New Zealand exporters are being put at risk by the country’s slow pace to decarbonise, a director of a Taranaki company that has just announced a large hydrogen project in Australia says.
Hiringa Energy director Cathy Clennett said international demand for investment in renewable projects was heating up as markets moved towards giving preference to products produced with low carbon emissions.
“It is soon not going to be a nice-to-have. You’ll be downgraded or left out of these premium markets, European markets in particular,” she said.
“As an exporting nation, we are at risk of no longer being competitive.”
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The company has recently announced a partnership in Australia with Sundown Pastoral Company to develop hydrogen and solar energy to power a cotton farm in northern New Sou Wales.
“If our exporters don’t have the ability to decarbonise, they’re going to be disadvantaged, you can see that in the way that our Australian partners are thinking, how do we position ourselves to be competitive and attractive?
“People like Sundown are looking ahead by developing a product, which is carbon positive, and they’re getting a premium for that,” Clennett said.
The Good Earth Green Hydrogen and Ammonia project has received a share of $64 million in NSW government funding, out of a $150m funding pool.
This will see a massive solar farm built to power a hydrogen and ammonia operation at the Wathagar ginning facility near Moree, the world’s first Good Earth Cotton farm producing climate positive and traceable cotton.
The project “will provide a long-term sustainable pathway for multiple hard-to-abate agricultural and logistics activities, including ammonia-based fertiliser, replacing diesel and LPG for powering the irrigation system, the drying facility, farm vehicle,and transporting cotton to market,” according to a press release.
Hiringa’s Kapuni wind turbine project with Ballance Agri-Nutrients would give New Zealand a similar opportunity to decarbonise farming once it was up and running, Clennett said.
Cathy Clennett, Hiringa Energy, with MP for Whanganui Steph Lewis at a 40-year celebration at the Ballance Kapuni plant in February.
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Cathy Clennett, Hiringa Energy, with MP for Whanganui Steph Lewis at a 40-year celebration at the Ballance Kapuni plant in February.
“There’s lots of applications for hydrogen in farming here too, but unfortunately we don’t have hydrogen production here to do that, it would have been good to be first.”
The four 125-metre wind turbines the company planned to build at Kokiri Rd, 5km northeast of Manaia township, would generate electricity to produce hydrogen used to make fertiliser by the nearby Ballance Agri-Nutrients ammonia-urea manufacturing plant, but in five years would transition to supplying fuelfo commercial and heavy transport.
Hiringa is also building a heavy transport hydrogen refuelling network in four North Island centres that will be operational from the end of 2023, with the first hydrogen-powered trucks arriving in the country later this year.
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Originally given the go-ahead in December 2021 by an independent panel of experts, the $70m Kapuni project has been stalled by two court cases, with the latest, an appeal led by Greenpeace against the conditions of the resource consent, to be heard in Wellington by the Court of Appeal on May 23.
If the court cleared the way for the project to begin, work would not start until next summer and would take 12 months, Clennett said.
She said it was frustrating to be opposed by Greenpeace because of its campaign in New Zealand against synthetic fertiliser.
“We’re trying to address climate change and be proactive, we are taking tangible acionand being opposed by a group that says it is what they want too.”
Delays in getting the go-ahead for new renewable projects made New Zealand less attractive, she said.
“The investors are international companies, they work globally, so the ease of consenting is definitely a risk.
“We don’t have time on our side. The next 10 years are critical for New Zealand. New Zealand will have to move really fast to implement projects, like our project at Kapuni, to stay competitive.”
Greenpeace says hydrogen made using clean, renewable energy could play an important role in moving away from dependence on fossil fuels, but “the devil is in the detail,” a statement attributed to climate campaigner Christine Rose said.
The organisation opposed the project at Kapuni because “urea is a major climate polluter, whether it’s made with green hydrogen or fossil gas”.
“To deal with the climate crisis, and protect rivers and fresh drinking water, the Government should phase out the production and useof snthetic nitrogen fertiliser altogether,” she said.
“It should not be consenting projects that intend to produce more synthetic nitrogen fertiliser.”
She claimed the proposed project would lead to a 7000 tonne per year increase in urea production, and there was no guarantee hydrogen produced from the Kapuni project would be used to fuel heavy vehicles as the application claimed.