An article by the GasFields Commission Queensland in the Western Star (Roma) on 12 December 2017 describes recent groundwater research.
Researchers from the UQ Centre for Coal Seam Gas (CCSG) and Queensland's Office of Groundwater Impact Assessment (OGIA) have been scrutinising vast amounts of data from landholders, government, industry and university to better understand groundwater movements.
The research suggests that water is flowing north easterly rather than south west into the regional Great Artesian Basin, as opposed to previous findings. Another assumption is that there may be small faults creating a localised connection between the Precipice and Hutton Aquifers in the vicinity of the Moonie-Goondiwindi fault system.
"The use of groundwater monitoring data, water production figures, detailed geographic distributions of water levels and hydrocarbon migration 'fingerprints' are giving us a level of detail never seeen before", said Professor Jim Underschultz, Chair in Water at the UQ-CCSG.
It is still work in progress and the work is being reviewed by UQ and CSIRO independently on multiple data sets.
Read the article on the website of the GasFields Commission Queensland.
