A WHOLE new irrigation industry is expected to develop in an area between Wandoan and Taroom in the next 12 months as coal seam gas (CSG) water becomes available for agriculture.
In what is an Australian first, around 35,000 megalitres of salty waste water a year will be treated and then piped 120 kilometres overland, before being pumped into the Dawson River. The water is the by-product of the CSG extraction process in the nearby Surat Basin. THE number of fly-in fly-out (FIFO) and drive-in drive-out (DIDO) workers in Bowen Basin could reach more than 34,000 by 2019, according to new figures released by the Queensland Treasury.
Currently there are 25,040 non-resident workers in the Bowen Basin, but they are are not included in official population estimates carried out by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, making it difficult for councils and governments to plan infrastructure and services for areas like the Bowen and Galilee Basins. To bridge the information gap, the Queensland Treasury now provides projected numbers of non-resident workers in those local government areas. THERE’S no port access and no railway, but Glencore Xstrata is remaining coy about whether Australia’s largest thermal coal project - the Wandoan mine - will go ahead.
The future of the coal project has been under a cloud for months. It started when the Surat Basin rail project was put on hold late last year, in response to weakening market conditions. This week, Glencore Xstrata announced it would dump its billion dollar export terminal at Balaclava Island, north of Gladstone.
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