Tiwai Point -- February 2020

The various owners of Tiwai Point aluminium smelter have been out-negotiating successive New Zealand Governments since before the smelter was even built. The builders and original owners of Tiwai Point, Consolidated Zinc, reneged on their agreement with the Government to build the Manapouri hydroelectric power station, leaving the Government to foot the $135 million bill in order to make ConZinc commit to the construction of the smelter.

The smelter paid little to no tax from its opening in 1971 through to the late 80s and, due to its exposure to bauxite prices, electricity charges and fluctuations in the New Zealand dollar, frequently operates at a loss.

Despite its wildly changing fortunes the smelter has grown to be a significant employer in Southland, directly employing some 800 staff and 2000 contractors, and by some estimates it’s responsible for 10% of Southland’s GDP. This is one card Rio Tinto, the smelter’s current owners, play when negotiating with the Government. The other card is the Manapouri power station; without Tiwai Point the station is a stranded asset.

Tiwai consumes some 570MW of electricity annually, which is one third of the South Island’s consumption and thirteen percent of the nation’s, and uses it to produce the most pure aluminium on the planet. Without the smelter there’s nowhere else for the power to go. Every time closure is threatened blueprints to upgrade the South Island’s power networks are dusted off, and every time the threat is averted, as with the Government’s $30 million bail out in 2013, the plans are shelved again.

Almost every commentary I have read about a post-smelter New Zealand imagines the power being exported to the North Island, with Huntly power station being closed and the nation rejoicing as power prices tumble. The reality is much further from the truth; there’s no infrastructure to carry the extra power north and the inefficiencies in transporting it that far are huge. The best we can hope for, if the infrastructure upgrades in the South Island are completed, is cheaper prices in the South with Manapouri operating at a greatly reduced capacity. The worst case scenario would see the power station mothballed.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were an option that allowed the Government to say “No, there will be no more handouts, we have another taker for the electricity and if you don’t like it you can leave”?

The Labour-led Coalition recently announced they were spending $10 million to replace the coal boilers in eight schools and two hospitals, reducing CO2 emissions by some 3000 tonnes (the equivalent of taking 1200 cars off the road). On the same day Fonterra announced they were converting their Te Awamutu factory from coal to wood pellets. This conversion carries a price tag of $11 million and will reduce emissions by 84,000 tonnes (32,000 car equivalents). I did the maths, that’s $8,333 per car equivalent for the Government and $344 for Fonterra. The private sector proves its efficiency again.

Fonterra’s Edendale factory in Southland is the Co-operative’s largest user of coal, it uses twice as much as the Te Awamutu site, but converting Edendale to an alternative fuel source is no simple task; there’s no piped supply of natural gas in the South Island and nowhere near enough readily available biomass to make wood pellets or similar a viable option. If only there was an abundant supply of clean, renewable energy close at hand and some way to get it to the factory…

Imagine if the Government dipped into their $200 million decarbonisation fund to build transmission lines to Fonterra’s Edendale plant, lines capable of bearing a load sufficient to allow Fonterra to convert their largest coal burning site to electricity.

There’s no downside; the Government would be investing in infrastructure, as they should, Fonterra would invest in a capital upgrade that reduces their coal consumption by a whopping 20% and the leverage Rio Tinto holds over our Government would all but disappear.

If Rio Tinto wants to stay then Manapouri could ramp up output and supply both Fonterra and the smelter, they’re capable of sustaining outputs of 800MW. If Rio Tinto decides to go, well there’s a little something they don’t tell you about the world’s most pure source of aluminium; each tonne produced comes with a price tag of 1.9 tonnes of CO2 emissions, and in Tiwai Point’s case that’s a whopping 570,000 tonnes per annum. Add that to the potential 170,000 tonne saving from weaning Edendale off coal and that’s the equivalent of removing 300,000 cars from New Zealand’s roads

If the Government are serious about climate change being this generation’s nuclear free moment then this would be a big step forward in taking action. Cutting CO2 emissions by a further 170,000 tonnes seems a lot more valuable to New Zealand than giving a gift to a billion dollar overseas-owned company.

Brisket Done Briskly, The Country -- February 2020

If you watch American sitcoms for any length of time, one character will inevitably invite another over for dinner with the encouraging phrase “Ma’s making brisket!”. The response is always overwhelmingly enthusiastic, and with good reason; slow cooked brisket takes a lot of time and effort but the result is melt in the mouth deliciousness.

Brisket, which is slowly becoming more available in New Zealand, is the group of chest muscles from a beef animal. These muscles do a huge amount of work; they’re in constant movement and support some 60% of the animal’s weight. They are dense with connective tissue and laced with fat, all reasons why in this country the brisket is usually ground up for mince or turned into sausages.

When I was queueing to buy barbecue in Texas, and I did this as often as possible, I would listen to the people around me speak in hushed reverential tones about the brisket they were about to buy. The only quandary they had was how many pounds they could justify purchasing, and this often came down to storage space. Brisket isn’t a food in Texas, it’s a cult.

Blissfully ignorant about the amount of effort that goes into cooking these massive slabs of meat, I asked my butcher to source me some and he happily obliged. Did I mention how big a whole brisket is? When you’re buying it at a barbecue joint you see a portion getting sliced, so I was quite unprepared for the two foot long, 8 kilogram behemoth that was cheerfully delivered to my freezer. The smoker I use is a home built affair made out of a 44-gallon drum and the brisket was so large it covered the whole cooking rack.

It might surprise you to learn that I’m not the world’s most patient man, so it was with a growing sense of despair when I realised recipe after recipe called for cooking times of 10 to 18 hours, there’s even a barbecue place in South Auckland that cooks their brisket for two days, and while I loved the brisket I tried in Texas I wasn’t sure I was quite that invested. The lesson here is to do your research before committing to an improbably large lump of meat.

I had just about resigned myself to the idea of the brisket staying in my freezer forever when I stumbled across a hot and fast recipe; this sounded like it was written just for me. Hot and fast in this context was five hours at 150 degrees C, but that was less than half the cooking time of other recipes and I was totally here for that.

While I was waiting for my smoker to come up to temperature I doused the meat in Worcestershire sauce to give it a peppery hit and to give the rub something to stick to; and that’s half the fun of this barbecuing lark, trying different rubs and finding the ones you like. I used one I’d brought back from Texas but there’s a huge array of local suppliers that I’m just itching to try. With my smoker sitting nicely at 150 degrees, in went the rub covered brisket and on went the lid. The neat thing about smoking food is there’s a long period where you can’t do anything but wait for the meat to take on smoke and develop some bark.

When I lifted the lid two hours later the meat had darkened considerably and started to puff up, so I took it out and wrapped it in tinfoil, pouring two cups of beef stock over the meat before I sealed the tinfoil and placed the package back in the smoker. This is when I inserted the meat probe, I hadn’t been worried about temperatures so far, but reaching an internal temperature of at least 80 degrees to dissolve the collagen and connective tissue is vital or you end up with chewy brisket, and nobody wants that.

Two hours later things started to go horribly awry; the brisket was cooked an hour early and I’d also allowed an hour for it to rest. No vegetables were ready and it was way too early for dinner, I’d almost accepted the indignity of having to serve cold meat for tea when I remembered a trick from the eighteen hour recipes; they rested their brisket in a chilly bin! I warmed a chilly bin up with boiling water and put the brisket in and covered it with a towel for added insulation.

This trick is nothing short of magical, that brisket went in at 90 degrees and came out a good three hours later piping hot at 70 degrees.

I highly recommend unwrapping and carving your brisket outside, it’s gloriously sticky and messy but well worth it for the rich, smoky, succulent and tender treat that follows. The meat stands alone without the need for barbecue sauce, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t add your current favourite. My sons were home for this meal and the leftovers were, as they say, gone by lunchtime.

That may have been the first brisket I ever cooked, but it definitely won’t be my last