Resource expansion prompts widening of water level information gathering

It’s a grassroots program that has been bringing landholders, NRM groups and resource companies together to monitor groundwater levels in areas of resource or potential resource development.

The initiative has been promoted prominently through Southern Gulf NRM and Desert Channels Queensland in recent months but has also been taken up by NQ Dry Tropics and Fitzroy Basin Alliance since expanding out of traditional CSG areas in July 2017.

The Queensland Murray Darling Committee is the project manager for Groundwater Net, in conjunction with  the Department of Natural Resources, Minerals and Energy, thanks to the committee’s extensive experience on the topic.

According to QMDC regional Landcare facilitator, Matt Brown, it originated in their region because of the concerns surrounding the impact of coal seam gas extraction on water levels in the region.

“There are three parts to it – landholders, government monitoring bores and CSG monitoring activities – each collects bore level data and uploads it to a common database that’s freely available,” he said.

According to a DNRME spokeswoman, over 500 landholders in 19 monitoring districts have participated in workshops to date, and committed to groundwater monitoring.

“Since it started in 2014, landholders have taken nearly 1100 individual groundwater level measurements, with results stored in DNRME’s groundwater database and made publicly available via the Queensland Globe,” she said.

Matt described it as a “point of truth” exercise that was providing a permanent record that all could access.

“It’s worked well to date,” he said. “Because it’s worked well here, and because CSG isn’t the only thing that could impact on groundwater levels, it was decided this was a model that would work well around the state.”

In Queensland’s north west, the commencement of the federal government’s geological and bioregional assessment program for the Mount Isa ‘superbasin’ has prompted Southern Gulf NRM to participate.

The assessment is examining the potential impacts and appropriate management options for shale and tight gas development.

Spokeswoman, Anne Alison, said they were aware that groundwater was one of the issues they needed to consider.

“There is no better time than now for producers in the region from Mount Isa to Burketown and across to the Northern Territory border to start monitoring their groundwater through our program,” she said.

Regular monitoring was providing participants with baseline data for assessing groundwater impacts and identifying bore performance issues.

Matt said one of the big findings so far, thanks to feedback from pump sales, was that many bores across Queensland were already equipped to monitor water levels but landholders didn’t realise the capabilities of the equipment they’d installed.