Dart Energy boss confronts angry crowd

An earlier Sydney protest against Dart Energy's exploration plans

The chief executive of Dart Energy, the company holding an exploration licence for coal seam gas in metropolitan Sydney, has fronted an agry public meeting at the Leichhardt Town Hall.
Dart chief Robbert de Weijer told the rowdy meeting he understood community concerns, but said he believed that coal seam gas mining could co-exist with metropolitan Sydney.
A brace of organisations were represented at the meeting, all of them strongly opposed to Dart’s plans to extract coal seam gas at St Peter’s in Sydney’s inner-west, with wells in industrial estates feeding gas into pipelines or small-scale power plants.
The company had planned to start drilling by September, but the NSW Government has put a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the process of injecting fluids into cracks in rocks to extract gas.
NSW Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham has introduced a bill calling for a 12 month moratorium on coal seam gas mining in NSW.
Meanwhile, National Party Senator Barnaby Joyce has revealed his Northern NSW farm can be explored for CSG by Eastern Star Gas, which has been given exploration approval.
Senator Joyce told reporters that while he was not against CSG mining he was concerned that farmers were afforded little right to resist exploration.
“The farmer really has no rights,” he said. “On my own place where I pay the rates, insurance, repairs and maintenance I can’t just go and knock down trees but the mining companies can.”