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| Photo sourced: Farmer claims mine water monitoring is flawed |
Make Good
Mine dewatering is to be subject
to the Water Act provisions requiring underground water impact reports,
baseline assessments, general agreements and make good agreements. These will
do little if anything to protect the rights of other groundwater users.
Miners will hide behind the one-side
and trivial provisions of the Water Act to frustrate any attempts by landowners
to achieve make good agreements that are actually workable and enforceable. The
limited bargaining power which the
landowner may have during the current objection process will no longer count
for anything as far as a make good agreement is concerned.
The Water Act make good
provisions are so one-sided and fundamentally flawed that in practical terms
are they unenforceable, for example:
- settlement of a make good agreement is not required before dewatering begins, so the landholder has no bargaining power – only a recourse to the Court and the Court would be restricted by these badly designed Water Act provisions
- no requirement
for independent expert testing of bores;
- bore
owner not entitled to the data and reports
- baseline
testing of private bores inadequate (especially as sustainable yield and
gas intrusion not tested)
- no
regular monitoring of private bores including for specific capacity (short-form
yield test) and gas intrusion
- no
expert-determined declining value trigger levels for individual bores
derived from monitoring data (just one-size-fits-all water level decline
which is not conclusive proof of diminished capacity)
- no
process for independent expert interpretation of impaired capacity and its
cause when trigger levels reached
- no
process for resolving appropriate make good action
- no dispute
resolution process for technical matters requiring expert assessment
- both
make good and compensation are assessed according to the ‘authorised
purpose or use’ of the bore, ie. its licensed yield limit (if there is
one) and description of its utilisation at the time of baseline testing.
Either or both of those parameters may be substantially below the bore’s
actual capacity.
Comment
Licenced yield (if the bore is
subject to licensing) can be amended. Subject
to that upper limit it is the owner’s right to use the bore’s full capacity and
it is that full capacity which must be underwritten by the make good system.
The Water Act make good scheme fails to test (baseline test) and track (by
monitoring) an individual bore’s actual capacity and thereby accurately
identify any adverse change and its cause. Data from those in-house assessments
isn’t required to be shared with the bore owner. Those
broad groundwater assessments and reports under the Water Act will
gather a vast bank of data which is of little if any use when it comes to
achieving a just outcome for the owner of a damaged bore.
More detail of the dysfunctional
nature of the make good scheme may be found in ‘Make Good Flaws’, a
supplementary document from Basin Sustainability Alliance at the 29thOctober 2014 public hearing of the Agriculture, Resources and Environmental
Committee of Parliament.
As is painfully obvious from experience in make good negotiations with
CSG companies, such weak and inadequate terms in the Act are used by resource companies
as a shield to deflect and frustrate any attempt by landholders to negotiate
realistic and enforceable terms of a make good agreement.
As stated above, dewatering approval should only granted after the
proponent has entered into a make good agreement with each potentially affected
bore owner.
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| Areas in Surat Basin where aquifers will be impacted by coal seam gas Prepared by the Office of Groundwater Impact Assessment Managing groundwater impacts of coal seam gas |
Previous published related posts
Representing PRA Joanne Rea at the Water Act Amendments hearing [page 41] on October 29 2014 said,
ReplyDelete"Property Rights Australia has had long-term reservations about how make-good would work at all levels to the continued efficiency of property owners. The bill does not address all of those concerns. Almost no mention is made of how problems will be resolved. Time frames are too long, particularly in the event of a cataclysmic event. The practical reality is that resources companies do not construct make-good bores in a timely manner and try to get landowners to accept money instead. Our belief is that this then becomes new infrastructure and is no longer covered by make-good provisions, because it is treated differently under the act.
Landowners bear the onus of proof that resources companies are responsible for loss of quality or quantity of water in the event of a serious dispute. Reasonable access to proof has been curtailed, if anything, by this bill. The water monitoring authority, rather than being the government or an independent authority, is to be the resources company. Involvement of the government seems limited and, I must say, it seems unwilling. Even if this was a contest between two players of equal size and financial strength, which it is not, this legislation has one party on an uneven footing already, with the resources company the holder of the hydrogeological and water monitoring information, with severe penalties for anyone who may interfere with a monitoring bore, which remains the property of the resources companies and may be plugged by such company at any time without reference to anyone.
It is also one of the basic tenets of science and agriculture that you cannot monitor anything without measuring it, so the bill making it clear that monitoring bores do not need to have a baseline assessment is, quite clearly, not suitable for the purpose. One of the main determinants of whether or not a bore has been affected is based on the underground water impact assessment report, which sets out the obligations to monitor and manage impacts on bores and springs. The fact that small low-impact or no-impact mines or resources companies in unregulated areas are not required to complete an underground water impact assessment report or a baseline assessment, in spite of having make-good obligations, leaves a gaping hole with no clear path on how such obligations are to be realised.
Of course make good agreements are crap... once its gone, its gone.. what are they going to do.... truck in 15 or 20 thousand gallons per hour to run a travelling irrigator???
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