The meeting was part of an eight-week public environmental review process for approval to build a $3.5 billion urea plant near Collie.

Projects director Joe McCarthy said job training would begin about nine months before construction began.

“I reiterate what I have previously said about Collie people getting first crack at the jobs,” he said.

The plant will create 1500 jobs during construction between 2010 and 2013 and then 200 permanent jobs when production starts in 2013.

A concern was raised about the increase in rail movements.

Perdaman is proposing an extra four train movements a day, on top of the eight current train movements through town for other industry needs.

Concerns were raised about the proposal to take six gigalitres of water from the east branch of the Collie River.

Perdaman project manager of infrastructure Gary Watson said the water would go into a mine void in winter and be left for use when needed.

In regards to the planned waste water pipe to the Leschenault inlet, Mr Watson said Perdaman was talking with Verve Energy about using its existing pipe.

“We will be constructing two ponds so water can be stored for up to eight weeks when the pipe is under maintenance,” he said.

Verve Energy’s waste water pipe needs to be resleeved and local resident Peter Piavanini asked instead of resleeving it, couldn’t it just be replaced.

Mr Watson said Perdaman was talking to Verve about the idea.

Another local asked what measures Perdaman had in place if geosequestration did not work.

This question was not answered.

Resident Ken Waterhouse spoke about that issue after the meeting.

“If they are successful with geosequestration near Harvey, why have they not outlined how they will pipe the carbon dioxide to Harvey?” Mr Waterhouse asked.

Dry cooling technology and biosequestration were other topics raised by residents.

Mr McCarthy said dry cooling was not viable. “We will currently need 150 megawatts of power, if we used dry cooling we would need a further 30-50 megawatts,” he said.

To generate more power the plant would use between 0.5 to 0.875 more megawatts of water.

“This is in addition to the additional carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, sulphur oxide, noise and cost increases that would occur as a result of using dry cooling extensively in the plant,” Mr McCarthy said.

Biosequestration was also not addressed.

• Issues about Perdaman’s proposed ammonia storage tank were raised. See next week’s Collie Mail for the full story.