‘A gas well sits in a paddock on an acre or half an acre block of land that has been cleared, fenced and the ground pounded to give vehicles access. A metal box, like a garden shed, sits beside it housing a couple of diesel generators to keep the gas well going. Some of these are quite close to people’s homes. At night it’s very quiet in the bush so the noise is amplified and it doesn’t stop. You can’t turn the television up high enough and when you want to sleep you have to close your windows. Imagine having three or four noisy diesel engines running every night, 24 hours a day at your neighbour’s place. A gas well is a small piece of infrastructure.’

 ‘Today we passed a water treatment plant and we were hundreds of metres away and it was loud. The reverse osmosis plant at Kenya makes a heck of a lot of noise, some whistling sounds and you can hear the steam whooshing out too.’ (See the Kenya site on Google Earth. Type into Google Maps: GD Pipeline Kenya Site)

Before a gas well is connected to pipelines, or if there is excess gas or issues with capturing the gas, it is flared. Some companies have horizontal flares while others have vertical flares, a long pipe going up into the air with the gas on fire at the top.

‘From a kilometre away, the sound of the flares are like standing at an international airport and hearing jet engines roar,’ said Karen. ‘You can almost feel the ground shaking. And then you see the flame. Horizontal flares have three story walls around them and the flame comes up above the third story with white puffs of smoke and black particulate smoke with VOCs (volatile organic compounds) coming off it. You can stand at people’s houses and watch this. The gas companies don’t flare all the time but when they are not, they are raw venting which is worse than flaring.’

Vents, with a piece of poly pipe sticking up in the air, are attached to gas wells and to low and high point drains. Karen describes them as making ‘a really sick didgeridoo sound as the gas and water gurgle up the pipe before spurting out.’

Karen’s major concern is air pollution from infrastructure. ‘There are no fence lines when it comes to air pollution,’ said Karen. ‘Air pollution is the big sleeper with this. When millions of kilograms of formaldehyde, VOCs, particulate matter and heavy metals are pumped continually into the air they must come down.

‘The National Pollutant Inventory www.npi.gov.au is a great place to start. You can look at a facility like QGC’s Kenya and see what it is pumping out into the air over a one year period and if that doesn’t scare the pants off you, you’re brain dead. That is just one facility in one year, let alone tens of facilities over many years.’

‘People think they have good clean country air but the health impacts from air polution are felt by people within a 20 kilometre radius of CSG infrastructure.’