Construction is under way to convert an Awatoto industrial building into a bottling plant on a site where the owners have permission to extract more than 400 million litres of underground water a year.
One Pure International Group was granted resource consent in December to develop the automated bottling plant in the 4800sq m building beside SH2 south of Napier.
The company has had consent since 2013, when it bought the property, to extract up to 7.8 million litres of water a week from a bore on the site - or up to 405.6 million litres a year.
A spokesman said yesterday that the company did not plan to use its full water take allocation and the location of its bore meant any water not pumped out of the underground aquifer simply flowed out to sea.
"The amount of water that we will take is minimal to what's available," he said.