Introduction: Health and climate leaders have welcomed news that a Senate inquiry will now go ahead, investigating the proposed development of the Middle Arm precinct on Darwin Harbour.
As Croakey reported last month, health and climate groups reacted angrily to a previous decision by Labor and the Coalition to block a Senate inquiry into the development, sounding the alarm about the health impacts of gas and fracking developments, as well the wider climate implications.
Meanwhile, researchers have released a timely new report, ‘The risks of oil and gas development for human health and wellbeing: A synthesis of evidence and implications for Australia’. No doubt many Croakey readers will find it useful when preparing submissions to the Senate inquiry.
The report’s authors summarise their findings below, in an article first published at The Conversation under the headline, ‘Health evidence against gas and oil is piling up, as governments turn a blind eye’.
Melissa Haswell, David Shearman, Jacob Hegedus and Lisa Jackson Pulver write:
We are seeing deadly heat and fires circle the world. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns we are fast running out of time to secure a liveable and sustainable future. Without emergency action to stop mining and burning fossil fuels, the world faces an unthinkable 2.8℃ temperature rise.
It’s incomprehensible, then, that many of our politicians support “unlocking the Beetaloo Basin” in the Northern Territory and developing another 48 oil and gas projects across Australia.
“Unlocking” means starting large-scale shale gas extraction. After drilling through 3–4km of rock and aquifers, a cocktail of chemicals, sand and water is forced down the well. This process of hydraulic fracturing is commonly known as fracking. This brings to the surface, and then into the atmosphere, carbon that had been securely stored underground for 300–400 million years.
[This week] we have launched a report that demonstrates the many risks of oil and gas development for human health and wellbeing in Australia. Based on a review of over 300 peer-reviewed studies, our report provides the public and decision-makers with a summary of the now-extensive evidence of these risks.
What is the evidence against oil and gas?
There is a need to combat widely held misconceptions and repeated misinformation about the safety of the oil and gas industry. We undertook the review at the request of concerned paediatricians in the Northern Territory.
New research clearly shows that “unlocking gas” is at least as harmful to the climate as mining and burning coal. This is largely due to methane leaks at many stages of production. Methane is 86 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere over 20 years.
Doors opened for the 49 planned projects in Australia after state reviews of potential impacts. These reviews are flawed and outdated as the volume of published studies has grown rapidly in recent years. Reviews were undertaken, for example, in New South Wales in 2014, Northern Territory in 2017, South Australia in 2015 and Western Australia in 2018.
Our report synthesises recent scientific and public health research on five areas of concern about oil and gas operations:
- threats to biodiversity, water and food security arising from site preparation, drilling, fracking, wastewater handling, gas pipeline transport and processing
- contributions to the climate emergency
- a vast array of potentially harmful chemicals
- contamination of water, soil and air
- physical, social, emotional and spiritual health impacts near oil and gas fields and their sprawling infrastructure.
Each fracking event to release shale gas uses 6 million to 60 million litres of fresh water. Fracking is often applied many times to each of hundreds to thousands of wells in a region. This puts water security at risk in arid areas.
Each step of gas production creates risks of contamination of surface and ground water. With vast quantities of wastewater, it can happen through spilling, leaking, flooding and overflows. Wastewater can even be deliberately spread for so-called “beneficial uses”.
This wastewater contains hundreds of chemicals. Some are naturally occurring. Others are added during drilling and fracking.
These chemicals can include heavy metals, phenols, barium, volatile organic compounds including benzene, toluene, ethylene and xylene, radioactive materials, fluoride, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, salt and many chemicals of unknown toxicity.
Air becomes contaminated with volatile organic compounds, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, radioactive materials, diesel fumes, hydrogen sulfide, acrolein and heavy metals. Formaldehyde, particulate matter and ground-level ozone are formed and travel long distances, damaging health and agriculture.
What are the health impacts?
People exposed to oil and gas operations experience a long list of harms. These include:
- more severe asthma in children requiring more medical treatment, emergency department visits and hospitalisations
- higher hospitalisation and death rates due to heart attacks, heart failure, respiratory diseases and some cancers
- higher injury and fatality rates due to increased heavy vehicle traffic
- increases in depression, anxiety and social withdrawal, especially among young and pregnant women
- increases in sexually transmitted infections associated with the industry’s mobile workforces
- reproductive harms and interference with development of unborn babies, including higher risks of low birth weight, pre-term delivery and spontaneous abortion
- higher risk of severe birth defects
- higher risk of acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
Putting Indigenous people and others in harm’s way
Many of the 49 planned projects affect Aboriginal land. Some companies have allegedly violated the rights of Traditional Owners to free, prior and informed consent. The massive disruption of Aboriginal Country and life puts people at great risk of physical, social, emotional, cultural and spiritual harm.
The report also issues a loud warning about sexual violence against First Nations Americans and Canadians associated with oil and gas activities. The WA parliamentary inquiry into women’s experiences of sexual harassment and sexual violence in “fly in, fly out” (FIFO) mines suggests these risks apply equally in Australia. Yet all government assessments of oil and gas development in Australia completely ignore these risks.
In the United States, the industry has grown so vast within two decades that over 17.6 million people live within a mile (1.6km) of oil or gas wells. By 2016, the estimated cost to the community was US$77 billion. This was the cost of illness, extra health care and premature deaths (7,500) from asthma, respiratory and cardiovascular disease due to air pollution alone.
Our report makes clear any further gas development will have serious impacts on the climate, the people living in or near gas fields and the overburdened health services that serve them.
Author details and disclosures
Melissa Haswell is Professor of Health, Safety and Environment, Queensland University of Technology and Professor of Practice in Environmental Wellbeing, Office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Indigenous Strategy and Services) and Honorary Professor (School of Geosciences), University of Sydney. She has previously received funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, the National Suicide Prevention Strategy, the Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health, Queensland Department of Environment and Science, Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Australian Red Cross, The Healing Foundation, Queensland Health and Australian Health Ministers Advisory Council. She is affiliated with the Climate and Health Alliance, Australian Public Health Association and the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology.
Professor David Shearman AM MB, ChB, PhD, FRACP, FRCPE. is Emeritus Professor of Medicine at Adelaide University 1975-1997, and previously held senior positions at Edinburgh and Yale Universities. He is author of many books relating to climate change, its science, consequences, democratic and international and economic implications; he served on the IPCC for two terms on health and scientific sections. He has been President of the Conservation Council of South Australia and with the late Professor Tony McMichael he founded Doctors for the Environment Australia in 2001 and was the Hon Secretary 2001- 2018.
Jacob Hegedus is a Research Assistant at Sydney University and a proud Gumbaygnnirr man from the Northern Rivers in UNSW. He is is a member of NSW Young Labor Party.
Professor Jackson Pulver AM currently holds the position of Deputy Vice-Chancellor Indigenous Strategy and Services at the University of Sydney.
See statement: Earth had hottest three-month period on record, with unprecedented sea surface temperatures and much extreme weather
