Labor – the party of government – was this week the only party in the Senate which refused to back Senator Pauline Hanson’s inquiry into a carbon capture and storage trial involving the Great Artesian Basin. 

Even the Greens managed to bring themselves to support One Nation’s motion for an inquiry into a three-year trial proposed by a subsidiary of multinational coal mining giant Glencore. The inquiry will report to the Senate on 1 May, just before the Queensland government hands down a decision about whether the project will proceed – its final hurdle. 

The trial would involve capturing carbon dioxide emissions from the Millmerran Power Station in Queensland, turning it into a supercritical fluid and injecting up to 330,000 tonnes of it into an aquifer more than two kilometres deep inside the basin. 

The proposed trial – which could set a precedent for carbon capture and storage in Australia – has local farmers and mayors up in arms about the potential for contamination of groundwater in the basin, one of Australia’s most important natural resources. 

At more than 1.7 million square kilometres, the Great Artesian Basin is one of the largest groundwater basins in the world. If it was a country, it would be the 17th largest in the world. It contains about 65 million gigalitres of water – enough to fill Sydney Harbour 130,000 times over. This water supports production worth almost $13 billion a year, and is vital to farmers, miners and hundreds of regional, rural and remote communities. 

Farmers are concerned that increased acidity in the water caused by the injection of supercritical carbon dioxide could leach contaminants like lead and arsenic into the groundwater at levels many times greater than safe drinking water guidelines. Queensland farmer group AgForce is so concerned it has launched legal action over the trial. 

The project could prove to be yet another perverse example of climate change ideology and policy effectively destroying the environment in order to save it.