At Issue

Martin Coles, Matrix Polymers

NZ Gas Ban – A Wake-up Call for All Rotomoulders?

New Zealand has proposed a ban on all new installations of natural gas. This is to reduce CO2 emissions so the country can attempt to meet its climate change targets.

This has come as quite a shock to the rotomoulding community there as it has the potential to be a major threat to the future of the process in New Zealand. There is also the uncomfortable question for the rest of the global rotomoulding industry – Is New Zealand the “canary in the mine”? the early warning signal of a new trend that will eventually affect rotomoulders in every country?

Natural gas is our industry’s energy of choice – it’s readily available in most places, it’s an efficient form of energy and it’s cheap. If bans come in and we’re not going to be allowed to use it, what are the alternatives and are these practical and realistic?

Let’s look at electricity.

It seems that everything is going to be converted to electricity. So, what about rotomoulding machines? There are a few conventional rotomoulding machines that do run on electricity. Reinhardt Teknik in India built their first electric carousel for Saeplast in Iceland 10 years ago, and it’s still running well. The customer already had two Reinhardt fossil-fuel powered ovens, but the fuel must be imported and is expensive and Iceland has very cheap renewable electricity generated from hydro, geothermal, and wind.

The Reinhardt machine has a 3.8 metre oven, and the

AT ISSUE

connected load is up to a very meaty 800 KW. Dhanu Patell of Reinhardt tells me that they now have more experience, and the connected load can be as low as 400 to 600 KW depending on the size of the machine. The time it takes for the oven to get up to temperature and cycle times are the same as for a gas-fired oven and temperature control is very good. Dhanu estimates the power consumption as 1.15 kWh per kilo of LLDPE processed. The heaters need no maintenance and there is no gas flue to manage.

What are the downsides? Well, the machines are about 30% more expensive than gas-powered ones and the connected load is substantial. Would your local electrical infrastructure be able to handle this and if you had several machines would you have to stagger start-ups? Will there be enough electricity available in any case if everything else is converting to electricity? And in most of the world electricity is significantly more expensive than natural gas.

Of course, there is the thorny question of how the electricity is generated. If the electricity is being made by burning fossil fuel, like natural gas, then you are defeating the whole objective of reducing CO2.

Bill Spenceley, CEO of Flexahopper in Canada is a rotomoulding industry pioneer in adopting green energy solutions and his whole plant is covered in solar panels and all his other electricity is sourced from renewables. Bill tells me that it takes 3.5 times the amount (equivalent units) of energy in gas to produce one unit of electricity – so using electricity made from gas, to replace using natural gas in rotomoulding would significantly increase CO2 emissions!!

So, for most of the world simply converting from a conventional gas oven to an electric one doesn’t seem very practical and is also going to be much more expensive.

What is our industry going to do?

In the next issue of RotoWorld® we will look at some other developing alternative technologies and see how we can reduce our energy consumption as an industry. In my view energy is a vital issue that we must come to terms with, and it is likely that the proposals to ban new installations of natural gas in New Zealand is just the start of a worldwide trend, which will accelerate as politicians around the world try to out-do each other in their promises to display their green credentials.

We urgently need to wake-up and start work on finding practical, realistic, and cost-effective solutions.