We'll leave no trace, Chinese miners pledge

THE executives from the Chinese-controlled mining giant Shenhua Watermark Coal yesterday insisted that 30 years of coalmining would leave no trace.

Shenhua Watermark Coal's Chen Gang Gunnedah

THE executives from the Chinese-controlled mining giant Shenhua Watermark Coal yesterday insisted that 30 years of coalmining would leave no trace.

.Having spent about $200 million on coal-rich farming land across the Liverpool Plains in northern NSW, Shenhua is standing firm in the face of community opposition to its proposed 30-year mining project.

It has pledged to leave the region's valuable agricultural and water assets untouched, the social fabric of the area strengthened, and the economy bolstered.

They are impressive claims -- a little new-age by mining company standards -- but Shenhua executives, and the company's obligatory public relations division, are keen to spread the message that their exhaustion of the vast coal deposits under the Liverpool Plains will leave no adverse environmental or social impacts.

Pitted against Shenhua are various local anti-mining groups, which claim the proposed large-scale extraction of coal will contaminate the area's prime agricultural black soil and its underground aquifers, and squeeze the life out of tightly knit farming communities such as Gunnedah, 500km northwest of Sydney.

Either way, should the state government give the multi-billion-dollar project the go-ahead, the ultimate consequences of the scheme won't be known until the middle of the century.

For all of Shenhua's promises, the company does not have a perfect record when it comes to coalmines. It was the owner of a mine in China's northwestern Ningxia province that exploded twice, in 2008 and 2009, killing 30 people and injuring 55. The blasts, which hurled stones and rocks more than a kilometre from the Dafeng mine, were blamed on the miners' mishandling of dynamite while conducting blasting operations.

Another 31 Chinese miners were killed when Shenhua's Luotuoshan coalmine flooded during its construction in March last year. There were 77 workers underground as megalitres of water began gushing into the Inner Mongolia mine.

Yesterday, the director of Shenhua's Liverpool Plains project, Joe Clayton, and company executive Chen Gang accompanied The Australian on a tour of the proposed mining sites on the outskirts of Gunnedah, where Shenhua has bought 43 farming properties in the past two years.

"This suggestion we're destroying the food bowl of Australia is just wrong," Mr Clayton said. "No mining will occur within 150m of prime black soil; we'll only mine on red soil. And part of our environmental assessment is that we have to show how the land will be left after the mine is no longer active."

The NSW government won't give the project the go-ahead until all environmental impact studies have been assessed, a process which is unlikely to be completed within the next 12 months.