Fury over Government geothermal stance

The Government is under fire for holding back development of renewable geothermal energy by charging hundreds of thousands of dollars for access to data from exploratory drilling carried out from the 1960s to the 1980s.

The outgoing president of the Geothermal Association, Auckland consultant Jim Lawless, said the Government's 101 wells had been drilled with public money and the results should be made public to encourage geothermal development.

The country faces recurrent power shortages in dry years and a gas crisis that forced the closure of Methanex's methanol plant, at Motunui, near Waitara, last week, with the loss of 40 jobs, because the Maui gasfield is drying up.

The Government made the original investment in one of the world's first geothermal power stations at Wairakei, which opened in 1958, and Lawless estimated that it had spent about $68 million on drilling the 101 exploratory wells up to the 1980s.

He said similar data in Australia was available for only the cost of providing it, and in New Zealand the Government allocated $15 million in June to map potential oil and gas reserves to entice oil explorers to this country.

Yet when he represented the Taupo District Council in the recent hearings over Contact Energy's proposed expansion of the Wairakei power station, the Treasury provided data from monitoring wells for the council only.

"It took nine months to get the information under an Official Information Act request and it was only made available on the basis that it would not be given to Contact, which is operating the field," Lawless said.

"They have to operate the field without the monitoring information from wells that were drilled with public money."

A Treasury senior analyst, Scott McHardy, said data from the Government's 101 geothermal wells had been sold to Mighty River Power for a fee of "hundreds of thousands, as opposed to millions" of dollars.

The data was available to other buyers for the same price.

He said the data was a commercial asset acquired by the Gas and Geothermal Trading Group of the former Ministry of Energy when the state was a direct participant in energy development.

Lawless and other speakers at the Geothermal Association's recent annual conference in Taupo also urged the Government to restore support for a geothermal diploma which was axed by the aid agency NZAID two years ago.

The director of the university's Geothermal Institute, Dr Stuart Simmons, said

the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology spent just $1 million on geothermal research out of its $433 million budget. The foundation has asked the Government for an extra $5 million a year from next year.

Associate Energy Minister Harry Duynhoven, said he told Simmons: "You present us with a proposal and I'll do all I can to see that it happens."

Data for sale

* The Government has data from exploratory geothermal wells drilled from the 1960s to the 1980s and wants to sell the information.

* The outgoing president of the Geothermal Association, Jim Lawless, says the data should be made publicly available.

* Lawless believes such a move will help overcome looming energy shortages.