Cr. James Ryan
Introduction
Sean Gough:
Councillor James Ryan is known to many of us. As well as being on Cessnock City Council, James is also treasurer of the Nature Conservation Council.
This week James moved a motion at Council, in terms of the threat the Wollombi Valley is facing, urging Council write to the NSW Premier requesting that his Government take urgent action to develop vigorous environmental impact assessment requirements for coal bed methane exploration with reference to impacts on heritage and tourism values.
The motion was supported by Alison Davey but roundly rejected without comment by all the Labour councillors, including the Mayor John Clarence.
Transcript
I guess what we're here for is we know that this exploration license has been granted and we know the way that the Petroleum Onshore Act works there's a minimum of environmental assessment that has to occur and that's certainly not done in the public exhibition sense, before this exploration license is granted.
My personal opinion, and many other's, is that there's a great problem with that.
Because, while on one hand it's argued that these are just exploration wells and there is a minimal amount of impact if you have to construct a road to the site to get heavy vehicles to drill through the aquifer and down into the coal seam there are any number of consequences that may occur as a result of that.
I guess what we all know is that if the company judges that there is enough gas to warrant, it will become subject to a Part 3A application for a full-blown coal seam gas production facility.
I don't know a lot about what happens in Camden but just this week, on Wednesday a Part 3A application was lodged with the department of planning for the Glouster Valley, around Stroud and Stratford.
I just have skimmed the preliminary assessment for that and they are putting forward a proposal for 60 to 90 wells in that valley and the gas lines from those wells will come to a central facility something that they call a central facility site where they will gather the gas and increase the pressure of it and it will then be piped to Hexam.
so there's a 100 kilometre long pipeline associated with this proposal which will have a 100 metre-wide corridor and within that corridor they will clear the vegetation and dig a trench and bury this high pressure gas pipeline.
There's a right of way easement created obviously along the whole length of that 100 kilometres for continual maintenance and site inspection etc.
So, I guess that that is the sort of type of proposal that could be put forward for the Wollombi Valley or Wollombi Valley and surrounds.
So it's a big issue, things can only get much much bigger from here.
When you look at the local environment here and say well why should we have a greater environmental assessment of the possible consequences.
I'm not an expert in any means on flora and fauna in the Wollombi Valley but I just had a look at a couple of publicly available documents and one of those is the Water Sharing Agreement that's put out by the Hunter-Central Rivers Catchment Management Authority and that looks at the Wollombi Brook and identifies that you got six endangered frog species here, several endangered birds, some macro-invertebrates and then you've got your larger fauna species as well like Powerful and Sooty Owls.
But one of the really interesting things about Wollombi is it has it's own forest type and it's called the Wollombi Redgum Forest Oak Community. I think I've got that right - [
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