Gates shut in the gas lands

KYOGLE farmer Jim O'Neill has seen the US documentary GasLand and heard the rumours of meat contamination on the Darling Downs.

His livelihood and lifestyle has been built on the pristine creek flats in the shadow of the World Heritage-listed Border Ranges National Park, which straddles the Queensland-NSW border, and he is not interested in taking any chances with it.

"If there is any risk at all I don't want it," O'Neill says.

Like many landholders across eastern Australia, O'Neill is worried about coal seam gas, which -- rightly or wrongly -- has assumed the reputation of a government-sanctioned environmental monster.

Green groups are abandoning long-held support for the gas as a transitional, greenhouse-friendly fuel to replace coal, arguing methane can actually be worse.

But this is only one of many conundrums posed by the modern-day gas rush that promises to fuel Asia and help balance the budgets of money-hungry state governments.

Most pressingly, has the city again lost touch with what is happening in the bush?

As a symbol of the pent-up pressures straining Australia's rapidly growing coal seam gas industry, it is difficult to go past what happened at Tom O'Connor's 4500 acre (1820ha) cropping and grazing property, 25km west of Dalby, this week.

Contract drillers working for Arrow Energy -- a joint venture between petroleum giant Shell and Petro China -- lost control of one of the wells on O'Connor's land, sending a high-pressure plume of gas and salt water a reported 100m into the air.

The company brought things under control after 27 hours, but "There is no question they were winging it," O'Connor says.

The incident has left him with lingering doubts about what to expect next from his new-found gas well friends.

He is keen to put the record straight on how his flirtation with coal seam gas has turned into an unexpected nightmare.

"I didn't give permission for the gas wells; I didn't have a choice," O'Connor says.

"The company told me it was going to put gas wells on my property and I couldn't say no.

"The company certainly didn't turn up on my door and say it was going to have gas leak one, two, three and four."

The right of access is one issue raised by what is happening with coal seam gas exploration. It challenges the bush-lawyer belief that a man's house is his castle.

Does the crown ownership of minerals in the ground really give exploration companies the right to trample land users who were there first?

Some of the issues are reminiscent of the Wik debate regarding the coexistence of native title and pastoral leases.

This time it's freehold land at stake and farmers who are feeling disenfranchised.

Country landholders stretching from the Darling Downs in Queensland to the Hunter Valley in NSW are asking whether enough value has been put on what limited stocks of highly productive arable land there is.

Should some areas be out of bounds? Have exploration permit areas been drawn too wide for coal seam gas? Are company promises to make good any damage even possible to keep?

In many rural towns, farmers and other residents openly fear what they are told is an existential threat posed by coal seam gas.

In fact, by marrying environmental, agricultural and nationalistic concerns, opposition to coal seam gas has joined the circle of political dissent, with conservative farmers calling on the environment movement for help.

Cotton growers, eco-tourists, crack-of-dawn dairy workers, lifestyle hippies, mango growers, corporate drop-out tree changers and outback cattle runners are speaking with a single voice: "Stop the madness."

For long-time environmental campaigner and Queensland Greens co-founder Drew Hutton, who leads the charge for landholders to lock the gate on the miners, it is an astonishing turn of events.

"I thought forming the Greens was going to be the biggest thing I ever did, but this is going to be bigger," Hutton says as he marvels at the unlikely marriage of interest.

"I'm standing next to these fellows who are to the right of Genghis Khan, I am going on [Sydney radio talkback supremo] Alan Jones next week, for god's sake. This should not be happening to an inner-city leftie like me."

On a tour of the Darling Downs with Hutton, however, it is clear there is still a lot of the boy from Chinchilla left in him as well.

He can point out his father's old property, where Jones coached him at tennis and where he was recently arrested in a protest that -- if he has his way -- will go all the way to the High Court to assert the right of property owners to reject the advances of the coal seam gas industry.

Lock the Gate is a cause that is building fast and gathering a formidable war chest.

"We are getting people standing forward to donate everywhere, right from ordinary people wanting to give me $50 for my petrol through to hundreds of thousands of dollars," Hutton says.

"They see a cause that goes beyond tribal politics and farmers. It is about the bush, our food bowls. It gets down to the potential contamination of the Great Artesian Basin: 'How could you do that?' they say."

Hutton's Lock the Gate juggernaut has more than 80 regional groups and is about to hold its first national meeting.

Hutton -- disillusioned with the overly bureaucratic approach of the Greens -- has pledged to be the group's hands-on protest leader.

On another front, the National Farmers Federation is using its fighting fund to underwrite a test case that attempts to keep coal seam gas exploration off prime agricultural land in southeast Queensland.

The concerns are the same in the Hunter Valley, where the NSW government has put an interim freeze on coal seam gas exploration and development applications while it works out how best to deal with the rising level of landholder anger.

Left unchecked, there is a tinderbox waiting to explode in the protest-savvy hills straddling the NSW and Queensland border.

A proposal by small industry player Metgasco to lay a pipeline from its fields in Casino to join up with the gas grid in southeast Queensland -- opening the region to widespread exploration by Arrow Energy and others for export gas -- could well be the flashpoint.

Metgasco claims to have strong local support in Grafton and Casino, where it sponsors the annual Beef Week and is planning to build a small gas-fired power station.

Metgasco managing director and chief executive Peter Henderson, who only recently joined the company, can sense the anger but probably doesn't know what is coming if his company pushes ahead with plans to build its pipeline alongside the community-built Lions Road through the Border Ranges National Park.

"If I put myself in a position where I had never worked in the oil and gas industry and seen GasLand, I would be starting to say: 'Oh, is that what is coming,' " Henderson says. "I am also not surprised that people will support something as long as it is not in their own back yard."

Locals in northern NSW are gearing up for a re-run of the Terania Creek forest protests of the late 1970s, which was the first direct action taken in defence of a forest in Australia.

"We are only getting started on this campaign," Caldera environment centre co-ordinator Kim Hollingsworth says.

"We got 3000 people [to protest] in Murwillumbah and that was an information session.

"If they try to go through the Border Ranges, thousands and thousands of people will turn out. They will be stopped. If they can get through a national park they will just ride roughshod over us."

At Lynchs Creek, the proposed route of the Metgasco pipeline -- which Henderson insists is still at an early stage -- locals are already preparing tractor blockades to stop it.

"I think there is going to be a lot of civil disobedience," says

Leah Hobbs, who has been stunned to find out that big gas has discovered her recently acquired rural bolt-hole.

"I don't think people are going to stand for this at all. You are taking away everything that these people have."

Stephanie Barker bought a property on Lions Road 10 years ago, attracted by the World Heritage listing for the Border Ranges and the fresh air and water.

"To find that gas interests have come into an area that was meant to be protected is absolutely devastating," she says.

Lesley McQueen has recently returned to the area her family has lived in for more than five decades.

"I came back for one thing: for my children to have a childhood like I had," McQueen says.

"We have got the rainforest up behind us, we have got green pastures everywhere, we grow our own vegetables. I want to be in touch with the land as much as I can, and them coming through is going to poison the land and the water, and I don't want to take that away from my children and grandchildren. I love it here and I'll do anything, I am not going to let those bastards through."

Dairy farmer Doug Parker, whose family owns 810ha of prime river flats on seven titles, shares his neighbours' concerns about contamination of the water.

"We have got the best water in the country," Parker says. "Once they have contaminated the water how do you fix it? You may as well pack up and bugger off."

Wendy Sibley sees things in typically northern NSW terms, quoting a Native American saying: "We don't inherit the land from our fathers, we borrow it from our children. What the hell are we doing?"

Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association chief executive Belinda Robinson says far from being a disaster, Australia's coal seam gas industry is an economic and an environmental revelation.

She says the 250 trillion cubic feet of gas identified to date is enough to power a city of one million people for 5000 years and it produces about half the CO2 of black coal when used to produce electricity and almost 70 per cent less than brown coal.

However, Beyond Zero executive director Matthew Wright argues that Robinson's figures do not take proper account of the global warming impact of methane.

"If proper account is taken of methane's ability to trap heat in the atmosphere, coal seam gas has the same greenhouse gas impact as coal," Wright says.

It is still possible that northern NSW will prove too difficult for the coal seam gas industry to get a strong foothold there.

But it is past the point of no return in Queensland, where contracts have already been signed to supply Asian energy markets through two Gladstone liquefied natural gas facilities worth more than $30 billion, and new export projects are on the drawing board.

The Queensland government is banking on royalty income from coal seam gas of about $800 million a year.

But this does not impress Darling Downs farmers such as Graham Clapham, who is at the centre of the Australian Farmers Federation fighting fund-supported legal challenge to strengthen the bargaining position of farmers.

"I don't think there is any dispute that this land is as valuable as it gets in terms of food production and farming in this country," Clapham says. "Don't you think this generation and future generations have some sort of right to see that this land is not destroyed and the aquifer under it that makes it so productive?

"Why does 20 years' worth of gas have rights over and above who knows how many thousands of years of sustainable farming?

"What is 20 years' worth of cheap gas to China or Asia?"

With a moratorium on new applications, the NSW government is showing it is aware of the problem.

So is Queensland Liberal National Party leader Campbell Newman, who has spoken to companies and concerned residents on the Darling Downs and promised to announce the LNP policy within four to eight weeks.

"One of the things that is becoming apparent is that some companies are much better than others," Newman says.

"It is an important industry to the nation and the state of Queensland, but state Labor has been really very behind the eight ball in dealing with the issues.

"I have a number of concerns: land use, fair compensation, environment in relation to concerns about the water table and the level of investment in local communities.

"There is a problem when companies build the stuff and compromise the ability of farmers to work the farm.

"This is becoming a bigger issue as companies move from forested and grazing lands to top-quality cropping land.

"Water is an issue that will have to come back to science."

Michael McNamara, coal seam gas co-ordinator for the Northern Rivers Guardians, refers to the precautionary principle.

"If you don't know, don't do it," McNamara says.

"There is a risk to businesses up here because the clash with the underlying values of the region is just too great.

"The government and companies need to look at the history of this area.

"We don't have the highest concentration of national parks in the state because of government initiative.

"It came about because of long, hard struggle by community members."