Big Shale find near Coober Pedy in Australia

[Aeson]

It doesn't confirm your concern at all. It basically says that wells already truck the water around. (Water trucked in, waste water trucked out.) Trucking water is generally not as efficient as piping it, except in cases where you'd only need relatively small amounts intermittently over long distances.

It also says that in cases where water is hard to get to the site and/or dispose of, it can be scaled back by recycling, making operations more cost efficient.

All that sounds like it's directly contradictory to your claims. You wouldn't need a really big pipeline (and even if you had enough wells that you did, it would be more efficient than trucking in that case), and it's already cost effective to transport water for fracking operations.

[Alexander's Horse]

bottomline is Australians I have noticed seem to have a totally different attitude to mining

My friend has gold on his land but basically the cost of extracting it, the yield per yard of dirt, means it isn't worth digging for it commercially even at current high prices. But it's fun for the kids to get a few flakes in the pan when we go camping there.

[pchang]

Meaning what? Rape and pillage the environment and let someone else worry about it?