Coal Seam Gas - friend or foe?

April 16, 2012 10:18 PM

All over Australia, landowners are fighting to keep mining companies off their property. Why? Coal Seam Gas. Land owners have spent generations working family properties believing in the common law position that any minerals in the land belonged to the landowner as an inherent product of the land itself. The common law assumed that the person who owned the land owned not only the surface of the earth, but also the space above that surface and the soil below that surface.

Not any more. Now that the Crown owns the minerals, exploratory and extraction mining licenses can be granted with little reference to the landowners, with often devastating effects on the land.

“Our property is now partially developed with 18 CSG wells, 15km of gravel roads and underground pipelines and we now wait for the anticipated arrival of a second company who have estimated to drill a further 20 CSG wells and just as many kilometres of pipelines and roads. Our concerns over groundwater have not been answered and we don't believe that all the issues have been addressed.” source

Not everybody agrees that CSG heralds the coming end, with lobby groups on both sides fighting a tough campaign. We’ve even seen wild claims of CIA involvement with political parties likely to oppose CSG mining coming from mining interests, to be later laughed off as a ‘ political distraction’. Lobby groups have combined to fight these claims, made by a billionaire who previously listed one of his hobbies as 'litigation'.

So, what’s the problem? Water. The Great Artesian Basin (GAB) lies under 22% of Australia and is the only reliable source of water in many areas. Springs fed by GAB waters support rare plants and animals found nowhere else. In Queensland CSG is mostly extracted from the Walloon Coal Measures, an aquifer of GAB. In NSW, CSG companies are targeting the Pilliga Sandstones in the southern recharge area of the GAB. Well, also salt and various other chemicals used, including those used to generate ‘minor seismic events’ to fracture the coal seams to release gas and the risk of these contaminating the sole source of water for huge portions of the country.

posted by dg (14 comments total)

Regarding Crown ownership of minerals, Wikipedia has a helpful summary:

Crown ownership of minerals has been made universal in Victoria[7] and South Australia[8] by legislative expropriation of all minerals. In Tasmania[9] and New South Wales,[10] this approach of legislative expropriation has been applied on a selective basis (in Tasmania, for gold, silver, oil, hydrogen, helium and atomic substances, and, in New South Wales, for coal). The Crown, pursuant to statute, may grant various leases or licences to enter onto land and take minerals.

posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 10:26 PM on April 16, 2012

and owners have spent generations working family properties believing in the common law position that any minerals in the land belonged to the landowner as an inherent product of the land itself.

I disagree with this. The relevant legislation s is at about twenty years old now - it's hardly something that's changed recently, and the changes had nothing to do with CSG when initiated, so I feel it's a bit misleading to link them in this way. It's been a long time since Australian citizens owned anything below the surface of their land.

I dunno, I'm very much opposed to CSG, but I can't help feeling this post is veering into GYOB territory, and some of links (Palmer's brain fart, for example) seem pretty tangential to the central narrative about fracking; some of the other links are if not astroturf wholly biased, predictable, and not exactly high quality - on both sides of the debate.
posted by smoke at 10:27 PM on April 16, 2012

The wiki page Red Thoughts was quoting.

I note this line: "From 1855, colonial parliaments legislated for ownership of minerals to be retained by the Crown in future grants of freehold title." If farmers were labouring under the illusion that they owned the earth under their farms, I submit that they never bothered to check this was the case. I grew up in the country (not even mining country!), and it was certainly something most people were aware of back then. Nobody has ever liked it, CSG or no.
posted by smoke at 10:33 PM on April 16, 2012

dg, you are totally wrong and I have no idea where you got your ideas from. Minerals (including gas) have ALWAYS been the property of the Crown. This was well-known and well established in the Australian colonies a loooong time ago. What some people may have thought is hardly relevant, if you're going to use legal terms such as Common law, you need to know the facts.
posted by wilful at 10:37 PM on April 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

Yeah, here in the US, I was shocked to learn that the 36 acres of undeveloped land I was about to buy some years ago did not include the rights to anything I found beneath it. The idea that some company or other could come and tear up my property, or occupy a good part of it, to extract value from land I was about to buy was hard to swallow.

Especially out West where, as I imagine in many parts of Australia, the whole point of buying your own land to develop as a legacy is anathema to the idea that the government might come in and hand over rights to it to someone else (i.e., often wealthy cronies of semi-corrupt legislators, etc.).
posted by darkstar at 10:49 PM on April 16, 2012

That would certainly be pretty crazy if this were a sudden change, but it sounds like mineral rights were retained by the government when it gave out(?) the land in the first place.
posted by delmoi at 10:53 PM on April 16, 2012

As to CSG, yes I agree it's a very serious issue. I am absolutely not going to automatically say the farmers have privileged access to land and cannot be inconvenienced, I understand and accept why minerals belong to the Crown and that some form of compulsory acquisition can and will occur (with appropriate compensation (which is guaranteed by the Constitution)). But CSG/fracking appears to be a case unto itself. It's locally ruinous, it's poisoning the well (literally) and does not appear to be sustainable in any sense of the word. It's a pretty sad state of affairs that the NSW and QLD state governments have gone into this in such a big way and with such inadequate regulation. Victoria is not nearly as poorly regulated, however the companies are sniffing around in my neck of the woods too and I will be/am working hard locally to ensure that community opposition is heard.
posted by wilful at 11:03 PM on April 16, 2012

the idea that the government might come in and hand over rights to it to someone else

I thought that was one of our founding principles.
posted by pompomtom at 11:03 PM on April 16, 2012 [5 favorites]

wilful: "Minerals (including gas) have ALWAYS been the property of the Crown."

Well, that's (somewhat) debatable, as it's true that the rights to certain* minerals has long (not quite always**!) been retained by the Crown. But, to take a particular Queensland example: it was the Petroleum Act of 1915 that gave the government the right to issue separate leases for sub-surface oil & gas. So that part of it is certainly not a "new" issue, but the right for local landholders to control access has seen big changes in more recent times.

That said, yes, it's led to a quite shitty situation here where landholders are required to negotiate "in good faith" with exploration & mineral rights holders - but failing to agree to all their requests is considered to be acting "not in good faith".

As for the lack of adequate environmental & operational regulation? Yeah… and not just direct damage through the fracking / extraction chemicals used, but mixing & shifting of different groundwater strata and basins due to permeability changes will almost certainly lead to unforseen negative consequences.

^{* The list varies between Federal & the various State governments, as His thoughts' quote indicates.
** If I remember my Australian history correctly, a minor kerfuffle happened in the mid 1800's when it was found the Victorian Government didn't actually hold the rights it had been issuing to explorers and miners - but that was quickly sorted out.}
posted by Pinback at 11:31 PM on April 16, 2012

I thought that was one of our founding principles.

Manifest destiny, lebensraum, eminent domain... The names might be different, but it's interesting how it all ends up directly or indirectly furthering economic goals.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:32 PM on April 16, 2012

Minerals (including gas) have ALWAYS been the property of the Crown.

Not always, but, in Australia, more or since since the 1850s. Very old farmers, maybe?
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 11:33 PM on April 16, 2012

The names might be different

We called it Terra Nullius.

/derail
posted by pompomtom at 11:40 PM on April 16, 2012

Yeah, sorry. I am aware that actual Common Law doesn't vest any mineral rights with landowners and hasn't for a long time now. I got mixed up with editing and should have changed the text that I was using as a reference and that used that description incorrectly. it wasn't meant to be the main point anyway, but there's a reason I almost never post here :-(
posted by dg at 11:54 PM on April 16, 2012

Maybe someone else can try again after this one vanishes?
posted by dg at 11:59 PM on April 16, 2012