The Public Environmental Review of Black Mountain’s Valhalla Project with the Environmental Protection Authority of WA is now accepting submissions until Monday 7 October (end of day).
What’s happening?
Bennett Resources Ltd (trading as Black Mountain Energy) is currently seeking approval from the WA EPA to drill and frack 20 gas wells in the Martuwarra Fitzroy River catchment in the Kimberley.
This Valhalla proposal is just the beginning. If the company gets its way it will expand to many hundreds of wells scoring the Kimberley’s fragile and unique environment.
Gas corporations have compared the Kimberley’s Canning Basin to the Eagle Ford Basin in the US. The Eagle Ford had no oil and gas wells in 2008: now it has 27,000.
This is the first fracking proposal to reach this stage of assessment with the WA EPA under this WA Labor Government, and it’s the biggest ever. The EPA must recommend against this dangerous project.
What do we do?
There are three ways to submit a comment:
a) Join our submission (you can add your own words there too)
b) Write directly to the EPA by filling out their online portal form.
c) Post your submission to:
Deputy Chair
Environmental Protection Authority
Locked Bag 10
Joondalup DC WA 6919
Submissions are due by end of the day on Monday 7 October 2024.
Further Resources
All relevant documents are the EPA's Valhalla page under Assessment/Environmental Review.
Key points you may want to make in your submission
The Valhalla Project will have significant impacts on climate change, water resources and threatened species - and if approved, will most certainly lead to a rapid expansion of fracking activities in the Kimberley region.
The significant impacts of the project include:
- Using 2 billion litres of precious groundwater for drilling and fracking 20 wells. It has a huge impact for a small exploration project, but would be just the beginning. This water would be accessed by drilling through multiple aquifers, several kilometres underground, with little to no understanding of the hydrogeology of the area. The risk to water is frankly catastrophic.
- Causing drawdown of pastoral wells - which is a significant impact that needs independent expert oversight from the Independent Expert Scientific Committee (IESC).
- Risking toxic wastewater spillage - no details have been provided about the management of fracking wastewater in Black Mountain’s proposal. It is well documented that well failure occurs at shale gas fracking sites so the potential for aquifer contamination is real and can only be wholly prevented by refusing this project.
- Releasing ~1.6 million tonnes of greenhouse gas pollution over seven years - equivalent to around half the annual emissions of WA's Muja coal-fired power station. The assessment shows that the emissions per well for this project is extraordinarily high.
- Ongoing emissions from Black Mountain with their plans to drill an unknown number of wells over 40 years - completely inconsistent with WA and Australia’s commitment to decarbonise and prevent catastrophic global warming.
- Destroying, fragmenting and introducing predators to the habitat of threatened species like the Bilby.
- Posing an unacceptable risk to Martuwarra Fitzroy River, which is downstream of the proposed site for the Valhalla fracking project.
Write directly to the EPA by filling out their online portal form.
We recommend telling the EPA if you want them to reject this proposal.
If you are keen to sign on to the above concerns, you can also add your voice by submitting the comment via our form here. We will be hand delivering these submissions to the EPA office.
Closes 7 October.
For more information contact the WA team at frackfreewa @ lockthegate org au