No Australian farmer is ever going to get as rich as Jed Clampett, a character in the sitcom "The Beverley Hillbillies ". Old Jed's shot at a rabbit struck pay dirt. It caused a "gusher "and he found he had discovered oil on his property - resulting in a financial bonanza.
In America, a land deed to property includes the rights to any oil or minerals beneath the soil. Here in Australia, the founding fathers took a very different view. You simply own the land up top - and anything down below belongs to the government.
It seems that wise heads in the New South Wales government are temporizing to sort out the unholy mess that coal seam gas has become. As a state we are paying ever increasing prices for natural gas because it is all imported from other states, and yet there seems to be almost unlimited amounts in the ground beneath our feet.
That's where the skin and hair starts to fly. This gas needs to be mined very carefully to avoid contaminating natural aquifers, causing land subsidence and interfering with farm production by way of the roads and pipelines needed to service the wells and bring the gas to market. A large section of the population is is firmly opposed to the "fracking "process needed to release the gas trapped in porous rock and enable it to be captured.
Up until now the land owner has been offered a paltry "inconvenience " payment for the presence of a gas well on his or her property. The big winners would be the gas companies and we are assured that the public would benefit because this local gas would lower our domestic gas bills. There are calls for a proportion of CSG to be "quarantined " from inclusion in the gas we are exporting overseas at market rates, but so far no legislation to that effect has been forthcoming.
The state government is now proposing what some cynics will describe as "sharing the loot "! Not only will gas drilling licenses be subjected to rigorous protocols to ban harm to productive farming land but the industry will be expected to train all it's operatives to a high educational industrial standard. The aim is to achieve a level of professionalism that lowers the chance of mistakes and ensures that gas mining is an industry at the forefront of world expertise.
The other significant change of attitude is to offer compensation - not only to the landowners involved - but to the communities which will play host to a new gas well industry. Instead of just the gas exploration companies and the government sharing the rewards, a gas well could return an annual payment to the landowner of $10-15,000, making gas extraction an integral part of farm income, and a dividend would be built into the price structure to compensate the entire locality for inconvenience caused.
Next year there will be a state election and at this stage the new deal on gas mining is just a proposal - to be implemented well after that poll has taken place. No doubt it will become a item of controversy once electioneering gets under way, but the offer of a share of the rewards will certainly cause some people to have a change of thinking. Others may remain bitterly opposed to gas mining, in any shape or form.
Like all controversial issues, the outcome will probably be some sort of "middle road ". It is probably unrealistic to expect the gas to be left in the ground indefinitely, but a sensible compromise would permit gas wells where they would not compromise the most rewarding farming land, and the degree of "fracking " needs to be subjected to industry standards. The government is talking about bringing the industry under strict control - and banishing the "Hillbilly "element that has unnerved the observers of initial gas prospecting.
Even Jed Clampett would probably agree that is a wise way to control a new industry !
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