By TONY MOBILIFONITIS
THE campaign to restore refining capability to New Zealand’s Marsden Point oil refinery has been boosted with public shareholding of the management company passing the 51% level to nearly 53%.
Shares in the company can easily be purchased by both Australians and New Zealanders via the share trading platform Sharsies. This raises the real possibility of a people’s victory over the hijacking of the refinery by the woke board members of Channel Infrastucture.
The board, in cahoots with Australian mining billionaire Twiggy “Green Guru” Forrest’s Fortescue Future Industries (FFI), are trying to turn the facility into a manufacturer of expensive, unnecessary and virtue-signalling “green fuels” of dubious quality while ignoring the refining capability for local, high quality sweet crude oil.
Also, so-called e-fuels, or synthetic fuels, must be produced by wind and solar to qualify as “carbon neutral”, and sourcing industrial electricity exclusively from wind and solar farms is a major problem and requires massive areas of land.
The new National-ACT-NZ First coalition government is also investigating re-opening the refinery and reinstating offshore oil and gas exploration banned by Jacinca Ardern and her anti-industry Labor-Green-Maori Party rabble, who had to be reminded in Parliament recently that the country can’t actually operate without petroleum products.
Meanwhile, New Zealand, since the decommissioning of the refinery in 2022, is totally reliant on global shipping to deliver its petroleum supplies, while that system now struggles with choke points in Panama, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea and bans on ships going to Israel.
The country has also been forced to import inferior products whereas previously, the refinery produced the majority of the nation’s jet fuel, which was regarded as some of the highest quality jet fuel in the world. Airlines and air freighters made special flights from Europe simply to load up on the fuel.
Bitumen, a refinery by-product, was also a third the price of the imported product, according to Operation Good Oil organiser Karl Barkley. Another by-product of the refinery was also carbon dioxide, used in beer, soft drinks, food production and other industrial uses.
Channel Infrastructure has also scandalously failed to put the refinery into a proper decommissioned mode and have instead simply destroyed parts of the refinery apparatus, meaning recommissioning would take an estimated two years, Barkley said.
Last year Barkley told Paul Brennan of Reality Check Radio that cutting off a nation’s oil refining capacity exposed that nation to potential disaster. “I’m ex-army and there’s two ways of looking at this. You either take a country over by force and shoot them with bits of lead or you cut off their fuel supply and let them survive with that, which is not going to happen [turn out] very good.”
Brennan wondered whether BlackRock’s much publicised “investment” in NZ under the Ardern government had something to do with the situation.
Barkley said the refinery was originally established by the government in 1962 to process the very high quality light or “sweet” crude oil sourced off the coast of Taranaki province that required very little refining and would possibly run a diesel motor straight out of the ground.
Operation Good Oil spokeswoman Grabrielle Thompson said this week the general public shareholders status had reached 52.6%. “So yes, via negotiation and careful strategy, we do have a chance of regaining control over New Zealand’s only oil refinery,” she wrote to shareholders.
Not only will the new shareholders being doing something good for their nation, – but they may shortly be financially rewarded for their support.
Washington has just urged Ukraine to halt its attacks on Russian energy infrastructure, so as to temporarily suppress oil price rises. But as soon as they are told to recommence strikes, Russia will retaliate and global oil prices will surge. Just as Washington wants to happen.
The U.S. and UK air strikes on Yemen are also working to this end.
When global oil prices surge this year, which they will, the Marsden refinery and its shareholders should see a nice increase in the company’s value and share price.
So now’s probably a good time to do some positive financial activism.
Taranaki oil and diesel (the same great quality found in SA) was taken free of charge; as it was and is, in Australia, thanks to the 1954 (Menzies) Oil Price Parity Agreement.
Many thanks to Muddy. This kind of information is hard to get hold of. As far as I know, excluding theoretical oil storage, the total actually in continental tanks is four days.
As far as I am aware Taranaki oil never went through Marsden Point.
Only imported black crude did that is why bitumen was a byproduct.
Taranaki oil was taken out of NZ – by the Majors.
Gifted and $80 Million to help the new (Big Oil) adapt to the new environment.
Following the election of the reformist Fourth Labour Government in 1984, the Petroleum Sector Reform Act was introduced. This Act deregulated the petroleum industry, with 1,500 workers expected to lose their jobs.[2] The Refinery assets were transferred by the Government to the New Zealand Refining Company Limited, a consortium of the five major petrol retailers. BP, Mobil and Z Energy are currently major shareholders.[3] The Government injected $80 million to enable the company to adapt to the new environment. A major efficiency drive was launched to cut operating costs. (Wiki)
Need to deal with our own backyard as well, Lib/Nats have shutdown all bar two of our refineries and these have only one train in operation each (3), we are also paying them Billions $ to stay open.
We have 24 days supply of each fuel type in storage, storage includes on ships in transit, this is in peace times.
The emergency reserves we had stored in the USA have been sold.
The largest oil reserves know in the world are under Coober Pedy.
$20 trillion shale oil find surrounding Coober Pedy ‘can fuel Australia’ (copy and paste that into your search engine)
Bloody good Parliamentary inter-play in the linked video, GONZO -Go Nz-Oh?