well, trigger me, page-8

Source - http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=8362041

Heading - Gas body says Cougar lawsuit was avoidable

The Queensland government could have avoided the legal action it is facing after shutting down an underground coal gasification (UCG) project, an industry body says.

Three Queensland bureaucrats are being sued for shutting down Cougar Energy's $550 million UCG project at Kingaroy in the state's south-east after a cancer-causing chemical was found in a monitoring bore on the site.

The Australian Syngas Association (ASA), which represents UCG companies as well as those which use gas-to-liquid (GTL) and coal-to-liquid (CTL) technology, says these industries are overregulated compared with coal seam gas (CSG) mining, and the decision to shut down Cougar's project could have been premature.

"The regulations are applied to us somewhat more rigorously than they are to other operations," ASA executive director Paul Clauson told AAP on Tuesday.

"We feel that had this not been the case this matter would not have gone to court and there would have been a resolution to it and perhaps it may have been that the operation still would have been going ahead.

"Had there been a higher level of communication, a more approachable level of communication, between the parties, between the relevant agencies of government and the proponent of the project, it may have not led to the court situation."

Mr Clauson said the government seemed to have made a decision to back the CSG industry despite both technologies having environmental issues.

The decision to shut down Cougar's project would be a "speed bump" to the growing UCG, GTL and CTL industries in Queensland, he said.

"Where we have these knee-jerk reactions by government it tends to cause sovereign risk issues in the mind of investors and the mind of the companies that are making that investment," Mr Clauson said.