Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaleditions.com/i/103334
industryfocus Gladstone LNG plants, which will cost a total of $61.5 billion. Energy companies and farmers rely on the same resource: water. While it is essential for agriculture, it is also used to release gas from coal seams underground. The issue has brought environmental groups together with agriculture in a push against expansion by the gas giants. "A number of issues have been raised in the context of coal seam gas and unconventional gas, and one of them is hydraulic fracturing," says BREE's Grafton. "People have concerns about that in the context of contamination of aquifers." In fact, very little of the extraction process involves hydraulic fracturing, or 'fracking', Grafton says. Instead, water is extracted from the coal seam down below and the gas is extracted from it after it reaches the surface. The water brought to the surface tends to be saline, which cannot be released into waterways. "That's a risk which has to be managed," Grafton adds. Environmental concerns cut both ways in the LNG game. Water aquifers are under strain, with farmers happily tapping them to irrigate crops, but gas is a cleaner energy source than coal, which is why Asian buyers are turning to it for powering electricity plants. Be it for the good of the country or the good of the world, investment in LNG ignites debate. 72 projects in profile Gorgon The Gorgon plant will be able to produce 15 million tonnes of LNG a year, with three shipments a week leaving its port on Barrow Island, 50 kilometres off the Western Australian coast, near Karratha. A system of wells on the seabed, in waters 200 to 1,300 metres deep, will feed gas from the Gorgon gas field, west of Barrow Island. Buyers in Japan, China and South Korea have signed contracts of 20 and 25 years with Gorgon joint venture partners Chevron, Shell and ExxonMobil. Wheatstone The Wheatstone project in Ashburton North, about 12 kilometres west of Onslow in WA's Pilbara region, will produce 8.9 million tonnes of LNG a year for export, with a plant also producing gas to feed into the Dampier-to-Bunbury pipeline for domestic use in Perth. The gas will be piped from a processing platform 225 kilometres offshore, tapping the Wheatstone and Iago gas fields, with lesser amounts feeding in from the Apache, Julimar and Brunello fields. The platform will stand in 73 metres of water and be built to withstand 12-storey waves. Plans are for the trunk line to go through a tunnel for its final two kilometres to leave the coast undisturbed.