8 Rivers will never be worth the price tag

Hydrogen hit headlines once again this week with the release of US ‘clean tech’ company 8 Rivers’ plan to develop a mega-project in Taranaki with a price tag of more than $1 billion.

It proposes using enormous amounts of gas to produce power, hydrogen, and urea.

The hydrogen would be used as an energy source, while the urea would be used as fertiliser on New Zealand’s farms and for export.

But there’s a problem. We have around 10 years of gas left in New Zealand.

Over the last decade, 75 wells have been drilled, but not one has been commercially viable.

Add to that the fact that Government has just banned new oil and gas exploration because of climate change.

8 Rivers will never be worth the billion dollar price tag because its primary input is a finite fuel that’s being phased out.

The proponents of 8 Rivers are asking us to accept that we should reopen New Zealand to exploration and keep extracting dirty gas for decades to come.

All this at the same time as the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s air raid siren of a scientific report, that pleads with politicians around the world to halve carbon emissions in the next decade.

If we don’t, they warn we risk the displacement of tens of millions of people, and devastating impacts to our health, homes, communities, food security, culture, and livelihoods.

The report gives us just 12 years to turn this situation around completely. Meanwhile, the oil and gas industry is asking us to believe we can have it all.

Instead of phasing out dirty energy, they suggest burying carbon dioxide underground.

It’s called Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology, and it’s one of the features of the 8 Rivers proposal. Carbon capture and storage is a weak and highly expensive technology in every aspect – technical, economic, safety, liability.

Not only is it a truly risky investment choice, but with all the renewable energy and energy efficiency solutions already available, we don’t need it.

The project’s supporters point to one small 50 megawatt power plant in Texas that’s trialling the technology.

Compare that to the 18,000 megawatts of distributed solar that was installed worldwide in the year 2016 alone – almost twice the capacity of New Zealand’s entire national grid.

Onshore wind power and solar – even without subsidies – are now the cheapest source of new bulk power in almost every major economy.

Solar is the fastest growing energy source in the world, yet in New Zealand we’ve met less than four per cent of our solar energy potential.

Instead of spending $20 million taxpayer dollars on a single feasibility study for 8 Rivers, the Government could be spending that money on building real, onthe-ground solar projects that would cut energy bills right now.

For $20 million, we could put solar panels and batteries on every school and social house in Taranaki today.

We don’t need to wait to prove that it works.

As for hydrogen, it may well have a future in Taranaki if it’s developed using clean energy from the sun and the wind.

Taranaki already has a workforce equipped with unique skills in the energy sector and could become the hub for a new, thriving offshore wind industry.

With just 12 years to halve the world’s climate emissions, the Government should be investing in proven clean energy technologies like these.

It shouldn’t spend a dollar more subsidising fossil fuels.

Let’s be clear: making hydrogen and urea out of gas is neither clean nor renewable.

It would continue our dependence on mining, drilling, transporting and burning fossil fuels, which would still pollute our air, lands and oceans.

It would also dramatically increase the production of urea, a synthetic fertiliser responsible for driving dairy intensification, suffocating our rivers with algal blooms and pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The promise of carbon capture and storage is a distraction.

Instead of wasting our limited time and public money trying to figure out how to bury pollution, let’s embark on an ambitious programme to roll out the existing clean and safe energy technologies that don’t produce pollution in the first place.

Let’s be clear: making hydrogen and urea out of gas is neither clean nor renewable.