2.3.2.1 Scope and overview

This section summarises the geology and hydrogeology of the southern part of the Cooper subregion (hereafter referred to as the southern Cooper Basin), as shown in Figure 6. This is due to the absence of any CSG-only developments identified in the rest of the subregion. As the Bioregional Assessment Programme is focused on coal and CSG resource developments, this product does not consider other unconventional gas systems (such as shale or tight gas), composite unconventional gas systems (a hydrocarbon resource characterised by multiple potential reservoir types within the gas saturated zone. For example, it may be a stacked shale gas and coal seam gas resource), or conventional gas resources because it is not possible to separate the source within a composite system. The area lies within the preliminary assessment extent (PAE) described in companion product 1.3 for the Cooper subregion (Sparrow et al., 2015), and focuses on the area of the coal resource development pathway (CRDP) described in Section 2.3.4.

The product incorporates the information provided in companion product 1.1 for the Cooper subregion (Smith et al., 2015b), and includes further information on the geology and hydrogeology developed during the course of the BA. This summary describes the baseline coal resource development (baseline) of the subregion, which did not have coal mining or coal seam gas developments as of December 2012.