Premier Cook on election trail in the Kimberley – community calls for fracking ban commitment
Premier Cook on election trail in the Kimberley – community calls for fracking ban commitment
West Australian Premier Roger Cook is on the election trail in Broome and has been greeted with a strong community call to extend the ban on fracking in the southwest of the state and the Dampier Peninsula to cover all the Kimberley.
While the WA Government under Premier Mark McGowan’s leadership promised veto rights for Traditional Owners and farmers over fracking in 2018, the promise has not been fulfilled and the whole process is creating significant division in communities across the region.
“There’s a simple answer to the whole question of the destructive industrialisation of the Kimberley through oil and gas fracking and that’s a ban on the industry like there is in the Southwest of the state,” said Environs Kimberley Executive Director Martin Pritchard.
The community protest at local Kimberley MP Divina D’Anna’s office called for the ban in light of the proposal by Texan fossil fuel company Black Mountain, to drill and frack 20 oil and gas wells in the Martuwarra Fitzroy River catchment.
The WA EPA is currently assessing the proposal and a decision will be required of the WA Government after the election.
The Kimberley community has vehemently opposed fracking for the past 12 years and concerns have been heightened recently with Black Mountain proposing a pipeline to an LNG refinery in the Pilbara.
“A recent report by climate scientists has shown the potential for 8,700 oil and gas wells across the region that would seriously undermine Australia's ability to meet its climate goals, surely the Premier Roger Cook doesn’t want to open the Kimberley to that,” Mr Pritchard said.
“What we have now is a completely different proposition to what the WA government based its lifting of the ban on fracking in the Kimberley in 2018. What we’re facing now is turning the Kimberley into Texas,” Mr Pritchard said.
“The community wants a commitment from the Premier and the Labor party that the already existing ban on fracking in the Southwest of the state and the Dampier Peninsula be extended to cover the whole Kimberley,” Mr Pritchard said.
Surveying of over 1,000 people in the seat of Fremantle revealed 92% of voters want a ban on fracking and 72% are willing to change their vote for it.
“If its too risky for the Southwest then we shouldn’t be discriminated against in the Kimberley just because it’s been a safe Labor seat,” Mr Pritchard said.
You can send a message asking Premier Cook to ban fracking in the Kimberley here.
Photo: Damian Kelly.
WA Government quietly approves fracking company’s 100 million litre water licence in Kimberley
The WA Government has quietly approved a groundwater extraction licence that would allow an overseas-based fracking company to take 100 million litres of groundwater each year.
While the state’s water department (DWER) approved Black Mountain Energy’s water licence on May 2, no public statement was issued, and the only way to find evidence of the licence’s approval is by searching the company’s Australian subsidiary, Bennett Resources, on the WA Government’s Water Register website.
The licence gives Black Mountain permission to access the groundwater for “the maintenance of unconventional gas wells, dust suppression, mining camp purposes, stock watering and rehabilitation purposes”.
However, the company’s “Valhalla” exploratory gas fracking project is still undergoing environmental assessment, and a public consultation process still needs to be conducted.
Dead duck in Buru Energy wastewater pond
If Valhalla is approved, Black Mountain would drill 20 exploration wells between 2 km and 4 km deep and hydraulically fracture them in up to 70 stages each. It would also require an additional two billion litres of groundwater.
Valhalla is also only an exploration project. Black Mountain’s website makes it clear the company wishes to expand to full scale production. If this occurs, it would require the drilling and fracking of many hundreds of wells. An export-scale project would also require a 1100km high-pressure gas pipeline to the Pilbara, processing facilities, pumping stations, flare stacks, and heavy-vehicle access roads.
Mount Hardman Creek where Black Mountain oil and gas wants to drill and frack
Environs Kimberley Director of Strategy Martin Pritchard said, “If Black Mountain goes into full production with hundreds of wells, the volume of precious groundwater required would be unimaginable.
“This incremental threat of enormous levels of precious groundwater extraction shows why fracking must not be allowed to take-off in the Kimberley.
“Fracking uses toxic chemicals that can pollute our clean water here in the Kimberley, why would we risk that?”
“Giving Black Mountain’s Valhalla Project the go ahead risks opening up the Kimberley to full-scale industrialisation by petroleum companies eager to get at the unconventional gas within the Canning Basin. This would ignite a carbon bomb, at a time when increasingly severe heat waves caused by the burning of fossil fuels and resulting climate change is putting the Kimberley at risk of becoming unliveable.”
Overflow at Buru Energy wastewater pond in the Kimberley
Read local media's reporting on the approval here.