Across the Mid West and Kimberley regions of WA there is currently a mad scramble by companies to develop new onshore oil and gas resources.  Many of the companies claim their developments are conventional and will not involve fracking. However these claims don’t always hold up. At Waitsia, in the Shire of Irwin, there are plans to develop a massive gas resource that includes conventional and unconventional gas targets.     Continue reading

WA Fracking Decision    1. It’s fundamentally unfair If fracking is not safe in the south-west and Perth, then it’s not safe anywhere. This approach divides Western Australia and creates two classes of people – those in the south and the Dampier Peninsula who are protected from fracking and those in the Mid West and Kimberley who are not.  Labor have banned it totally in Victoria, while in WA they have banned it only in small, entirely arbitrary locations. Continue reading

Download the PDF version of this fact sheet Myth: “We’ve been fracking for years….” The risks of fracking are often downplayed by the gas industry and the WA Government with the rhetoric that ‘hydraulic stimulation has been used in the oil and gas industry in Western Australia for the past 50 years’ and that hundreds of wells have been fractured in WA without ‘observed or reportable adverse consequences’. When the Department of Mines and Petroleum say they’ve been fracking for years without consequence, they are deliberately misleading local communities by obscuring the fact that fracking techniques, and the associated risks, have changed over time.  Continue reading

Download the PDF version of this fact sheet What is the difference between conventional and unconventional gas? The difference between conventional and unconventional gas is the geology of the reservoirs from which they are extracted and which therefore require different extraction techniques to obtain commercial quantities of gas. Conventional gas is usually found in relatively large permeable rock reservoirs. In a conventional gas deposit, once drilled, the gas can usually be extracted relatively easily via vertical wells. Conventional gas has been extracted in Australia for many decades. Continue reading

Download the PDF version of this fact sheet What is fracking? Fracking is a mining process used to extract gas deposits from shale and tight sands rock formations deep underground. Fracking involves pumping large volumes of water, chemicals and sand into a gas well under extreme pressure to force the rock to fracture and release trapped gas. Shale and tight gasfields also require the industrialisation of entire landscapes with hundreds or even thousands of gas wells, plus vast networks of roads and pipelines, compressor stations, processing plants, wastewater holding dams and treatment plants.   Continue reading