Greg Hunt, the environment minister, has approved dredging for three new port terminals, to be operated by a selection of Indian and Australian mining companies.Ī total of 3m cubic metres of seabed will be removed to allow vessels to access Abbot Point, with up to 300m tonnes of coal shipped annually by 2020. In the case of Abbot Point, dredging will be used to expand what is essentially a simple jetty jutting out into the sea into one of the world’s largest coal ports. The debris collected is usually a mixture of sand, mud and rock. Sometimes the sediment from dredging is used to “renourish” onshore areas, such as coastal areas subject to erosion. Large vessels require water of a certain depth to access these routes, so dredging is used to ensure they don’t run aground. “That’s a 16-17m (52.5ft-56ft) lowering of the lough bed as a result of extraction.Various Australian waters have been dredged in the past, most notably Port Phillip Bay, overlooked by Melbourne, and, more recently, locations off the Queensland coast such as Gladstone harbour.ĭredging is mainly used to either maintain the depth of ports or create new shipping channels. “However, years of extraction has removed sediments from the bed such that depths are now, in places, 21m (69ft) deep. “The lough bed used to be around four to five metres (13ft - 16.4ft) deep in that part of the lough,” Dr Hackney told The Detail. His work found that sand dredging alone has created scars of up to 56 feet deep (17 metres) in places.ĭredging has also caused several deep ‘pock marks’ of up to 19.6ft (6m) deep. Research carried out by sand mining expert Dr Chris Hackney, which The Detail published in December, has shown that industrial sand extraction has left long-term scarring on the bed of the lough.ĭr Hackney surveyed an area where sand dredgers have been active in recent years.

Workers initially used shovels to remove sand for use in building projects.īut over the decades, extraction has become a major business.Ĭompanies now use suction hoses and dredgers more than 60 metres in length to remove more than a million tonnes of sand from the bed of the lough every year.ĭespite concerns about the impact of dredging on the lough, no Stormont department or public authority regularly monitors the effect of extraction. SAND has been extracted from Lough Neagh for more than a century. Sand has been dredged from Lough Neagh for decades

What is sand dredging