In Australia, it is a contrived, vote winning Greens/Labor agenda and has nought to do with reality. CSG is a mature industry that has been around for 4 or more decades in the USA.
Obama is thinking things through with a balanced perspective in his recently announced energy led strategies to develop a resurgent USA.
Every square kilometre of farmland is subject to pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, fertilisers and a multitude of farm chemicals, all of which pose a real and present danger to drinking, yet it is tolerated. These chemicals can and do work their way into surface and subsurface water and it is caused by many of the very folk that protest about CSG.
Only a minute fraction of farmland might also be subject to CSG, and only a small portion of that minute fraction might also be subject to fracking.
By far and away the majority of Australia's drinking water is captured rainfall stored in dams and that has nought to do with CSG drainage water extracted from 100's of metres below the ground.
The mainstream justification commonly used for farm chemicals is just an uneasy truce between the benefits of the chemicals and the real proven harm they produce in surface and subsurface waters and elsewhere in the environment... its fact the world would be in a dire food production position w/o the use of such chemicals.
The exact same argument exists for offsetting benefits of CSG ... renewables like solar wind and hydro cannot fly planes, produce fertilisers, plastics, chemicals and medicines, nor lubricate engines, nor be easily transported around state, country and the world ... coal and gas can and gas, including CSG, is measurably cleaner than coal.
There appears to be legitimate perspective with CSG and the critical role gas plays in Australia's energy security and economy to balance against the remote concern there might be for potential fracking related groundwater issues ... food security and energy security are both critical ... in this perspective, Obama has it right for the USA.
By 2014 there will be no surplus powergen from Victoria to Queensland on the Australian east coast ... from 2015 gas is being exported from Gladstone ... from now, there are locked in massive powergen and gas price rises for the east coast that cannot be avoided ... there are already energy intensive manufacturing business shutting down and/or relocating offshore ... in these post mining boom times we needed to rely on manufacturing ... the average age of coal fired power stations is something like 20 yrs, 30 yrs and 40 yrs respectively in Qld, NSW and Vic and the ones in Vic include the dirtiest in the world and several more in the top 10 dirtiest ... clean burning gas and CSG powergen is the environmental pragmatists preferred power station fuel, even if just for peaking capacity around base load solar, wind and hydro powergen.
Imo, the lasting negative legacy of the Greens/Labor energy policies over the past 3-5 yrs will have rooted in the fallacy that Australia had the luxury of going it alone on carbon and environmental issues in a globally competitive market.
