Putty Community meeting with Dart Energy
Date: 10-Apr-11
Author: Peter Firminger
My reading of the meeting with Dart Energy at Putty Hall was that this outfit is even less professional than the incompetent staff of Sydney Gas were at meetings in Wollombi and Broke a few years ago. Nothing has changed in this industry.
About 40 people were in attendance. I arrived late, so I missed much of their presentation (if you can call it that). They had no projector. The presentation was a 12 page handout, the standard APPEA crapsheet and a whiteboard - with four representatives of Dart in the room (two at the front).
Dart Energy use the term "Coal Bed Methane" rather than "Coal Seam Gas". Probably on advise from APPEA I would suspect. Same reason gas companies now talk of "Stimulation" instead of "Fraccing". Change the name and it changes the perception... nope!
There was no useful map of the PEL (PEL 460 4.7mb PDF) as it related to the local area. Why would you come to a meeting without this obvious information? This is what they got instead...
It was in the Q&A session that I (and most others in the room - if not all) found Dart to be "disingenuous" (a word used about them by locals).
As normal, they had "no plans" to go to production. This is only exploration, just a core hole to see what's there. When pushed on the next stage they had very little to say. A notable question being how they envisage getting any gas out of the tight valley (between two national parks) they said that they had no plans and no idea how they would do that as this was only exploration, but it may be that a small power station would be installed to generate power for both the valley and to feed into the grid.
When pushed on produced water from future possible production, the young bespectacled guy (who said he has worked in Surat Basin, and Dalby) said that there would only be 8 to 10 barrels of water per day. I asked him to clarify a barrel and he said a 44 gal drum (100 litres). So he's saying that only 800 to 1000 litres of water per well would be produced per day.
When asked about enforcing access after the exploration stage (into production) and whether they would honour the wishes of the landowner or force it into arbitration to gain access, none of them knew what the law was and "didn't think" that it would be enforced. They don't want to take communities to court.
When asked about BTEX chemicals, they simply said there are no BTEX Chemicals used in exploration. When pushed to comment on test wells (or appraisal wells as they called them) they said they don't frac so there's no BTEX, and they don't use it in drilling fluids, they use horizontal drilling. When I pointed out the fact that BTEX is present in the produced water from the coal the "geo" said "there's a lot of stuff in coal".
The guy from Queensland wanted to keep using Camden as an example and didn't seem to be aware (or didn't want to use them) of closer and more appropriate comparison sites such as Broke, Bulga and Yarramalong.
When pushed on production (again) I asked where they would put the processing plants, compressor stations, pumping stations etc. and of course the answer was this is only exploration. I said that these take up acres of land and are very noisy and the answer was, they don't have to be that big and can be soundproofed.
A local fire brigade representative mentioned an existing easement through Yengo National Park for a pipeline, Dart had no knowledge of this.
A pretty disgusting attempt at community c
Related Documents
- Written Questions and Answers (118kb pdf file)
From the Community Meeting with Dart Energy at Putty NSW
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