south africa puts csg on hold, permits ucg, page-5

Psi, you sound as though you think it is a simple enough matter to do fraccing safely.

It is. Particularly CSG fracs which are much smaller and propagating through a much softer rock with a much higher contrast in rock strength with the surrounding strata. If they are done properly they are extremely safe.

What is your view of the respective cases presented in the documentary Gasland and the ABC Four Corners The Gas Rush?

Gasland's cases have been attributed not to fraccing but cementing failures. Did you ever wonder how contaminants supposedly get from two miles underground to an aquifer within 100m of the surface?

Hint: it's not by fraccing. It's literally impossible for a frac to propagate that far. What's actually happening (as is now realised) is the cementing failures at the base of casing are causing fluids, including gas, frac fluid, mud and formation water, to escape up the side of the casing and into the surface aquifer. It's not the fracs which are the conduit but the wellbore itself.

The Four Corners issues with gas leaks are similar, because some of these gas leaks are coming from wells that weren't ever fracced! I know of one issue in the hundred-plus wells that have been fracced in Queensland, where QGC fracced into the Springbok Sst aquifer. No lasting damage was done because a) the frac fluid is non-toxic and mostly biodegradable and b) the amount of frac fluid leaked into the aquifer was negligible compared to the amount of water in it.

In fact the QGC frac issue is probably on par, environmentally, with the Cougar issue. ie, minimal.

Taken together they would appear to amount to a compelling enough case for a moratorium on CSG while no such case against UCG seems to exist.

UCG has had FAR worse environmental issues in the past and when done poorly can be extremely damaging. Look into the UCG failures in the US in the 70s and 80s which took decades to clean up. The point is, when it's done properly, like any industrial process, it can be safe.

CSG has been operating in the US continuously for 50 years without the armageddon the environmentalists are predicting is going to happen here.

I know UCG has taken a bashing from all directions, including the CSG industry, but UCG supporters aren't helping themselves by trying to bash CSG right back. It's using exactly the same logical fallacy - find the one, tiny problem with the technology, inflate it out of all proportion, and then try and tar the entire industry with the inflated brush.

Haven't you learned from what happened to Cougar that this is not only wrong and patently ridiculous but very damaging? If you only listened to the negatives you'd be convinced both UCG and CSG are going to destroy Australia if they proceed. Unfortunately due to the media plenty of people do think that.

(Nothing like it has ever happened at Chinchilla.)

Nothing like it has ever come to public knowledge at Chinchilla. Linc had similar casing issues while UCG was still flying under the radar with both DERM and the public. Linc did not ever to my knowledge find BTEX in their monitor bores though. Carbon have had similar problems too, according to their ASX reports.

The political ramifications of the casing failure dwarfed the technical reasons and DERM/KCCG notwithstanding, CXY can proudly proclaim that NO environmental damage was caused.

100% agree. Unfortunately the wider UCG industry can't claim that. It was, unfortunately, those earlier problems that some Kingaroy locals discovered online (a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, as they say) and led them to start the KCCG and eventually to the situation CXY is in today.

UCG and CSG are both probably safer than conventional oil and gas - if done incorrectly, (as BP showed in the Gulf of Mexico) O&G can be very dangerous and environmentally devastating.

But nobody claims the entire global O&G industry should be shut down, even though these blowouts happen on average once every couple of years or so.