The Wire

It’s a method of extracting gas from water held in coal seams deep underground, and its about to spark a new resource boom of epic proportions, starting in Queensland. BG group has just announced that they’ve committed 15 billion dollars to the first stage of a coal seam gas project that gained environmental approval from the federal government last month. But environmentalists say that growth of the industry is getting ahead of the science on aquifers. They’re worried about the vast amounts of water that the process brings up from underground, with the BG project alone set to extract the equivalent of several sydney harbours worth of water every year.