Gas company defends disposal plans

Coal seam gas company QGC has defended its plans for the disposal of mineralised water and salt brought to the surface during mining operations.

The company was responding to claims from Friends of the Earth that QGC is seeking to have the Queensland government water down environmental approvals for the disposal of coal seam gas (CSG) water and to build more evaporation ponds to increase its brine storage.

The company admits that it is still seeking a viable commercial plan to dispose of brine and salt extracted in CSG mining.

A QGC spokesman said the company intends to invest A$1 billon in treating water.

"We are currently improving our water management by building water treatment plants to treat all of our water so that it can be used by the community for things such as irrigation, town water supply and industry," the spokesman said in a statement.

"This work requires some changes to our environmental authorities, including for temporary discharge of treated water to surface waters while a pipeline is built.

"This discharge will actually prevent the need for more large dams.

"Future operations for the LNG project will include water aggregation and brine ponds to enable water treatment to occur.

"We are presently studying commercial applications for the use of brine and salt."

Friends of the Earth organiser Drew Hutton said QGC wants to amend its environmental authority (EA) to allow it to dispose of more CSG water into the Murray Darling Basin at Wieambilla Creek, near Chinchilla, despite doubts by experts that the gas companies can meet the standards at an acceptable cost.

Mr Hutton said these developments showed the inadequacy of the state government's regulatory approach.

"The state government's much-vaunted 'adaptive management' approach to regulating the coal seam gas industry means little more than the government watering down sections of the environmental authorities when the companies don't want to meet the standards," Mr Hutton told AAP.

"As more and more water gets extracted from the coal seam, QGC is having trouble dealing effectively with it, so they are wanting the government to amend their environmental authority to enable easier solutions."

Mr Hutton said an expert in waste water management, Dr Konstantinos Athanasiadis, told the recent Future Gas conference in Brisbane that he did not believe existing technology would enable the CSG water to reach the regulatory standard for discharge into waterways at an acceptable cost.

"If treated to an inferior level then discharges of CSG water to inland waterways would not only disrupt water-flow regimes in those streams but also would potentially contaminate them," Mr Hutton said.

He said Dr Athanasiadis also made it clear there was also no feasible solution to the problem of disposing of the one million tonnes of salt brought to the surface, other than landfill.