Yesterday Greens member Alison Xamon told ENP the state Environmental Protection Agency should be able to undertake a wide-ranging review into unconventional drilling while also assessing individual projects.

While the Western Australian government has vigorously opposed the EPA undertaking such a widespread investigation, the Greens, Labor, Liberal, Nationals and industry agree the regulations need to be looked at before the industry ramps up.

On the face of it then, the concept of a moratorium seems reasonable.

The industry is not yet at a stage where being held back would put multibillion LNG projects at risk and the shale’s not going anywhere.

For the industry though, exploratory work being done by the likes of Norwest Energy, Buru and Latent Petroleum are part of informing a robust regulatory regime.

“That exploration is important in gathering information about geology, aquifers and other issues which can help inform the regulatory environment if the shale and tight gas sector does proceed to commercial production in coming years,” Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association WA spokesman Stedman Ellis told ENP.

“The current activities are being governed by the regulatory processes outlined by the [WA Department of Mines and Petroleum], they’ve been assessed by the EPA which determined that they were unlikely to have a significant impact on the environment.

“So a moratorium on activities an independent EPA has considered and which of themselves are an important step in gathering information which can help inform the future regulatory environment doesn’t make sense.”

The message here is landholders should not expect a crisscross of wells and infrastructure to roll onto their land tomorrow. Ramp-up is still a long way off.

Green groups on the other hand are happy to show landholders pictures of Dymock, Pennsylvania and Chinchilla in Queensland as examples of what they can expect if they do not lock the gate on exploration companies.

WA Mines and Petroleum Minister Norman Moore and his Labor counterpart John Ford lambasted the Greens in Parliament for trying to compare shale and coal seam gas.

Ford told Parliament a moratorium would shoot the industry into the ground at a time when exploration should be encouraged rather than having explorers facing a gamut of hurdles.

When Moore got around to responding to Xamon’s call for a moratorium last month, he attacked the Greens for trying to use arguments run in the CSG debate to halt the unconventional industry in WA.

“I think it is quite disingenuous of the Greens to say ‘Let’s lump everything into one great big environmental campaign and say every aspect of unconventional gas is the same as every other aspect’ when clearly, it is definitely not,” he said.

The government, DMP and APPEA on the other hand have been trying to differentiate shale, CSG and tight gas drilling.

“We see the main key point of difference here as the timing of the industries in various jurisdictions,” Ellis said.

“For example, in Queensland the industry is very developed but places like WA, we’re still in that very early exploration phase.”

Ellis said the main tactic here from green groups was to put all unconventional exploration in the one basket and while Xamon said the issues she wanted to highlight were not unique to each type of drilling, Ellis said her tactics were right out of anti-CSG 101.

“I think what opponents have been doing is looking across all unconventional gas activities across the world and finding the worst of any particular example and then they’ve sought to conflate and confuse those issues often out of context in different jurisdictions,” he said.

“So they’ll find something out of the US and use that in public debate around the CSG industry in Queensland and that’s what they’re doing in WA.”

The government has also been keen to point out the economic opportunities in allowing a WA shale gas industry to develop.

The matter was acknowledged by Moore himself in last month’s sitting.

“We have been paying higher prices for gas in Western Australia even though we have loads of conventional gas in this state and, indeed, export it overseas,” he said.

“But our domestic consumers, certainly when long-term contracts expire, will have to compete for that domestic gas in the context of international market place prices, which are much higher than exist here.”

The WA government has moved to ease the price for domestic users, moving to promote domestic gas projects such as Devil Creek and Macedon to try and flood the domestic market.

Of course all the average punters (the ones who vote) can see is an increasing gas bill.

Moore also touched on the location of unconventional exploration as a key motivation of encouraging it to take place.

“Being onshore is very good for the state of Western Australia because we get the royalties,” Moore said.

“With conventional gas offshore in commonwealth waters we get nothing, except for what we get from the North West Shelf.”

He also pointed to the flow-on effects of having plentiful gas onshore, highlighting the particular example of Whicher Range as a development that could have a positive impact on industry in the state’s South West.

So the Greens are railing against perceived environmental threats of unconventional drilling and the conservative government and industry body is spruiking the economic benefits of allowing the industry to develop.

The ramp-up of the CSG industry in Queensland resulted in pretty much the same sort of rhetoric and the public outrage has been virulent.

Tune in next time when ENP will examine what those keen to get industry up and running in WA have been doing to manage community outrage and whether it has actually worked.