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Seabed ironsand ruling
‘a victory’ for science
Hugh de Lacy
Trans Tasman Resources plans to extract 50 million tonnes of ironsand a year off the seabed 20km off
the Taranaki coast.
News »
Spring 2017 »
Mining NZ
5
A New Zealand company with a strong
Western Australian backing is moving forward
with capital and possible listing plans after
detailed testing of geothermal power plants to
recover silica which is currently lost.
Environmetals Ltd, which is rebranding
itself as Geo40 Ltd, is reportedly close
to commercial development for patented
technology to economically extract silica
and other specialty minerals, such as lithium
and boron, from the hot fluids harnessed
by geothermal stations in New Zealand that
produce electricity.
According to “The West Australian” if
successful, the venture would open up export
income for Geo40 but could also be a “game-
changer for the fast-growing global geothermal
industry where silica is a corrosive and costly
headache”.
Driving this operation are two of the most
highly regarded people in the international
mining world.
They are Bill Turner, who formed a close
relationship at Anvil with Geo40’s founder,
New Zealander, Michael O’Sullivan, an expert
in geothermal mining. The other is Perth-
based Independence Group NL chief executive
Peter Bradford. The Independence Group is
one of Australia’s leading gold and base metal
miners.
According to the newspaper, Geo40 has
raised more than $A10 million from 65 private
investors, including clients of Perth broker
Euroz. It now appears these funds, along with
a $US4.9m Japanese grant, have financed
proof of concept work and trials of the
company’s technology at on-site pilot plants
at Contact Energy’s Wairakei power plant
and Japanese utility Tohoku Electric Power’s
Kakkonda plant.
The report said said Geo40 was
considering its options, including a partial sale
of the business and an IPO, to fund the start-
up of its first $NZ10-$NZ19m commercial
silica extraction plant in New Zealand next year.
The company’s managing director, John
Lea, is a former executive with NZ dairy giant
Fonterra, who says the company is working to
finalise contract talks with two major utilities.
Progress
made on
silica plan
Peter Owens
It’s been a tortuous passage but the recent
granting of a marine resource consent to Trans
Tasman Resources (TTR) for seabed ironsand
mining off the west coast of the North Island has
brought a sense of both relief and reality to the
New Zealand extractives industry.
It has endorsed the extensive research that
went into the TTR project and forced anti-mining
interests throughout the country to realise that
their opposition needs to be backed up by
science, and that polemics and protest are not
in themselves justification for denying a mining
application.
That’s the view of Chris Castle, the principal of
Chatham Rock Phosphate (CRP) which, like TTR,
has had a maritime mining application declined in
the recent past by the Environmental Protection
Authority (EPA).
“You’ve actually got to back up those opinions
with facts, which is what the EPA concentrated
on,” CRP’s Castle told Mining NZ.
Castle said opponents of mining projects
would have to “concentrate less on noise and
more on substance” if they were to successfully
challenge such applications in the future.
In early August the EPA announced that it had
given the green light to TTR’s application - with
the EPA chairman delivering the casting vote - to
extract 50 million tonnes of ironsand a year off the
seabed 20 kilometres off the Taranaki coast, and
to export up to five million tonnes of recovered
concentrate.
The application to vacuum up the sand, extract
the roughly 10 percent of iron from it and return
the rest to the seabed, was initially declined by the
EPA which handed out a subsequent and similar
decision against CRP’s proposal to extract rock
phosphate nodules for fertiliser from the bed of
the Chatham Rise off the east coast of Canterbury.
TTR took its second application to the EPA
in a hearing that extended from February to May
this year, and it was successful in the face of
opposition from environmental and local Maori
interests.
No fewer than 13,733 submissions on the
application were received by the EPA, all but 156
of them opposed to it.
Media coverage of the application trumpeted
opposition claims that TTR’s operation would
destroy the seabed environment, threaten the
recovery of the blue whales that pass through the
area on annual migrations, and be an affront to
Maori values.
Almost excluded from the coverage was that
TTR would be investing nearly $600 million to get
the project up and running, with a further $250m
in annual operating and servicing costs, that it
would create 300 jobs locally and a further 1600
nationwide, and bring annual export revenues of
$400m into the country.
The lack of balance in mainstream media
coverage meant that it came as a surprise to the
wider public when TTR’s application was granted,
though the company itself was always confident it
could prove the environmental safety no less than
the economic sustainability of the scheme.
TTR chief executive Alan Eggers expressed his
delight at the EPA decision though it relied on the
casting vote of the hearing committee chairman
after two of the five committee members refused
to support it.
Eggers said the company was untroubled
by the raft of conditions the EPA imposed on
the scheme, noting that most of them had been
suggested by the company itself.
CRP’s Castle, who attended much of the
hearing, said it was apparent that TTR’s second
and successful hearing reflected the presence of
“better qualified people” on the decision-making
committee.
Castle said he was unfazed by the need for
the chairman to deliver the casting vote that got
the scheme across the line, and believed that
the two dissidents did not reflect deep-seated
unease about it within the EPA. He said that the
seeming closeness of the decision was more a
factor of the hearings being held under the old
Exclusive Economic Zone Act, which had inherent
difficulties in attracting qualified staff, than it did
with the science behind the application.
Under the revised Act, which came into effect
on June 1, boards of inquiry appointed by the
Minister of Mines will replace the decision-making
committee, with members’ remuneration levels
being determined along state services guidelines
limiting them to about $800 a day.
CRP intended lodging its second application
to mine phosphate from the seabed within 15
months, though Castle thought that time-scale
might be shortened by the hike in CRP’s share
value making fund-raising much easier.
The chief executive of extractives industry
lobbying group Straterra, Chris Baker, told
MiningNZ that it would be wrong to view the EPA’s
decision as a win for one side or the other.
Instead he says it was “a victory of process
and science over confusion and ignorance” which
showed that, while it would never be easy to gain
consents for such projects in this country, it could
still be done if the applicant got “all its scientific
and environmental ducks in a row beforehand”.
Baker dismissed the opposition’s highlighting
of the chairman’s casting vote as “a question-
mark in the minds of only the people who didn’t
want the application to succeed”.