By Alan Sheridan 

30 August 2006

The Honourable Malcolm Turnbull, MP

Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister

House of Representatives

Parliament House

Canberra, ACT 2600

Dear Mr Turnbull,

ALTERNATIVE WATER SUPPLY OPTIONS FOR SEQ

I am the Shire Engineer at Noosa Council and a member of a community group which is opposed to the State Government’s proposed dam on the Mary River at Traveston. My purpose in writing is to appeal to you as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister with Special Responsibility for Water, to encourage the Queensland State Government to consider the alternatives as outlined in this letter. If the proposed Traveston Dam was a good decision for the right reasons I am certain that people would learn to accept it over time, but this is not the case.

First, a bit about my own background. I have an Honours Degree in Civil Engineering, a Master of Engineering Science Degree, Graduate Diplomas in Management Studies and Strategic Studies, have lectured at the University of NSW, have worked overseas through South East Asia, the South West Pacific and in Southern Africa and have managed water supply systems in the countries of Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea and in the Council’s of Pine Rivers and Ipswich City. I am presently the Director of Works at Noosa Council.

I am absolutely convinced, beyond any doubt, that there are cost effective alternatives to major dams for securing water supplies for South East Queensland. These alternatives are not dependent on decreasing and highly variable patterns of rainfall and they will save the State Government hundreds of millions of dollars in both capital and ongoing operating and maintenance costs.

I believe that the State Government has been poorly advised by the water industry in general with regard to the current drought and the alternatives. There is a lack of skilled and experienced people within the bureaucracy and they are not producing the goods; otherwise South East Queensland would not be a state of crisis right now with regard to water.

The proposed Traveston dam will not be constructed until 2012. Assuming it takes two years to fill, it will not provide any water until 2014. Brisbane will run out of water in 2008 based on current demand and rainfall projections. Fortunately, the SEQ Water Corporation (owned by state and SEQ local government) has already devised a program of improving productivity and efficiency in response to the current drought. Their June 2006 report outlines thirteen short term projects involving a mix of recycling, desalination, restrictions and minor infrastructure that will see Brisbane through the current drought and beyond.

The proposed Traveston Dam will not secure future water resources for SEQ. The current demand in SEQ is about 500,000 megalltres per annum (one megalitre is an Olympic swimming pool) — this will rise to 750,000 megalitres by the year 2050. The proposed dam at Traveston will provide 70,000 megalitres per annum — less than 10% of the total water demand in the year 2050. Stage 2 of the proposed dam at 110,000 megalitres is only a marginal improvement.

In April this year, the State Government announced that the dam was selected on the basis of volume of water (yield) and cost. The proposed dam was estimated to have an annual yield of 215,000 megalitres at a cost of $lbn (Source — SEQ Dam Options Report dated June 2006). Based on these figures, the Capital Cost per megalitre of yield was $4,600, making the proposed dam one of the most cost effective of all options considered.

Less than two months later the official State Government cost estimate is $1.7 bn with a yield of 70,000 megalitres. The Capital Cost per megalitre of yield is now $24,300, making the Traveston Dam the most expensive of any dam option considered.

However, the real cost of the Traveston Dam will be far in excess of $2 bn for the following reasons:

• the cost of acquiring at least 1,000 properties alone will be $1 bn,

• the dam wall has gone from 800 metres to a massive 1.3 kin, approximately 30 metres tall and another 30 metres below the ground,

• the cost of sea ling up the dam so it does not leak will be high,

• there are three saddle dams to constrain the water behind the main wall,

• there is a 120 km pipeline to Brisbane plus pumping equipment,

• the dam will require relocation of major roads, power and telecommunications infrastructure and,

• to avoid flooding the historic Queensland pioneer towns of Kandanga and Imbil, the Government is proposing to construct bunds and levies which are highly questionable solutions to the increased risk of flooding in these communities.

Environmental flows in the Mary River will be a thing of the past, despite State Government assurances to the contrary. The recently legislated Water Resource Plan for the Mary River Basin only includes non-mandatory flow targets for the river at downstream locations. As an example, the legislation allows there to be less than 1 megalitre of flow at Gympie for 20 years out of the next 100 years. Currently, the driest month of the year has an average 171 megalitres of flow per day. Additionally, the small freshes (floods every 2-3 years) that are critical for fishing and spawning in the estuary will be cut by 58% at Gympie — these freshes will be captured by the dam. In effect, the legislation makes it legal to stop all flows downstream of the dam for any period of time, if the need arises. Members of the Mary Basin Community Reference Panel, established by the State Government to provide input into the water resource plan, have formally advised the Government that they had been profoundly deceived during the formulation of that plan in relation to the Traveston Crossing Dam.

The proposed Traveston Dam will be located mid stream on the Mary River on an alluvial flood plain. It will be a large, shallow dam (average depth just over 6 metres when full) with high evaporation losses and significant water quality and leakage problems. Locating a dam in such a place is like ring barking a tree — the river will die from the branches down and from the roots up. The dam will destroy 76 square kiometres of the most fertile agricultural land in Queensland — where will our food come from? The dam will annihilate the habitat for a number of rare and endangered species which rely on the river, in its natural state, for their very survival. According to world expert on the Queensland Lungflsh, Professor Jean Joss, the dam will inevitably lead to the extinction of the Queensland Lungflsh, which has survived on this planet for the last 300 million years and which is a sacred animal for the indigenous people of the area.

One of the heaviest hitters in the world of science has joined an international crusade to save the Australian lungfish. Along with thousands of palaeontologists and evolutionary biologists, Australian-born Robert May from Britain’s Oxford University has urged Queensland Premier Peter Beattie to halt the proposed dam, which he fears will push the creature to extinction. Lord May, former chief scientific adviser to the British Government and past president of the Royal Society, has warned that if the peculiar creature vanished, researchers would lose a living laboratory and, along with it, the opportunity to study the genetic, anatomical and behavioural adaptations that led to life on land. He has been quoted as saying “Australia is not a desperate developing country”.

At the recent Earth Dialogues Conference in Brisbane, former Soviet President and Chair of the International Green Cross, Mikhail Gobachev, was asked what he thought of the Government’s proposal to build more dams. His response was “Dams won’t work’t He has been quoted as saying “this thoughtless tampering with nature has left a terrible legacy, not least of all in my own region of the world where thousands of acres of fertile land has been lost. We desperately need to recognise that we are the guests, not masters of nature and adopt a new paradigm for development based on the costs and benefits to all people, and bound by the limits of nature herself rather than the limits of technology and consumerism’.

Add to this, the State Government’s proposed water grid — which will cost billions of dollars to deliver, with enormous energy costs involved in moving that water around the South East. One thousand litres of water, about what a house uses in one day, weighs one ton (you could carry it in the back of a one ton ute). One megalitre of water is 1 million litres and weighs 1,000 tons. Imagine moving 500,000 megalitres (500 million tons) of water through pipes around South East Queensland. How much greenhouse gas will this generate? How much is this going to cost and who is going to pay for it?

Wouldn’t it be smarter to produce the water where you need it and to have solutions which are less dependent on rainfall? After all, most of the dams in SEQ are close to empty so what is the plan? — build another dam.

There are alternatives. They include source substitution schemes, whereby additional water is extracted from river systems and this water is replaced with highly treated recycled water — the net impact on environmental flows is zero. As an example, the Brisbane River at Mt Crosby has a system yield of 379,000 ML and an allocation of 286,000 ML. The balance of approximately 100,000 ML is for environmental flows. If 50% of that flow was harvested for drinking water supply and replaced with highly treated recycled water, this would effectively provide an additional water source of 50,000 ML/a. Recycled water will be treated to a very high standard for the Swanbank power station, so the only issue is to treat more for use in the proposed source substitution scheme. This represents only a fraction of the total river system flows in the Brisbane River System (over 1 milllon ML/a) and other source substitution options on the Brisbane River may well be feasible. A similar exercise could be applied to other major river systems throughout the South East corner. A very similar scheme is proposed for Warragamba Dam (the main water supply for the Sydney metropolltan area), where additional water will be drawn from the dam for water supply purposes and downstream environmental flows will be maintained by using recycled water Direct recycling of drinking quality water back into storages would be preferable, but source substitution as described above, would be the next best thing.

Another alternative is desalination, which is not new or unusual, as many people seem to think. There are over 7,500 desalination plants in operation around the world, the largest being in Dubai which produces 232,000 megalitres per year and which uses waste heat from a co-located power generating plant to significantly reduce the energy required to produce the water A 70,000 megalitre plant is by no means a large plant A 45,000 megalltre plant is presently under construction in Perth — it will cost $387 million and will produce water for 95 cents per kilolitre. There are also options for supplementing the power needs with sustainable sources, for example, wind generation. There may also be an option for co-locating a major desallnation plant with the Swanbank power station and pumping water to and from the plant or constructing a separate desallnation plant on Bribie Island to service the northern part of Brisbane. The State Government has produced a report on desalination (GHD 2006% but has so far refused to release that report. The Mary River Council of Mayors, through the Chairman of the SEQ Council of Mayors, Cr Campbell Newman, has requested a copy of the report.

A third alternative is a raised Borumba Dam, if you must have a dam. The Premier and officers from DNR have visited the site with local grazier Ron McMah and the Department has produced technical data which shows that a raised Borumba mega-Dam with a 1 million megalitre storage capacity (about the same as Wivenhoe Dam) would have been fuil in the year 2000. In fact, the data shows that a raised Borumba Dam would have been close to full for at least the last 40 years and the existing dam actually overflowed towards the end of last year Borumba is a very deep storage with a relatively small surface area and it is located in solid rock. Evaporation and leakage losses from a dam at Borumba will be minimal. Further, if a raised Borumba Dam were operated in conjunction with the Wivenhoe and Somerset Dams by transferring water between the two systems, then SEQ would have significant reserves of water right now.

It only takes 10mm of rain in the Borumba catchment to create runoff. By contrast, it takes months of continuous rain in the Wivenhoe catchment to create any useful runoff. Permanent rainfall stations within the Borumba catchment at Yabba Station, Kin gham Station and Jimna iniate annual rainfall averages throughout the catchment of around 1,000 mm per year for the last lOO years. Even in the very worst of droughts, annual rainfall figures have been substantial.

A fourth alternative is to return rainfall patterns in the South East corner to their pre individual/ development levels. This can be achieved through the use of cloud seeding technology. While this might sound a bit far fetched, it is an internationally proven method of regulating rainfall patterns and is used by over 70 countries around the world including extensively within the United States and China. The science and technology is both established and proven. There is no shortage of water bearing clouds over the major catchments in SEQ. The problem is that rain does not fall from the clouds where it once did. The clouds and their ability to produce rain been impacted by pollution in the South East corner The rain either falls on the coast or out to sea, rather than falling on the land where our major catchments are located. It is entirely possible to reverse this and to return the rainfall patterns to more normal levels. There as no environmental issues associated with the technology as the quantities of material used to seed the clouds are so minute as to be undetectable. A full-scale trial could be conducted over the coming wet season for a very small investment; an investment which might well result in a substantial dividend.

Lastly, significant savings could be achieved by converting the Tarong and Swanbank power stations to dry cooling technology. The recycled water which is freed up from this conversion could then be used for an expansion of the source substitution schemes referred to previously. Combined consumption at both power stations is more than 27,000 megalitres per annum and is expected to increase to 37,000 megalitres per annum over the next ten years. In dry cooling systems, the condenser water is cooled by air (like a car radiator) instead of in a cooling tower where evaporative losses are high. Dry cooling can reduce water usage in power stations by around 95%. A dry cooling system was recently installed at the Milmerran power station and while they are generally more expensive to operate than wet systems, they use much less water The cost for converting both power stations to dry cooling is of the order of $500m.

I have written personally to the Premier regarding some of these alternatives — whether l get a response remains to be seen. I am only hoping that on behalf of the Mary River, which is ailing and breathing part of nature which has been part of the landscape for tens of thousands of years, and on behalf of the people who live along this river and who have grown to love it ~ to genuinely care for it, that people will start to understand what is really being proposed. There are alternatives.

In closing, I appreciate your time in reading this letter and considering its contents. I would love to see something good come out of this for the whole of Queensland and believe that in this time of crisis, we have a truly excellent opportunity to come up with world class, innovative and cutting edge solutions which will well and truly secure the future of Queensland as the smart State. Destroying river systems is not the answer

Yours Sincerely,

Alan Sheridan

BE Civ (Hon), N Eng Sc, Grad Dip Mngt Studies, Grad Dip Strategic Studies, RPEQ, CP Eng, MIE Aust, MIPWEA, MAPWA