I appreciate the farmers’ concern over the tailing dam and water allocation issues. However, I do have doubts about Dr Ian Wright’s assessment against piping treated wastewater from Lithgow's Centennial plant to Regis McPhillamys' gold mine.
"It's a 80 to 90-kilometre pipeline so it transits a lot of country and there are big elevations involved, which means that there'll be some high-pressure plumbing. I've worked in the water industry; all pipes and pumps at some point fail," he said.
"And when you've got such hazardous levels of metals, even a one to 100 dilution, the sort of nickel-zinc levels in here could be really dangerous to aquatic life and could build up in the soil."
Centennial Coal currently discharges up to 350,000 litres of treated wastewater each day into the Sydney water catchment under an Environment Protection Authority licence. If what Dr Wright said was true, that the treated wastewater contained such hazardous levels of metals and a fractional leakage from the proposed pipeline could pose too great an environmental risk, Centennial Coal’s current 350 KL daily discharge would have caused infinitely greater environmental damage not acceptable by the EPA.
We can reasonably expect that the EPA would only allow "stock quality" water to be discharged into water catchments. If the water is safe enough to be discharged into a catchment area that is far more populated than the state's west, it is reasonable to expect that its transportation would pose very minimal risk to surrounding farmland.
The state’s Minister for Planning and Public Spaces Mr Stokes said:
"Water is one of the major concerns that's been raised by the community — and it's also a concern for the regulator to make sure those impacts on water into the longer term are properly addressed,"
Regis’ proposed pipeline from the coal mine directly addresses the water allocation issue. I remain positive about McPhillamys' approval.
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