By Lachlan Forsyth
The damp hilltops of Taranaki are lands rich with lush grazing land on top, and mineral wealth deep down.
The traditional way to get oil and gas is to drill in and extract it. Increasingly it also involves a technique called hydraulic fracturing, more commonly known as fracking.
Industry players say that fracking has revolutionised the once-dwindling US gas industry, opening up previously inaccessible or uneconomic areas, and they say it has the potential to be just as revolutionary, and lucrative, here in New Zealand.
Fracking's been around since World War Two, but with most of the easy oil and gas now gone, companies are increasingly turning to methods to extract more oil and gas.
So how does fracking work?
Once a well is drilled, a high-pressure cocktail of water, sand and chemicals is injected into the rock - that pressure fractures the rock.
And the sand that is squeezed into the fractures stays there, holding them open.
Then the oil or gas that is contained within the rock and much of the fluid is sucked out.
David Robinson from the Petroleum Exporters and Producers Association has given him the job of explaining fracking to the public.
He said fracking is simply about getting as much as we can out of our reserves, while we still have them
“Renewable energy sources are coming, but for the immediate future conventional forms of energy will be the mainstay of what we use to live our lives,” he said.
But neighbours are not so keen on the prospect.
Sarah Roberts and her husband David Morrison have good reason to worry.
Their farm in rural Taranaki is surrounded by well sites, one of which was found to have been leaking fluid for up to two years - so not only do they trust the process.
“When they bring up the oil, they bring up the fracking chemicals with them, so I think there's huge scope for something to go wrong, massive scope,” she said.
They're horrified at the thought of what those chemicals could do.
“It feels pretty scary really, in fact the whole time I’ve felt scared, my family have felt scared. We don't want to drink the water anymore, in fact we don't drink the water any more. The nearest site to us, it’s right over the top of the aquifers that all the farms down here take water from.”
The energy minister believes the industry is safe
“In Taranaki it's actually been done very, very well. There’s been no effects on the environment whatsoever and that's the way we want to keep it. High standards when this practice is undertaken,” Phil Heatley said.
Something David Robinson agrees with.
“It's a science that's been around for a long, long time, and it's been proven, and done properly by qualified engineers in a consented operation the chances of anything going wrong with that bore are extremely low.”
Extremely low, but not impossible.
A report by the Taranaki Regional Council last year highlighted issues with the storage of fluids at five wellsites near the Kapuni well, which had resulted in the contamination of groundwater.
People who oppose fracking point to this as evidence the industry isn't perfect.
“It is putting our fresh water aquifers at real risk... That's not unsustainable, that's insane,” said Teresa Goodin, Kaitaki Community Board member
Growing public pressure has caused the Christchurch City Council to call for a moratorium on fracking, just like they already have in France, Bulgaria, and parts of Australia and Canada.
“I can't get my head around why countries like the States, France, South Africa have put moratoriums and banning on fracking - and they're continents, they're large! And here’s us, tiny little islands and we're having trouble making our minds up. Well, we're not really we haven't started the conversation yet,” said Sarah Roberts.
Energy Minister Phil Heatley disagrees with that argument.
“It's understandable that they did that overseas because their standards were pretty poor and they had instance with some effects on the environment. Well we don't tolerate that here.”
But Kaitaki Community Board member Teresa Goodin said there is too much at risk, and there must be an independent environmental impact assessment before fracking is allowed to continue.
“Water is incredibly important in an area like Taranaki, and once we lose that water you can't feed it to stock, you can't irrigate with it, you can't drink it, so it becomes a huge problem - once you've lost your water, you've pretty much lost your land.”
“Hydraulic fracturing is a well-proven technique that can extract more oil and gas from the reserves that we've got and don't forget how important those reserves are for New Zealand,” David Robinson said.
The economic potential fracking promises is a powerfully persuasive argument.
Oil and gas already bring in royalties of about a billion dollars a year, and a further $3 billion in follow on spending.
It provides jobs for thousands of people in Taranaki, and could do the same in other parts of the country.
“In other regions around New Zealand, if discoveries are made - and I hope they are - they'll expand economic activities and provide real jobs for people, and only once those commercial fields are discovered and proven would the topic of hydraulic fracturing even come into the mix,” Mr Robinson said.
The one thing both sides of this argument agree on is that the public needs to know more.
“I think people don't understand what's happening in the oil business. People don't understand the integrity of the wells and the way they're designed, and the scientists that are working on them. They don't appreciate oil and gas occurs in oil and rock. I think it when they don't understand and they hear about something like this which understandably can be emotive, there may naturally be a concern,” Mr Robinson said.
A need for more information is something Teresa Goodin agrees with.
“Once people really know what's going on, and the scope and the scale of it, i think people will be marching down the street,” she said.
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