Power station offer from Coalcorp

Press, 16 September 1987, Page 22

Power station offer from Coalcorp

PA Auckland The Coal Corporation has offered to help electrical supply authorities build their own power stations.

Coalcorp’s ventures and planning manager, Mr John Boshier, challenged the security of supply of gas and offered coal as a safer option when he addressed supply authority engineers at their annual conference in Auckland. Mr Boshier acknowledged that gas was easy to bum and could be used efficiently in combined cycle power generation where exhaust gases were recycled.

But he said the natural gas industry’s ability to give reliable long-term supply to combined cycle power stations must be questioned. “I would suggest that both the security of supply of gas and its price are quite unpredictable

over the 15-year economic lifetime of a power station,” he said.

It was hard to believe that gas prices could remain stable, given the need to build a second offshore Maui production platform, he said, and it was likely that around the turn of the century, oil prices, to which gas was often pegged, would rise.

He said that coal, which would come mainly from Waikato open-cast mines, offered a demonstrably better security of supply and would be suitable for power stations with outputs bigger than 100 megawatts He suggested Coalcorp and supply authorities go in a joint venture to spread the risk and reduce the capital requirements of building and running such stations. Although Coalcorp would wish to have a substantial share-holding,

supply authorities, either individually or as a consortium, should hold the majority stake, he said. The use of gas for electricity generation was also, criticised by a spokesman from the gas industry. Mr Jack McDowell, executive director of the Gas Association, said that burning gas in power stations wasted about 70 per cent of its energy content

He argued that it was in the national interest to sell the country’s electricity system to Electricorp at present-day, rather than historical, valuations.

The resulting higher electricity tariffs would then reduce the demand for electricity, and encourage the direct use of natural gas as a premium fuel rather than its inefficient use in power stations, he claimed.