Coal not on back burner

It will be another 30 years before some of Canterbury’s biggest consented burners of coal – including milk-powder processing companies, food and beverage manufacturers, a hospital and a university – are forced to stop.

An Environment Canterbury (ECan) list of consented coal consumers shows Fonterra’s Clandeboye plant in South Canterbury is allowed to burn up to 64 tonnes of coal an hour – the rough equivalent quantity-wise of bringing in every 60 minutes about 128 trailers of firewood.

Clandeboye is the region’s biggest consented burner of coal. Its resource consent to use seven boilers to generate a maximum of

203.4 megawatts (MW) of electricity remains valid until June

30, 2039, during which time it is not allowed to discharge more than 463 kilograms of sulphur dioxide each hour.

Fonterra says it is ‘‘actively transitioning away from coal’’ and will not install any more coal boilers from 2030.

The second-largest coal burner is Synlait’s Dunsandel milkprocessing plant up the road, which has consent until February

2049 to run four coal-fired boilers generating 85MW of power and discharging no more than 230kg of sulphur dioxide an hour. Synlait says it is only operating three of its coal boilers and has committed to never building another.

ECan chairman Steve Lowndes said he requested the list of the region’s biggest consented coal burners because he was concerned at the ‘‘shilly-shallying around’’ when it came to shunning coal and using clean, sustainable alternatives.

Lowndes recently joined the Extinction Rebellion protest group and said he was unsurprised the drive to more dairying showed up clearly in the figures on the list.

‘‘If the dairy industry is going to keep its social mandate to operate, it is going to have to move out of coal. We have to get on with it and change now.’’

He appreciated the amount of coal actually being burnt was not necessarily the quantity consented for burning.

Other big consented coal burners on the list include:

❚ Fonterra’s Darfield plant, with a consent lasting until December

2045.

❚ Fonterra’s Studholme plant, which is allowed to burn up to

4.472 tonnes of coal an hour until December 2026.

❚ McCain Foods at Washdyke, which can burn up to 6 tonnes of coal an hour until June 2039.

❚ Canterbury District Health Board’s (CDHB) Christchurch Hospital, which is allowed to burn 5.225 tonnes of coal per hour until September 2044.

❚ Lincoln University, whose consent to burn up to 1.5 tonnes of coal an hour runs until March

2025.

CDHB energy manager Tim Emson said changes were being made to Christchurch Hospital’s coal-burning programme.

‘‘We are still burning coal in the 2010 boilers but are working on a new biomass energy centre with the Ministry of Health that should be operational by the end

of 2020. ‘‘The current boiler house is earthquake damaged and it’s not economical or feasible to move and convert the existing boilers.’’

In his November update last year, CDHB chief executive David Meates said the organisation had reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent from its 2014 levels, ‘‘making us one of the country’s top 20 reducers’’.

‘‘It makes complete ethical health sense for health agencies to be mandated to improve our communities’ health and wellbeing by reducing our carbon and sulphur emissions,’’ Meates said.

Green Party energy spokesman Gareth Hughes said coal was the most polluting fossil fuel and it was hoped these organisations would start using cleaner fuels before their consents expired.

The list showed the ‘‘big carbon impact’’ of the New Zealand dairy industry, which posed a risk to trade because international consumers were increasingly wanting low-carbon products. Wood was a cleanburning fuel option for many commercial and industrial boilers and offered improved air quality over coal-burning.

Fonterra’s general manager of sustainability and resources, Ian Goldschmidt, said the company had a ‘‘commitment to achieving net-zero emissions for our global operations by 2050’’.

‘‘Our scale, lack of economically viable alternatives, particularly in the South Island, and need for a reliable energy source, means that we will be reliant on coal for longer than we would like.’’

Synlait’s director of sustainability and brand, Hamish Reid, said Synlait announced in June last year it would never commission another coal-fired boiler.

‘‘We intend to entirely remove coal from our supply chain and replace it with electricity.

‘‘The challenge rests with getting sufficient capacity into our site.’’