CSG, Bore Water & Bubbles in the Creek

Wambo Creek, Avenue Road,
south of Chinchilla

Gas companies, extracting lots of groundwater for CSG operations, are causing the water levels of aquifers to drop. ‘I don’t have a bore,’ said Joe Hill from Miles in Queensland, ‘but my next door neighbour has one. It’s about 1,100 feet into the Walloons aquifer but it’s dropped 60 metres and they estimate that around here it could drop up to 100 metres.’

‘A report named all the bores in the area that would eventually blow gas. Agreements were made with landholders to cap and seal these bores. The compensation paid only covered the cost of drilling one new bore, so if it’s no good you don’t have any more bore water. When a bore is capped, water and or gas sometimes comes up outside the casing.’

Once water levels drop, the pressure is taken off the gas and it expands and escapes wherever it can. Bores at Hopeland are blowing gas. ‘One bore has gas and water spurting up like the Lake Burley Griffin fountain,’ said Joe.

‘When bubbles appeared in the Condamine River, the gas companies said it was naturally occurring. They paid experts from around the world to come and look and they agreed. A person working for Origin who was bought up near there said he could remember bubbles in the river when he was a kid. I questioned him on that, saying that if that was the case why didn’t Origin have it in their EIS and he didn’t have an answer for that.’

When I visited the area in early May I wanted to see and photograph the bubbling in the Condamine River but it is on private property and quite a hike to get to. Instead I was taken to a bridge over Wambo Creek on Avenue Road, south of Chinchilla, where bubbles had also been sighted when the creek was barely flowing. It had been raining so the creek was flowing fast but at one stage bubbles appeared.