The Great Artesian Basin: a contested resource environment of subterranean water and coal seam gas in Australia

Kim de Rijke*, Paul Munro, Maria de Lourdes Melo Zurita

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    48 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    ABSTRACT: The Great Artesian Basin (GAB) in Australia is one of the largest subterranean aquifer systems in the world. In this article we venture into the subterranean “resource environment”’ of the Great Artesian Basin and ask whether new insights can be provided by social analyses of the “vertical third dimension” in contemporary contests over water and coal seam gas. Our analysis makes use of a large number of publicly available submissions made to recent state and federal government inquiries, augmented with data obtained through ethnographic fieldwork among landholders in the coal seam gas fields of southern Queensland. We examine the contemporary contest in terms of ontological politics, and regard the underground as a challenging “socionature hybrid” in which the material characteristics, uses, and affordances of water and coal seam gas resources in the Great Artesian Basin are entangled with broader social histories, technologies, knowledge debates, and discursive contests.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)696-710
    Number of pages15
    JournalSociety and Natural Resources
    Volume29
    Issue number6
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2 Jun 2016

    Keywords

    • fracking
    • great Artesian Basin
    • natural resource extraction
    • unconventional gas
    • underground
    • water

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