Hill to Fill: Clearing slash, creating biofuel

Henry Koia

Opinion

Our former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern, a current trustee of the Earthshot board, told media at the Earthshot Prize awards ceremony in Singapore last month that Earthshot had amplified the solutions to fight climate change. She was quoted as saying “we need speed and pace and Earthshot focuses on providing both”.

Today marks the third anniversary of New Zealand’s declaration of a climate emergency.

Addressing the House on December 2, 2020, Prime Minister Ardern said, “this declaration is an acknowledgment of the next generation: an acknowledgment of the burden that they will carry if we do not get this right and if we do not take action now.”

On December 16, 2020, in response to that declaration, I founded my company Climate Vision (formerly IwiTech), a Maori kaupapa social enterprise, to take my “From Hill to Fill” biofuel project from dream to deployment.

Imagine you are in the Mangatu forest. A mobile modular biorefinery pulls into a landing recently vacated by a cable harvesting crew. A work crew of drones, each with AI robotics capability and 200kg lifting capacity, are unleashed to scour the hills for slash left by the harvesting operation.

The drones detect, collect and stockpile the slash back at the landing where the stockpile is being processed by a mobile plant technology with wood chipping and storage capability. This technology then feeds the semi-processed feedstock into a modular gasification technology which produces syngas from the feedstock. The syngas is then transferred to a Fischer-Tropsch technology that produces and stores drop-in-ready liquid biofuel that can be pumped directly into logging machinery as a substitute for fossil diesel.

The end product is ready to be transported to nearby harvesting operations to fuel their machinery, or trucked out the forest gate to market.

The government has a duty to be proactive in providing the financial and technical resources necessary to advance my Hill to Fill project, at least to the point where private investors are willing to take over. This duty arises from the government’s obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

By virtue of the UNDRIP, Maori have the right to the conservation and protection of the environment and the productive capacity of their lands (Article 29), as well as the right to have access to financial and technical assistance from the government for the enjoyment of that right (Article 39).

In April 2021, I wrote to Jacinda Ardern regarding my Hill to Fill project. Having not heard back from her, I wrote to her again in April 2022, this time highlighting the Crown’s Treaty obligations to actively support my Hill to Fill project. At the same time, I wrote to Minister Woods (Research, Science and Innovation), Minister Shaw (Climate Change), Minister Parker (Environment) and Minister Allan (Conservation). I asked each of them to confirm what immediate next steps they were going to take to honour their Treaty obligations to actively support my Hill to Fill project. Not one of them replied.

Rather than flog a dead horse, I’ve been waiting for the political landscape to shift, even though the project should have been two years into its R&D programme. But that shift has now come with Christopher Luxon at the helm. How his leadership impacts on the government of the day’s attitude towards upholding its obligations to proactively support Maori-led climate-related projects remains to be seen.

■  For more information, see Henry’s website: www.climatevision.co.nz