The grounding of the Rena off Tauranga has seen oil polluting the ocean and beaches. Photo / Christine Cornege
The oil industry has been pressing the Government for the past five years to change the way it charges for oil pollution clean-ups, says John Pfahlert, the executive director of the Petroleum Exploration and Production Association of New Zealand.
"The proposed methodology would have seen our share go from $10,000
or so per offshore facility to over $200,000," he said. "Industry supported that approach", largely because it accepted that floating production, storage and offloading units (FPSO's) "posed a greater risk to the environment".
A review of oil spill preparedness in February identified west coast oil industry activity as the greatest threat to the environment in the event of an oil spill, with the only major oil spill risk on the east coast at the Marsden Pt oil refinery.
Pfahlert, who is also a member of Maritime NZ's Oil Pollution Advisory Committee, says the formula would also have seen 30 per cent increases in total oil and shipping industry funding for oil spill pollution readiness, with another 30 per cent rise in three years' time.
That would have taken the emergency response funding of around $4 million annually to around $6 million. Instead, the issue had become bogged down as officials debated what to include in a public discussion document that would precede any change to the way levies were set for the fund, which was intended only to fund "first responses" to an oil spill crisis.
