Sunday, 10 September 2017

Working Man's Blues #12&35. Notes from the Surat Basin

Queensland has the two largest producing basins of coal bed methane (cbm) in Australia - the Bowen and the Surat Basins. It also has the largest artesian basin in the world - the Great Artesian Basin, the main source of freshwater for agriculture and human use in inland Queensland. The hydrological boundaries of GAB are different from but overlap with the boundaries of the constituent sedimentary basins. In recent years, I have been in these basins for some work stints - on the railroads, the pipelines, the highways and the waterways.
Horses and cattle in remote agricultural paddocks.

A dingo watches closely from the tall grass, as the gas flares burn.

Some gas pipes are big enough for cars to drive through.
Where the gas pipelines cross the railway lines,
the long roads are next in line.

On the river mouth, out to port.

For decades the Surat and Bowen basins have been happy hunting grounds for many of the world’s largest coal producers. The recent emergence of coal seam gas (CSG) has seen major international oil and gas companies dig in the same proving ground as the coal mines. CSG has been a boom for the Australian and Queensland economy over the past decade.

Pipes as far as the eye can see, ready to be buried, and then remain unseen.

But I seen the old railway carriage, in Calliope historical village.

The Surat Basin extends across several townships in the Darling Downs; from Toowoomba to the Western Downs (Condamine, Chinchilla, Dalby, Miles, Tara Wandoan), the Maranoa (Injune, Roma, Surat and Yuleba), and many other villages and communities in Banana Shire and Central Highlands.




Several environmental and economic concerns have been raised in relation to CSG, and governments and politicians at all levels, have promised to protect people against coal seam gas development. But whether the environment and longer-term sustainability will prevail over agricultural, political and/or economic interests, remains to be seen. 
All rise, with the sunrise.

Whilst the sun sets, as the earth tilts, with the camera's axis.

Calliope River. The sign warns of crocodiles.
But the geese at a barbeque park say there's no crocodiles-
 in Dogwood Creek in Miles.
















where's those turnstyles?

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