more bad press for qgc/bg

Thankfully ESG avoids some of this!

TR

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/protesters-stage-qld-coal-gas-blockade-20110314-1btp1.html

Protesters stage Qld coal gas blockade
Petrina Berry And Jess Marszalek
March 14, 2011 - 12:34PM

AAP

Protesters say they will put their bodies on the line to save their land and homes from a coal seam gas development northwest of Brisbane.

Up to 70 protesters have gathered at Tara and say they will form a human blockade to stop Queensland Gas Company workers moving in to build a gas pipeline.

Some have climbed trees near a key access road, holding banners that say: "Don't gas Tara".
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Others, including farmers, landowners and green groups, have rallied outside the company's Tara office.

QGC is due to begin work on the 16km pipeline this week. It will take gas from existing wells on QGC and private land to the company's plant nearby.

QGC says almost half of the pipeline will be on its own land, and the 14 landholders directly affected have agreed to compensation packages for disturbance to their properties.

But Friends of the Earth spokesman Drew Hutton said several affected property owners believed QGC had not been fair or open about its plans.

He said they, and others opposed to the project's development, delivered a letter to QGC on Monday warning the company's workers not to enter the Tara estate.

"We told them it would be a public nuisance and we consider their activity to be illegal," Mr Hutton told AAP.

He said landowners were concerned QGC intended to build hundreds of gas wells in the area, and were worried about the impact on their health, the environment and land values.

Mines Minister Stirling Hinchliffe warned protesters not to break the law.

"Upholding the law is the way they're going to have their concerns respected and the way that the whole of the community is going to respect their concerns," he told reporters in Toowoomba on Monday.

"So my advice to anyone in the sort of situation where they feel they have to go to extreme measures to get their voice heard is that protesting is understandable, breaking the law is not."

Mr Hinchliffe said the government wanted to achieve a workable balance between the interests of residents and the emerging industry.

Controversy surrounds the safety of hydraulic fracturing, also known as fraccing, used to extract gas from the coal seams.

Environmentalists say it is unsafe and a scientist has also raised safety concerns about the chemicals used.

Dr Mariann Lloyd-Smith, an adviser to the federal government's National Industrial Chemicals Notification and Assessment Scheme (NICNAS), has said QGC's environmental applications contained out-of-date and deficient safety data.

Comment was being sought from QGC.

? 2011 AAP