Getting the science right: Queensland's coal seam gas development and the engagement with knowledge, uncertainty and environmental risks

Abstract

Along with the current global ‘gas revolution’, Australia’s natural gas industry grew rapidly over the last decade. As part of this growth, unconventional gas reserves in the coal basins underlying the State of Queensland have been developed at a large scale. These coal seam gas (CSG) projects are expected to involve the drilling of up to 20,000 gas wells in southern Queensland alone. On a small — but likely increasing — number of the existing 9,000 wells, CSG companies apply the controversial extraction technique of hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’). One hotspot of development is the rural Western Downs region where the CSG industry’s rapid expansion and accompanying socio-cultural changes have intensified land use competition between agricultural and extractive industries, while also affecting non-agricultural landholders and regional residents. In this region and elsewhere, CSG extraction has sparked debates over associated risks, uncertainties and possible unknown environmental impacts. Based on ethnographic research in the Western Downs, this thesis addresses the resulting environmental risk controversy by examining the ‘problems of knowing’ associated with CSG developments. My analysis focuses on how a variety of actors come to know CSG and its environmental risks as well as the ways in which uncertainties and unknowns are negotiated. I particularly attend to scientific knowledge claims regarding potential environmental and health impacts. The conceptual framework for this approach draws on anthropological and wider social scientific literature concerning knowledge and ignorance, late modern risks, and science. My understanding of these concepts generally follows a postconstructivist perspective that attends to the discursive and material practices of socially positioned actors. I start the analysis with an outline of the Western Downs’ resource history following European settlement. This outline situates the region as an intensively managed landscape that has already been shaped by significant techno-scientific developments. I subsequently examine the role of science in actors’ sense-making of CSG and argue that knowing its risks requires scientific knowledge but also involves personal experience and phenomenological ways of knowing. For some actors, CSG-specific scientific research has remained uncertain and unable to answer significant questions regarding groundwater or health-related impacts. I therefore address how a variety of actors have responded to continuing problems of knowing, including critiques of scientific research. The deconstruction of these critiques demonstrates how scientific research can be understood as situated practices that themselves can become contested. These findings point towards the wider politics of knowledge and ignorance around CSG developments, which I examine in the final parts. The analysis of the politics of science and knowledge offered here concludes that scientific knowledge is crucial for addressing CSG’s potential environmental impacts. However, science is ultimately only one element of sense-making processes within actors’ lifeworlds. For a variety of actors, scientific research findings often also remained uncertain and constrained by a diverse range of factors, some of which are examined in this thesis. Turning political and moral negotiations about CSG developments into scientific questions alone can thus adversely affect conflict resolution processes. Instead, this thesis demonstrates that it is important to appreciate the limits of scientific research and to find ways to bring scientific and other ways of knowing into dialogue. CSG risk debates and associated problems of knowing therefore manifest as socio-cultural phenomena that require social resolutions as well as techno-scientific solutions.