28 May 2024. Michael Guerin, AgForce CEO.
Last week The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea ruled Carbon Dioxide is an ocean pollutant – yet AgForce is still just weeks from going to the Federal Court to protect Australia’s Great Artesian Basin (GAB) from injection of CO2.
The Glencore/CTSCo proposal to pump waste into our Great Artesian Basin was waived through the Federal approvals process on 9 February 2022 when it was determined that the proposal was not captured by the Matters of National Environmental Significance (MNES) provisions of the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act.
But one of our greatest concerns is - this is clearly a trial for upscaling to a larger project. CTSCo claims in its proposal that the targeted GAB aquifer has a storage capacity of up to 730 billion litres of CO2.
Most of this storage is currently filled with good quality water.
The water quality of the aquifer would severely deteriorate through acidification of the groundwater if this proposal goes ahead in any form. It would lead to the dissolution of aquifer rock and the release of toxic concentrations of heavy metals such as arsenic and lead many times greater than stock and human drinking limits allow.
CTSCo acknowledge this in their Environmental Impact Statement but then argue it does not matter? This is farcical.
We are not aware of CO2 injection into water resource aquifers anywhere else in the world.
Only high salinity formations are conventionally targeted for this scale of carbon capture project.
CTSCo’s project plan is unorthodox and highly controversial.
This ongoing dilemma can only be properly solved at a federal level – with AgForce challenging those who seek to assert a state solution.
The GAB is one of the largest underground freshwater resources in the world and should be protected as such.
We continue to ask Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek, please call this project back in for consideration under the MNES provisions of the EPBC Act.
Don’t let Glencore or any other proponent start to irreversibly destroy the only reliable water resource for much of Australia’s arid inland areas.