By Chris Griffith

May 10, 2007

A CONTROVERSIAL geologist wants to drill 2000 groundwater wells on the coastline between Tweed Heads to Townsville in an audacious plan to counter the drought.

Under Peter Ravenscroft’s plan,  The wells would harvest vast quantities of naturally forming coastal waters that otherwise flow into underground aquifers or back through rivers to the sea.

A massive pipeline stretching from Lake Kutubu in New Guinea to Brisbane would link the wells and carry the water to drought-stricken regions.

“It could be Queensland’s version of the extensive water control system that the Chinese started in about 600 BC. Where they used canals, we would use pipelines,’’ Mr Ravenscroft said.

“At the core of this concept is the simple geological observation that underground aquifers are and always will be a far greater storage reservoir system than anything we will ever be able to build on surface.’’

Mr Ravenscroft has detailed his vision for a grand scale aquifer solution to the water crisis in commercial real estate journal King’s Counsel, the publication that proposed the five-tunnel solution for Brisbane’s traffic woes.

King & Co’s grand tunnel plans was adopted by Lord Mayor Campbell Newman and modified to become the TransApex tunnel system he promoted in the 2005 council election campaign.

Mr Ravenscroft’s plan would complement King & Co’s proposal for a water pipeline from New Guinea and is on the scale of Queensland engineer John Bradfield’s 1938 plan to harvest the waters of North Queensland rivers and send them southward and westward.

“The plan is to sink a chain of groundwater wells along the shoreline, in all the sedimentary basins that touch the coats, from at least Tweed Heads to Townsville,’’ Mr Ravenscroft said.

“Those wells, perhaps one every half or full kilometre, a couple of thousand or so all up, would be linked by a pipeline.’’

He said the wells would be recharged with water from floodplains, from coastal wetlands, and from wells located in northern rivers.

“The recharge wells would act as huge drainplugs in flood times, helping refill the aquifers below but allowing the rivers to glow naturally and extracting nothing, when the flows are at their lower and more usual levels.’’
Leading hydrologist Malcolm Cox said Mr Ravenscroft’s plan was “very hard to impliment” because of the ever varying conditions in coastal plains.

Acid sulphate soils in some coastal areas, and problems of dealing with sandy and salty made fresh water extraction a complicated issue at every location.

The plan wouldn’t be viable for tidal rivers with significant salt content, such as the Brisbane River, Professor Cox said.