Latest / Early Edition with Ryan Bridge / Brian Cox: Bioenergy Association Chief Executive comments on the Bio-refinery at the Marsden Point Energy Precinct proposal

Transcript

Brian Cox: Bioenergy Association Chief Executive comments on the Bio-refinery at the Marsden Point Energy Precinct proposal · Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: A new biorefinery at the Marsden Point Energy Precinct is
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: being proposed. This is up and never knows. Marsden Point
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Channel Infrastructure has announced its enterday conditional project development agreement
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: with Sedra Energy. It would utilize some of the oil
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: refinery's decommissioned assets, which would be refurbished and reconfigured, and
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: it would take up approximately eighteen to twenty hectares of
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: land at the site. So it is good news some
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: reprieve for Northland. Brian Cox is the Bio Energy Association
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: Chief executive. He joins me this morning.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: Good morning, Brian, good morning, how are you.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: I'm well, thank you. How hard is it to convert
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: an oil refinery into a biorefinery.
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's quite commonly done around the world, although normally
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: it's sun was an operating refinery and unfortunately this one
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: was decommissioned and pulled apart, so this makes it a
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: lot harder to put it back together. But on the
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: other hand, I suppose it's lately goo you know, you've
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: started fresh and you do different things.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: Any idea how big this might be, how many jobs
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: that kind of thing.
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: No, the aspect of what we're looking at here is
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: very early days and I don't know the detailed specific
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: in myself, but in general I can comment. And the
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: aspect of where we're going is that as we have
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: to replace petroleum type materials, whether it's for fuels with
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: a biofueld, or whether it's plastics moving to bioplastics, all
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: of these require the processing of the organics or the
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: biomass into a material that is then able to be
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: used as either that fuel or as a plastic or
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: any other bio based material.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: What sort of organics are we typically using?
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: Look, we're not sure. I don't know enough about what
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: they are proposing on this, and I think for my
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: reading of it, it's very early days also for themselves.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: But the aspect is we could use the natural resources
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: of the New Zealand is rich for the biggest part
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: of course, is by a mass from trees. And you know,
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: a tree is a collection of chemicals that are holding
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: hands in a way which looks like a tree. We
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: pull them apart and we can repackage them to look like,
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: you know, a plastic handbag or something like this. So
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: the aspect is that we can look at quite small ones.
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: There are people around New Zealand already who are doing
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: this on a small scale.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: Go big isn't the problem though, it's quite hard to
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: get to these trees, quite a labor intensive thing to do,
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: and to you know, drag them out of the forest
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: and take them down to a Buyo refinery.
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: Well, you don't actually have any option as if you
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: think about how if we don't have petroleum and one
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: day for whatever reason we won't have it or it'll
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: be too expensive, then what are your options? And you
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: don't have any other options. So it's a better of
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: it's not a better of cost.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, Brian, thank you very much for your time.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: It's Brian Cox. He's the Bio Energy Association executive officer
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: with us this morning talking about I mean it is
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: got some good news for Marsden Point, the energy precinct
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: that could go from oil to biomass.
• 3:16
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• 3:20
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• 3:21
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• 3:23
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