The Great Artesian Basin: A Contested Resource Environment of Subterranean Water and Coal Seam Gas in Australia

ABSTRACT

The Great Artesian Basin (GAB) in Australia is one of the largest subterranean aquifer systems in the world. In this article we venture into the subterranean “resource environment”’ of the Great Artesian Basin and ask whether new insights can be provided by social analyses of the “vertical third dimension” in contemporary contests over water and coal seam gas. Our analysis makes use of a large number of publicly available submissions made to recent state and federal government inquiries, augmented with data obtained through ethnographic fieldwork among landholders in the coal seam gas fields of southern Queensland. We examine the contemporary contest in terms of ontological politics, and regard the underground as a challenging “socionature hybrid” in which the material characteristics, uses, and affordances of water and coal seam gas resources in the Great Artesian Basin are entangled with broader social histories, technologies, knowledge debates, and discursive contests.

KEYWORDS:

• Fracking
• great Artesian Basin
• natural resource extraction
• unconventional gas
• underground
• water

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Matthew Whincop at the University of Queensland Culture and Heritage Unit for his assistance in producing the map used in this publication. We also thank the anonymous reviewers and Franz Krause and Veronica Strang for their productive comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

¹University of Queensland postdoctoral research project 2012-2015, School of Social Science, Ethics approval number 2012000314.