Posted September 25, 2018 05:24:49 The New Zealand government is expected to announce today it will build a new 1,250-tonnes-a-year plant to capture carbon dioxide from the country’s burning of fossil fuels.
The New York Times reports the country is to build the new plant, which will be built by Australian company GNS Science, at its Hauraki National Park.
It will be the first time the government has built a plant to store carbon dioxide for the long term.
The project has been delayed by a court challenge to the New Zealand Government’s carbon capture plan.
“The new plant will capture some 2,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, but we are looking at about 300 tonnes a year,” a government spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said the company was building the plant to meet a deadline set by the Government in 2018 for capturing emissions from burning fossil fuels and for reducing the amount of greenhouse gas pollution that it emitted.
“We have made progress with this project,” the spokesperson said, but “the future of the facility is uncertain”.
The spokesperson added that the Government had no plans to make the project permanent.
“Our aim is to move this facility to the next stage, to the phase where we have a long-term carbon capture plant,” the spokesman said.
GNS has made an investment of about $8 million in the plant, and is using the money to pay for a new facility to be built to capture more carbon dioxide.
The company has also committed to investing $5 million in a carbon capture facility in New Zealand, which was set to be completed by 2019.
The first stage of the plant will be able to capture about 7.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, the spokesperson added.
The spokeswoman said the plan was for the facility to last about 10 years.
GNS also wants to build an intermediate- and long-range plant to produce more methane, the New York Daily News reported.
The site has already been used for the first stage, and the company is planning to construct a second stage, which would capture methane, and process it into methane gas for storage, the newspaper reported.
The announcement comes as the Government’s Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) program is struggling to catch up with global demand for fossil fuels, according to the Daily News.
The carbon capture project has also been criticized by the World Bank, which has said the program was expensive, inefficient and failed to deliver a cost-effective solution to address global climate change.
The CO2 capture plant is the latest in a series of controversial initiatives the Government is taking to meet climate change targets.
The country has signed agreements to set up a carbon market and is also considering establishing an emissions trading scheme, a proposal that was rejected by the Australian Parliament in 2019.