Motunui costs released

Press, 20 December 1983, Page 23

Motunui costs released

PA Wellington Almost $350 million has been spent or committed in New Zealand so far on the synthetic petrol plant being built at Motunui, more than $lOO million of it in Taranaki. The “onshore” spending figures, which include more than $2OO million in construction contracts, are contained in the latest newsletter of the Major Projects Advisory Group. Figures referring to the overseas content have not been published. It is believed that these are kept in the “commercially sensitive” project files, which are available for scrutiny by the advisory group but not for public release. The Motunui plant is budgeted to cost SUSI47S million or about SNZ2 billion. Mechanical completion is scheduled for July, 1985. The plant will produce 570,000 tonnes of petrol a year — about one-third of New Zealand’s transport fuel needs — by converting natural gas from the Maui field into synthetic petrol. At the end of August the project construction was 34 per cent completed, and the work-force had increased to nearly 1500. It is expected to peak at 1800. The project will be the third, and biggest, of the gas-fed plants to be brought into production, following on from the ammonia-area fertiliser plant to Kapuni and the stand-alone methanol plant at Waitara.