Linc Energy former boss blasts ‘witch hunt’ that cost $10b project

It was an ultimately discredited state government action that cost him tens of millions and his marriage – and Peter Bond says it cost Queensland much more.

Former Linc Energy chief Peter Bond said the withdrawal of charges against him and other Linc executives for allegedly causing environmental harm on the Darling Downs signalled the end of a “scandalous seven-year witch hunt” that hurt Queensland around the world.

Bond, 59, said he was moving on after a harrowing ordeal that cost him his marriage and tens of millions of dollars in cash and lost opportunities.

The case collapsed, he said, because of bad law, bad science and bad will.

He said it became a political exercise run by green activists within state government departments – and the Palaszczuk Cabinet.

In an exclusive interview, Bond said he became persona non grata in the mining and investment community after Linc folded.

He and Australia had suffered huge reputational damage.

“I’ve been divorced and through a lot. Many, many millions of dollars have been taken away,” he said.

“Everything has changed.’’

The 15,000 shareholders who lost all when the state government moved against Linc, forcing its collapse, are now considering their options.

One New York hedge fund put in $100 million after then premier Peter Beattie went to the US in 2006 and championed Linc’s underground coal gasification project as a Smart State green energy initiative.

Peter Bond is opting to walk away rather than seek restitution. Picture: Brian Cassey

Institutional investors in London, Paris, Dubai, San Francisco and Boston lost millions. An individual investor in Singapore took a $7 million hit. Hundreds of Australians were burned.

Bond won’t be joining them in any action. Life was too short, he said.

Besides, he has a wedding to go to.

He is tying the knot with his sweetheart Sharon Casey, who he met in Sydney a year ago. Bond divorced four years ago amid the “turmoil and false accusations” swirling around Linc.

He broke his silence to criticise Deputy Premier Steven Miles (then environment minister) who slapped an emergency 320km excavation exclusion zone around the Linc plant at Hopeland, 20km southeast of Chinchilla on the Darling Downs, after the discovery of carbon monoxide and hydrogen gases there
in 2015.

In an earlier trial in 2018, long after Bond had left the company, Linc was convicted and fined $4.5 million.

Bond said that case was a miscarriage of justice because Linc was by that time in liquidation and there was no defence offered.

Bond said that $50 million “show trial” could have been avoided had investigators listened to his international environmental experts recruited from Canada and Germany, who assured him any possible pollutants caused by the extraction could be contained and nullified.

Daryl Rattai, the Linc general manager from late 2009 until 2011, agrees.

Then environment minister Steve Miles and the Hopeland site

“There is no environmental harm and never was,” he told me.

“At no time did Linc exceed the guidelines laid down in its environmental authority.”

“The regulator (the Environmental Protection Agency) sanctioned the UCG process.

“Thousands of samples were taken by Linc and not one sample ever exceeded the approved environmental authority.’’

Compounds including methane and hydrogen and benzene were naturally occurring in a region with vast underground reserves of gas and coal.

Similar compounds were detected in samples taken 100km away from the Linc site. They could not have come from the Linc site.

“They might even be in the soils in your backyard in Brisbane,” said Rattai, an oil and gas veteran with dual Canadian-Australian citizenship.

“After seven years they came up with no evidence of harm.

“The damage to me and my family was devastating.”

Rattai was still living under the “stigma”.

“The government never got its head around this,” he said.

Rattai had a message for government opponents of UCG: “You guys started it.”

It happened when the Beattie government even became a joint-venture partner in the project with the state-owned CS Energy sinking $4.78 million into it in 2000.

Coal was being burnt underground long before Bond and Rattai turned up.

Bond is determined not to let the scandal leave him bitter.

Toby Trebilco at Hopeland. Picture: Des Houghton

“There was a green agenda happening and we didn’t fit in with that. It got worse and worse,” he said.

“They went for the throat.’’

He said Linc had completed its mission of safely gasifying coal to produce diesel and jet fuel when trouble struck.

Bond believes Linc would today be worth $10 billion while creating thousands of jobs and billions in taxes and royalties. He had opened offices in the US, Poland, Alaska and Canada and was about to take his technology there.

“Steven Miles said it was Queensland’s worst environmental disaster, but where is the disaster, where are the dead cows, the dead trees?” Bond asked. “There are no dead frogs. Nothing. Nothing died, nothing was damaged. I can’t see a disaster. It just didn’t happen.’’

Linc neighbour Toby Trebilco, who lives near the Linc plant, said the panic caused by the evacuation had damaged the district’s reputation for producing high-value crops and cattle.

Allegations of Linc creating toxic waste were unsubstantiated.

“And I can prove it,” he said.

He produced a report on tests of water and silt on his property by the Department of Environment dated March 10, 2015.

“No organic contaminants were detected in the bore or dam water,” it says.

Days later Miles declared an emergency and created the exclusion zone.

In the District Court this week charges of failing to ensure Linc Energy complied with the Environmental Protection Act between 2007 and 2013 against Bond, Rattai and other executives Donald Schofield and Stephen Dumble, were dropped.

Peter Bond with fiancee Sharon Casey. Picture: Brian Cassey

Judge Leanne Clare quizzed the Crown prosecutor for answers. “Given the enormity of the prosecution, the costs and time and also the impact on so many people, it calls for an explanation on the record.”.

The prosecutor said the Crown was not satisfied it had sufficient proof of environmental harm having been caused while the four men were executives.

Bond said he was prosecuted by the same state government that initiated the Linc pilot plant and urged him to buy it. “The reality is the Queensland government’s fingerprints were all over it from the start,” he said.

“The government sponsored the research some years before I purchased Linc.

“Any damage done by generator one was caused by the government.

“We know that for a fact. They know that too by the way, it’s in their own report.

“It was a travesty (to prosecute us). They should never have gone ahead with it.

“What did the Queensland government want to do? Shut down Linc, shut down UCG? Well, they won.”

But you can’t keep an entrepreneur down. Bond may have some big news on the horizon.

“I have other business interests overseas and I want to pursue those,” he says.

“I’ll continue in business because business is what I am. I’ll do what I do to make things happen, but I can’t do it here. It’s too hard, too painful.” Mr Miles and Environment Minister Meaghan Scanlon declined interview requests.

Des Houghton is an independent media consultant and a former editor of The Courier-Mail, Sunday Mail and Sunday Sun

Then premier Peter Beattie in 2006