Maui gas for smelting?

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32789, 14 December 1971, Page 2

Maui gas for smelting?

(N.Z. Press Association) NEW PLYMOUTH, December 13. A United States mining giant, the Marcona Corporation, plans to make a feasibility study of the prospects for a New Zealand-based ironsand smelting industry using Maui offshore gas as a heat source. Marcona’s executive vicepresident (Mr G. Furth, of San Francisco), gave initial details of the proposals at the opening ceremony for the corporation’s Waipipi iron-

sands extraction project last week. Mr J. Todd, managingdirector of Todd Motor Industries, whose family holds a 25 per cent interest at Waipipi and is a partner in the consortium which discovered the Maui field, said he believed' this could be another possible use for'the gas, in addition to firing thermal power stations. Mr Furth said that such an industry would be dependent on its relative cost and whether New Zealand could support another domestic steel industry. Marcona was committed in its mining agreements with the New Zealand Government to explore al! avenues for development and was con-

stantly investigating alternative uses for the huge natural deposits of ironsand. Marcona’s contract to supply 10m tons of ironsand concentrate over the next 10 years to Japanese steel mills, involves less than 2 per cent of the proven reserves of the mineral. At Taharoa, where New Zealand Steel holds rights to extensive ironsands deposits estimated at more than 1000 m tons, a project almost identical with Waipipi is close to completion. An offshore loading buoy, now under construction in Auckland, will be moored to 'the seabed in March, and loading of ironsand slurry is expected to begin about the middle of the year.