David Johnston (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

That is a very legitimate question from Senator Milne. Nobody would lodge an application seeking to commence work on the site or the region immediately thereafter. They will do an enormous amount of work to ascertain whether the site has integrity—the geophysical profile and the cap security that is necessary in terms of the rock type formations and all of that—before they even contemplate lodging an application. They can do that by going to the department and asking for the material and information that the oil and gas companies have provided from that region, more broadly, over a long period. They would then plan an exploration program of maybe a half a dozen holes. Their plan would be completely made out before they lodged their application. If the holes do not prove up the integrity, the application simply goes nowhere.

What the minister would receive is not just a piece of paper saying, ‘I would like this area defined by GPS references.’ He would have a huge screed of documentation supporting the fact that this is a likely site, that it does not interfere with other proponents and that it is at a depth and location that is viable to the commercial interests of the greenhouse gas emitter. The minister then has 12 months to reconcile all of that work with his department to see whether they would advise that he grant the application on so many different threshold issues. That is the way the system should work and, indeed, to a greater or lesser extent that is the way mining works in Australia today. No-one simply goes out and marks out a large tenement without having done a huge amount of reconciliation of information from the particular region in question.

The other question was, I think, about the five years. Similarly, the company will never purport to close the site or apply for a closure certificate unless their scientists are telling them the site is secure and stable and they believe that the company may now make application to the minister to get the five years running. The minister may grant that application in less than the five years, in which case the 15 years would run. So there is an incentive for them to provide an enormous amount of data and supporting information that can be crosschecked by the department as to whether the site is secure.

Bear in mind that, as with the Otway trial project, there are measuring devices in the site. They are measuring and watching and calibrating the movement of the greenhouse gas material in the repository. All of this information would be available to the proponent—and must be available to him—for him to know viably how long he has got to use that site at the rate that he is injecting the material.

I actually think that the minister’s department would be able to deal with quite a number. The department has recognised from estimates, I think, some 15 feasible sites. Some are at a more advanced stage of assessment than others. But the point is that nothing is going to happen in a way that leaves the department, the minister, the government and indeed the parliament left in the dark as to what capacity this particular site or sites would have.