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  • My Maruti

    Most of the motoring reviewers can the three cylinder, 1000cc engine, but I bought the car for price and I’m impressed. It does struggle with four people on board, but if I wanted a people mover I would have bought something that weighed more than 800kg and is longer than the Alto’s tiny 2.5 metres.

     

    I regularly get under 5l/110km fuel efficiency, but it is very sensitive to my lead foot. If I drive at 100km an hour consistently, it runs at about 4.8, but sitting on 130km/h with occasional bursts of speed it starts to nudge 5.5. If you race, rather than potter around town, it really starts to suck on the juice. I occasionally crack 6 when I am zipping in and out of the traffic a lot.

    The car has also copped a lot of flack for its miniscule boot. I mostly drive around with the back seats down. That makes it very roomy. In the eighteen months I have owned my Maruti, I have moved house twice, carrying everything from two drawer filing cabinets to rolled up futons in the little hatch back with the back seats down.

    A couple of times I have had to move the front seat forward and lean the back forward as much as possible and once, I have had to leave the hatchback open when I was carrying some 2.7 metre timbers which we recovered from the Brisbane flood.

    The reviewers who dislike the Maruti mostly seem to forget they are talking about a car that is the cheapest on the market and the cheapest to run. They compare it unfavourably with cars that cost two to four thousand dollars more, and argue that it should really carry three people in the back seat, have a larger boot, or wider wheels.

    Why? I simply cannot imagine that anyone buying a car on price, as I did, is going to be the least interested in those sort of useless extras, when the obviously bump the price up. The Alto is a brilliant compromise on features, to keep the price down. I would have gone even more basic if it was within the law, I don’t care about electric windows, rear windscreen wipers or six airbags, though I’m perfectly happy to take advantage of them when they are provided.

    I certainly do not suffer any disappointment over having no lid on my glove box, a small boot that will only fit my supermarket shopping and an overnight bag, or a car that goes slowly up hills when it is carrying four people.

    That’s my Maruti.

    One review that is reasonably positive and has attracted lots of feedback is The Motor Report’s

  • Gas projects wait for no one

    Gas drilling companies will have to submit proposed work plans detailing environmental impacts and what chemicals would be used during extraction.

    However, what is the policy of the NSW National Party? How will they address this issue, if as expected they are elected to government in a coalition with the Liberals?

    It was disturbing to read in the Sydney Morning Herald earlier this month (04/12/10) that two of the companies with licences to explore for coal seam gas in NSW are chaired by former National Party leaders: Aston Resources by Mark Vaile and Eastern Star Gas by John Anderson.

     

    The Northern Rivers Greens are very concerned about the explosion in exploration of coal seam gas mining in our region eg Keerong, and its impact on farmers, prime agricultural land and our aquifers.

     

    The Greens are calling for a moratorium on all coal seam gas (CSG) mining activities in NSW.

    Overseas experience as seen in the movie “Gasland”, has shown that CSG presents significant environmental risks to water supplies and can have a devastating impact on productive farming lands as gas wells and surface infrastructure such as roads and pipelines limit their use for agricultural purposes.

    Queensland campaigners fear that up to 40,000 gas wells could be drilled by 2030 with 4000 exploration wells already in place across that state.

    NSW should not wait until it is too late to put appropriate regulation of the coal seam gas industry into place. The vast majority of NSW residents live on top of coal reserves.

    Susan Stock and Wayne Wadsworth

    Co Convenors

    Northern Rivers Greens

    Lismore

     

  • Federal government caves in on Gas restrictions

    Courier Mail – Dec 03

    Evidence of the threat came as the Government’s own National Water Commission raised fears of long-term impacts from the multiple projects planned for the Surat Basin.

    A letter dated October 16 from Queensland Gas chief executive Catherine Tanna to Federal Environment Minister Tony Burke said the conditions placed on the company’s plans were too severe.

    “We have indicated to your officers that we have significant concerns with the proposed conditions relating to coal seam gas water management, offsets and the timing of various approvals,” Ms Tanna said.

    “In their proposed form, these matters present sufficient difficulty to prevent my recommending the project to the BG Group board for a final investment decision.”

    Two weeks after the letter, the BG board approved the project, on which the Federal Government had placed 300 environmental conditions.

    The company confirmed the Government changed its mind on some water issues after officials were shown how they had misinterpreted the plan.

    Friends of the Earth activist Drew Hutton doubted all the conditions would be enforced.

    “Queensland has a long history of non-enforcement of environmental regulation with regard to the mining industry which, basically, regulates itself,” he said. “This industry is too big and too powerful to be effectively regulated.”

    Documents tabled in Federal Parliament last week show that at least one of the three projects approved had raised its own concerns about shallow groundwater contamination from salt ponds and chemical and fuel storage sites associated with processing plants.

    There have also been warnings that underground acquifers would be so depleted by the projects that it could take centuries to replenish them.

    The National Water Commission estimates the CSG industry would extract about 7500 gigalitres of water during the next 25 years – six times the capacity of Wivenhoe Dam.

    “If not adequately managed and regulated, it risks having significant, long-term and adverse impacts on adjacent surface and groundwater systems,” the NWC said.

    On the BG approval, Mr Bourke said all proponents were given a chance to comment on the proposed decision before the final ruling is made.

    “It is common practice for changes to be made to proposed conditions, in response to such comments,” he said.

  • What the Frack?

     

    What are we doing anyway?

    The best place to start is with the gas that we are trying to extract. Whether it is the layers of shale (fossilised mud) in the US or coal (fossilised plant matter – peat, swamp plants) there are small pockets of methane gas distributed through the fossil bed.

    The protein and other nitrogen based compounds in any ecosystem eventually break down into relatively simple forms like ammonia, urea or methane. Natural gas is methane and can be basically described as fossilised farts.

    In a coal seam (or shale bed) there are microscopic layers of methane coating the individual coal particles. Some coal beds are gassier than others. The tragic Pike Hill coal mine in New Zealand was notoriously gassy. As the coal was mined it gave off lots of methane.

    It is that methane that we are after.

    Frack my coal seam

    The process we are employing to extract the methane from these underground coal seams is to drill a well into the coal seam, fracture the coal seam to expose the gas, and extract the gas by using water to wash the gas off the surface of the coal.

    The term fracking is an abbreviation of fracturing. The process being used in most of the extraction being undertaken now is called hydraulic fracturing. In this process the gas company injects a mixture of high pressure water and sand into the coal seam, forcing the sand into minute cracks that appear under pressure so that the cracks will remain open as the high pressure water rushes out.

    After the initial well is dug, the gas capturing equipment is installed at the top of the well and then the well is fracked. The water that emerges is the process water or the production water, the gas is extracted and the water disposed of.

    A well may be fracked many times in its life before the volume of methane being removed becomes too small to make it worthwhile.

    So the simple picture is water and sand in, water and methane out.

    The methane is then extracted from the water at the surface.

    This sounds like quite a benign process but there are a number of additional extras that need to be considered.

    Unpack that fracking fluid

    As well as the methane, the coal is also coated with a range of other chemicals, including a high volume of salt.

    Remembering that coal is a fossilised swamp and consists of all the carbon that was in the plants growing in the swamp, the stuff that is clinging to the coal is all the non carbonaceous material from the swamp. Most swamps are smelly, slimy places oozing with a rich mixture of living things. Oily slicks of aromatic hydrocarbons, like phenols are common place and sulphurous gases are not uncommon.

    This cocktail of extras comes out with the methane in the water.

    That water is also incredibly salty. It is significantly more salty than the saltiest inland bores and is a great potential danger to the inland water ways.

    In addition to the “natural” compounds that are part of the coal seam, there are the fluids used to assist with the fracturing process. Even where pure water is being used to do the fracturing, there are lubricants, anticorrosion chemicals and emulsifiers just to get the process working properly.

    In most cases, though, there is a cocktail of chemical extras involved.

    If you are trying to wash the methane of the surface of the coal, why wouldn’t you add a little detergent or other surfactants to assist in the process, to dissolve some of the sticky hydrocarbons that are gumming up the coal seam, it might be useful to add some acids or alkalis to assist in the process.

    The truth is that every coal seam is different, and there are a range of fracking fluids designed to maximise the methane production from each well. The fracking fluids may be selected or mixed on the spot based on the results being obtained in the field.

    The other F word

    We might be fracking the coal seam, but the real concern is what we are doing to the rest of the environment.

    The damage to the landscape done by at least 22,000 wells in an arc from south west Queensland to the Capricorn Coast is one thing, the extraction of one hundred and fifty tonnes of salt a day is another#. The potential damage to the Great Artesian Basin is a third aspect that deserves special attention.

    (# Coal Seam Gas Discussion Paper)

    The Great Artesian Basin covers a huge part of Australia, larger than the area covered by the Murray Darling Basin. It is an enormous resource of fossilised water, on which a large amount of Australian agriculture depends for its existence. Without the Great Artesian Basin there would be no outback beef industry and many of the irrigation areas in Australia’s inland would not exist.

    There are two primary threats to the Great Artesian Basin.

    One is that we could use all the water up.

    This water has been underground for hundreds of millions and it is inconceivable that we might consider it a renewable resource. We are mining that water, on which future generations depend to extract a non renewable energy source at very high cost*.

    We are mining the water at incredible volumes. We are talking about tens to hundreds of gigalitres per year, that is hundreds of Megalitres per day over the lifetime of the project.

    That is a vast amount of water. That is a similar quantity of water flowing down the Murray River in a good year. The natural discharge from the Great Artesian Basin, is estimated to be around 400Megalitres per day#, which is reasonable to assume is of a similar order of magnitude to the inflows. That means, that the Coal Seam Gas project could potentially use all the water that flows naturally from the Great Artesian Basin, meaning that any extractions by farmers, towns or industry anywhere else in the basin is depleting this ancient water supply.

    So what we are doing is using a water supply that takes millions of years to create, that could supply us with water to grow food for centuries at current usage rates to satisfy twenty years demand for energy.

    It is clearly insane.

    # See Hydrogeological Framework Report on Great Artesian Basin – Qld Dept Natural Resources and Mines 2005

    * See my article The Nett Energy Profit of Coal Seam Gas.

    The other threat is that we could poison it

    The interconnections between the various layers of groundwater and the coal seam are complex and varied. They differ widely from location to location.

    The high profile problem that has been detected in this form of natural gas production is the mixing of methane with water that has led to the spectacular images of people setting fire to their tap water. Of more concern, however, is the appearance of carcinogenic hydrocarbons in people’s drinking water. Whether this is from substances washed off the coal during production, or from the fracking fluid itself is largely irrelevant, it is dangerous to allow these chemicals into drinking water.

    It is these additional chemicals that have led to widespread illness in humans and stock across the US shale fields.

    To poison the water coming to the surface during the mining operations is one thing, the greater danger is that this process is opening connections between the coal seam and the artesian water that have not previously existed. The problems that are emerging now may be the worst of the problems that this process will exist, or they may just be the beginning of much worse problems that will emerge in the future. We simply do not know.

    Neither do we know what the long term result of injecting these chemicals into the coal seam will be. They might just sit there and remain a strange addition to the fossil record they might become a catalyst for a reaction we cannot predict. The truth is that we simply do not know.

    Where the frack from here?

    In an energy starved world, Australia has vast reserves of fossil and renewable energy resources. It is in our interests as a nation, and as individual members of this nation, to exploit those resources in a manner that allows us to build a robust vibrant future.

     

    We simply need to make sure that we are not doing anything that could endanger this.

    There is no urgency to get this energy out of the ground. The world’s demand for energy is not going to go away, the longer we wait, the higher the price of energy will be.

     

    We simply need to proceed in an orderly fashion, well informed by the best science possible. If we rush we may make mistakes and these resources are too precious to destroy.

     

    There is only one Great Artesian Basin, if we break it, the sound of “whoops” will resound so far into the future that our mistake will become part of the mythology of cultures we cannot even imagine yet.

     

    Let’s no “go there”.

     

     

     

  • Liberal tactics support Greens strategy

    It is inevitable is that thinking voters will desert the old left right dichotomy of the industrial era and start to vote on the basis of long term marshalling of resources in the interests of future generations and the country, generally.

    From a Labor dominated Canberra, the view is somewhat different. There, an increasingly shrill and desparate Liberal opposition scores points by railing against a Labor Green Coalition. As the Labor Left attempts to reclaim the progressive tag, the Liberals can successfully use that as a wedge to paint the Greens as driving the government agenda.

    The opposite will happen in the Liberal led states. WA, Vic and soon NSW will get on with destroying the long term future of those states, while shoring up their immediate cash flow and isolate Labor as the incompetent past. The Greens will continue to present themselves as the rational voice of an alternative future and Labor will have no where to go.

    Whether the Liberal parties’ desperation reaches such a fever pitch that it escapes human hearing and disappears in a pouffe of smoke, or the Labor party becomes so earnest it cannot ever finish a sentence for the endless sops it makes to the mythical left, the culturally correct as well as the aspirational worker is irrelevant.

    What happens now is that the old, industrial parties blend, somehow, while the Greens work out how to manage a coalition of deep Green environmentalists, socialist watermelons, swinging voters who care and the increasingly important blue green pragmatists. That coalition will gradually come to represent the minority.

    As well as managing the increasingly complex agenda of a broad politically party, The Greens have to work out how to manage the grass roots. A century ago the ALP was working with the unions and the catholic church to build a network of workers clubs, adult education institutes, railway institutes and so on in preparation for attaining government.

    So far, The Greens have snubbed their nose at the environmental activist groups that spawned them. It is now time to grow up and harness the energy of that Green Army rather than neurotically attempting to distance itself from it.

    The genius of the ALP a century ago was to establish a national conference that allowed the active and the political wings of the party to work together separately. So far, the Greens have failed to even recognise this problem let alone solve it. Thoughtful men on the periphery, like Ian Lowe and Clive Hamilton have attempted, unsuccessfully so far, to grapple with it, but without much success.

    With hundreds of councillors, decades of state parliamentarians and seven Federal parliamentarians, this Green coalition has enough clout now to actually nail this thing. The challenge is to maintain the vision through the long tedious process of winning the numbers. But that is the nature of politics.

    Ghandi and Mandela have acquired religious status because it is belief that informs that wait. It is the presence of greater knowledge that allows a little man in a loin cloth to cause armies to cower and a shackled man in pyjamas to cause his captors to snap to attention as he shuffles up the stone steps from his dungeon.

    The Liberals denial of preferences to the Greens in the Victorian elections this weekend just gone is more grist to that mythical mill. The Greens simply have to recognise it.

  • Coal Seam dangers clarified

    Environmental adviser to energy company Origin, Bartrim was highlighting the problem that the large amount of detail involved in regulating and approving the coal seam gas projects across Queensland and Northern NSW may cause the regulators to fail at their task and the industry itself to lose sight of its primary objective, extracting the gas with minimum damage to the environment.

     

    “This obsession with conformance leads people to focus on ticking the boxes and completing the paperwork and there is a danger we can lose sight of the real problem,” he said.

    He also noted that Coal Seam Gas companies will become major land holders in Queensland and the largest individual users of water. “The volumes of water are simply staggering,” he said. It is unkown wether the water extracted from the basic to hydraulically fracture the coal seam can, or should be, returned to the basin. If it is not, there is the danger that the basin will be permanently depleted.

    Bartrim’s presentation about the nature of coal seam gas extraction is extremely helpful to anyone trying to grapple with the rechnical aspects of the problem. The Generator will post a link to that presentation online if Bartrim is in a position to share it with the general public.