Background

The licence application:

· The exploration licence was advertised in the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday 8th September 2008.  The applicant is required to advertise the application within 14 days of lodgement.

· The exploration zone covers nearly 6,000 km², spanning 135km of the NSW coast from the Royal National Park south of Sydney up to Port Stephens.

· An exploration licence cannot be granted for an area greater than 1,500 km², hence four exploration zones were advertised.

· This is the second recent mining exploration licence application for Commonwealth waters off the coast of NSW.  The previous case was the Bounty project’s oil and gas exploration licence.

· The NSW Department of Mineral Resources is the main contact, yet to date they have received no information about future mining plans from the applicant.

· The NSW Government prides itself on the recent runaway expansion of mining exploration. The Greens predict this project will get a rubber stamp approval if the exploration shows that mining is viable, regardless of the environmental impacts.

Visual and water pollution off our coast:

· The exploration licence comes within 2 to 4 kilometres of the coast in Sydney’s far south, and at points along the Central Coast, Lake Macquarie and Stockton Bight.

· A person can see up to 2km out to sea standing on the beach with the naked eye.

· From a headland you can clearly see ships waiting to enter the harbour, which are waiting about 8km out to sea.

· Similar off shore gas mining projects build drilling platforms out at sea, and transfer and storage terminals near to the shore.  They construct pipelines from the outer platforms to the near shore terminals.

· Some projects process and transfer the end product offshore, which poses big environmental risks for the ocean.

· Shipping traffic would increase, which also increases the risk of an accident.

Impact on whale migration and marine ecology:

· Seismic testing used in exploration could disrupt whale migration along Australia’s east coast.

· A full scale mining operation could scare away whales as seen in other waters.  The proposed method of mining - offshore underground coal gasification (UCG)
is highly experimental as it has only been proven on land to date., so who knows what impact it could have?

Don't let the Government give these mining companies approval to threaten our coastline with exploration that will possibly lead to an unproven method of offshore coal mining. The State Government has carriage of the application and the Federal Government has the final say.