Gas: 'Future Unlimited’

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31936, 13 March 1969, Page 16

Gas: 'Future Unlimited’

The New Zealand natural gas industry will need aggressive selling, top-rate management, and a new image, If It is to become the success it should be, said a Canadian natural gas expert, Mr F. J. Parks, in Auckland on Monday. Given these conditions, he said, it was likely the development of natural gas in New Zealand would be underestimated, as it bad been when the industry began in Canada in 1954.

| Mr Parks, who is manager of the manufacturers’ section of the Canadian Gas Association in Toronto, is one of a consulting engineering and capital equipment mis-

sion of six now in New Zealand.

“I don’t think there is any country in the world where the gas industry’s future is more unlimited than in Canada,” Mr Parks told an Auckland seminar.

He said that natural gas in Canada had produced a phenomenal increase in secondary industries. “There will be fantastic things happening in New Zealand’s secondary industries after four or five years, but this will depend on how aggressive your marketing people are,” he said. “Aggressive marketing is vitally important, as, of course, is the price.” Natural gas would also require a new image in

New Zealand, said Mr Parks.

“I get the impression that people here consider manufactured gas to be a very much out-dated form of energy. This happened in Canada at the time of our conversion, but an extensive advertising programme put that right.” Mr Parks said the gas companies in Canada had stressed natural gas was clean, modern, and efficient, and that if people were to be “in the swing of things” they should have it.

“They looked forward to having gas heating in their homes, which had traditionally been heated by oil or electricity,” he said. Mr Parks emphasised that management of the highest standard was necessary to make the natural gas industry successful.

“In Canada, any shortcomings in the industry were because of lack of planning.” The versatility of natural gas could be gauged by the fact that it could be used in 26,000 different ways in industry, from glass-making to bread-baking. Mr Parks said natural gas supplied 10 per cent of Canada’s energy in 1954. “In 1968 we were supplying 20 per cent, in spite of relatively cheap electricity and competition from oil.”