Battle for the Bight: Wind farms vs seabed mining in Taranaki
A thwarted seabed mining project has its sights set on fast-tracking – which could spell doom for renewable energy off the Taranaki coast. Photo / Getty Images, Listener illustration
From the late-1950s to the 1980s, companies with deep pockets fought over oil and gas deposits on and off Taranaki in a modern-day equivalent of the Central Otago gold rush of the 1860s. Taranaki boomed with oil fever and many Kiwi investors became millionaires after the world’s eighth-biggest gas field was developed and more discoveries followed.
But by the 2010s, the exhaustion of the Māui gas field loomed on the horizon and the appetite for oil and gas exploration was shrinking as the spectre of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change grew. In 2018 came Jacinda Ardern’s announcement that the party was over; hydrocarbons were bad for the planet: “There will be no further offshore oil and gas exploration permits granted.”
New Plymouth Mayor Neil Holdom deemed the news “a kick in the guts” but it was not long before a greener, cleaner form of resource exploitation blew fresh hope into the Taranaki, and national, economies: offshore wind farming.
New Zealand’s need for renewable energy is obvious every time electricity generators struggle to meet demand in a cold snap. More capacity is also needed for electrification of the vehicle fleet and industrial heating. If New Zealand is to meet its emissions reductions targets of 100% renewable energy by 2035 and net-zero emissions by 2050, electricity generation needs to rise by about 70%, all of it from renewable sources.
As the Listener reported in March last year, offshore wind farms proposed by international consortiums in the South Taranaki Bight promised to deliver a big chunk of the additional capacity needed by 2050. The area was once branded by the Global Wind Energy Council as “the Saudi Arabia of wind” due to its Roaring Forties location. The proposals could also generate 1000-4000 jobs during construction, and operating and maintaining the wind farms could employ 2500-8000 people. Though it would be years before turbines turned above the water, the last Labour government began work on a regulatory framework and fast-tracked the approval process for three wind-farming projects on land.
Then the government changed. Resources Minister Shane Jones has criticised the long lead times needed for wind farms while talking up the economic benefits of “extracting natural resources from the earth and from the bed of the sea”, which he depicts as “a legitimate part of the New Zealand economy”. In March, he told an offshore energy conference in Hāwera: “Offshore wind is being propelled by a moral belief that this will save the planet and make money. But don’t look to the crown to subsidise it, certainly not while I’m around. I will leave to the accountants and economists the economics of how you are ever going to make a profit from offshore wind farms.”
Eyes on ironsands
The government’s fast-track consenting legislation is a key part of enabling the mineral exploitation Jones favours. Launching the draft mineral mining strategy last month, he pointed to a range of mineral resources on land and at sea that might qualify for fast tracking, including vanadium and titanium in the ironsands off Taranaki. New Zealand needed six times more minerals for low-emissions technology and would no longer be importing from countries with abysmal environmental standards, Jones said. “In order to save the climate, we must mine our way to the future.” (See the Listener feature on clean mining here.)
Which is where Trans-Tasman Resources (TTR) comes in. Now owned by Australian gold and silver miner Manuka Resources, the company for more than a decade has sought to mine ironsands in the South Taranaki Bight. It has a mining permit covering 66ha of seabed from 22km to 37km off the coast. Using a processing ship, it aims to extract iron ore, vanadium and titanium from up to 50 million tonnes of sand a year – depositing most of the sand back on the seabed – over a 35-year timeframe.
Vanadium is used in reinforced steel for tools and construction, but also in large-scale batteries and grid energy storage – important in our transition to renewable energy. TTR’s plans to extract up to 11,000 tonnes a year of vanadium would make New Zealand the world’s third-biggest producer after China and Russia; it estimates vanadium alone could fetch more than $450 million a year on international markets.
TTR claims the venture would directly employ 300 people and generate about $170m in royalties and taxes a year from iron ore alone, though its chairman and executive director, Alan Eggers, says mining is likely for only 14 of the 35-year consent period being sought.