Waste wood from Northland's forests could be used to fire a recommissioned Marsden B power station.
Mighty River Power is looking at refiring the 250-megawatt Marsden B, which was built in the late 1970s to run on oil but was mothballed in 1978 without being used.
Late last year, state-owned Mighty River
ruled out using oil to refire the station for short-term emergency generation, and as a result this week said it would give the Government a $75 million dividend.
Mighty River chief executive Doug Heffernan said the company was now investigating medium-term thermal fuel options for the plant, including coal, gas and waste wood from harvesting of the region's forests.
"In the Northland area there are potential bio-waste products available from forests.
"It's one option in Northland over the next 10 to 20 years as more forests come on-stream for harvest," he said.
"There is a lot of waste in the industry that cannot be processed. In other countries, that wood has been put into a boiler arrangement that is linked to a generator."
Using any fuel other than oil at Marsden B would require new resource consents and it would take three to five years to finish the investigations and sort out what fuel to use, Mr Heffernan said.
The New Zealand Refining Company intends to lodge resource consent applications this week for its own gas-fired power station at the Marsden Pt oil refinery, said general manager Thomas Zengerly.
The company wants to build a $120 million, 84MW gas-fired station that will power its operations and boost supplies to the national grid.
Mr Zengerly said yesterday that the plant would be built, owned and run by Australian energy company HRL.
The station would produce enough electricity to power the refinery as well as provide extra power - about 400 gigawatt/hours each year - to the national grid.
A "biomass boiler" that would create steam for use in the refinery by burning wood waste, asphalt or other solid fuels would sit alongside the power plant on the Marsden Pt site, he said.
The refinery's electricity bill is $15-20 million a year.
- NZPA
