Talks On Use Of Natural Gas

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30879, 12 October 1965, Page 22

Talks On Use Of Natural Gas

The Minister of Labour (Mr Shand) will have talks today with the chairman of the Australian National Gas Development Association (Mr W. W. Pettingell) on the distribution of New Zealand’s natural gas resources. The talks will be held while they are flying north from Christchurch to Wellington this morning.

The Australian Natural Gas Development Association is a consortium of major life insurance, banking, public utility and chemical companies. Mr Pettingell is also general manager of the Australian Gaslight Company, of Sydney. Mr Pettingell reached Christchurch from Sydney last evening to hold discussions with Mr Shand and general managers of the Auckland, Wellington, and other major New Zealand city gas companies.

“It is quite obvious there are reserves of natural gas within the North Island capable of being developed in such a way that they can serve residential, commercial, and more particularly, the industrial sector of the New Zealand community,” said Mr Pettingell. Mr Pettingell said that New Zealand’s natural gas could provide a major stimulus to a variety of industries which were important to New Zealand’s growth. Natural, gas, he said, could provide a source of energy highly competitive with all other forms, and a great supplementary contribution to that already being made by hydro-electric power. Mr Pettingell said it was a significant factor in the

growth of all major industrial metropolitan areas of the world that complementary systems of wired and piped energy were available. This particularly applied in the United States and more recently in Europe. Europe now, said Mr Pettingell, had natural gas after major discoveries in France, Holland, Germany, Italy, and Algeria. In the next decade the natural gas industry was going to make a very substantial contribution to economic development. Many of the lessons that would be derived would be from Europe as well as from North America. “It is an industry that calls for maximum co-operation between government and private sectors for its full development," said Mr Pettingell. Commenting on the forthcoming Sydney trade fair Mr Pettingell, who is also the president of the Chamber of Manufactures of New South Wales, said that it looked as if it was going to be “a firstclass show.”