1.2 Scope

A ‘GBA region’ is defined for each assessment (Figure 2) to constrain the area of investigation (Section 2). The assessment considers activities associated with the exploration, development and production of unconventional gas resources at a regional scale for a 50-year development scenario. The unconventional gas resources that are prospective in the Cooper GBA region include those sourced from shale, tight and deep coal gas reservoirs. These resource types, referred to throughout as ‘unconventional gas resources’, are described further in the Stage 2 petroleum prospectivity technical appendix (Lech et al., 2020). Coal seam gas was considered as part of the Bioregional Assessment Program (Smith et al., 2016) and is not included in this assessment. This assessment represents a particular point in time as technology, methods and knowledge will change and advance.

Described in this synthesis report are the methods, assessment results, and monitoring strategies in Section 3. The following sections provide more detailed analysis of the assessment and mitigation of potential impacts on surface water and groundwater (Section 4), the environment (Section 5), and protected fauna and flora (Section 6). Bold text denotes where causal network node descriptions provide further detail and can be viewed using the interactive causal network in GBA Explorer.

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