Hampshire is not at the centre of gravity for 3.5 million tonnes of wood (including ex GSL wood which could be imported from Portland). Hampshire is 30 km inland from the (nearest) port of Burnie. It would also require long carts for wood from NE Tasmania which has much more plantation wood! Bell Bay will have its own wharf for pulp export vessels and I imagine it wouldn't be hard to receive imported wood on the same wharf. Once built, a pulp mill will probably last for more than 50 years. The higher cost of delivering wood goes on for all those years. If you build it in the wrong place that inefficency is locked-in forever.
I don't think any government could afford the amount of compensation that would tempt a proponent to shift to a site that has a significantly lower delivered wood cost efficiency. There are already enough unkowns in terms of what transport costs might be in 10, 20, 30, 40 etc years time as it is!
Those who propose Hampshire see, in particular, the Surrey Hills blocks (about 150,000 contiguous acres) and it fuzzies their understanding. They think its bigger in the scheme of things than it really is (because its so consolidated). They also think that "hectares" is directly equivalent to "tonnes". It can be far from equivalent, as some of the MAI dsicussions on HC have shown. While GNS manages (and owns) a lot of consolidated land in the Hampshire region much of it isn't particularly high yielding - it's high altitude and cold. Plantation rotation lengths would be much longer than the average.
Lordo, regardless of what the popular press might say, GNS knows the business. It has been in the hardwood plantation business longer by decades than anyone else in Australia. Through the APPM precursor it has also been involved in pulp and paper since the 1930s. Via precursors it was also a proponent in the failed Wesley Vale pulp mill proposal of the late 1988. It doesn't choose a site in a highly industrialised zone like Bell Bay to wind up greenies. It's because its the logical place for it.
I'd love a dollar for every time I have explained to someone in Melbourne or Sydney that the location isn't some pristine bush covered steep wilderness valley as they had assumed from what they read in the media, but it is in fact the industrialised seaward end of an opened out estuary, with neighbours that include a Comalco aluminium smelter, a ferro manganese alloy smelter, a gas fired power station, three export wood chip mills, Tasmania's largest sawmill, Tasmania's main port etc.
The mill has all its approvals to be built and only has 3 operating permits to get, that relate to effluent impact on Commonwealth waters over 2.5 km from the pipeline diffuser. Advise I have recieved is that it easily passes this hurdle and the 12 month baseline study the Feds required finishes soon. They are scientific evidence based processes. It cannot be legitimately stopped now by a political process without direct compensation ($200M plus?)
Better for Gunns/Investor to put up with the pain while the mill is built, then watch most antagonists get over it very quickly. Maybe the ABC's 4 Corners will do a "what was that all about" story and ask the important "can Australia afford to keep on behaving like this when major projects are proposed and still expect to maintain our standard of living".
GNS Price at posting:
60.5¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held
