Rock phosphate deposits eyed by “Kiwi battler”
Chris Castle with some rock phosphate nodules dredged up from the seabed of the Chatham Rise. Photo: Gerard Hindmarsh.
Chris Castle of Onekaka is leading a serious business mission. As project manager for publicly listed Widespread Energy, he is drumming up high-level support for what could potentially be one of this country’s biggest mining ventures ever undertaken: the offshore mining of around 30 million tonnes of medium-grade rock phosphate.
Widespread Energy, along with publicly listed Widespread Portfolios, of which Chris is also a director, is the joint venture entity that currently holds a two-year exploration licence over a 4726 square kilometre area of the Chatham Rise, around 600 km east of Christchurch. Here, at comparatively shallow depths (between 375 and 425m), there are significant seabed deposits of rock phosphate (P2O5) nodules. These are typically 10 to 40mm across and lie in a layer up to 70cm thick within the sandy seabed.
Unlike bird-guano phosphate deposits found on land, these undersea deposits were formed between 7 and 12 million years ago by chemical decomposition in the seawater. They were discovered by NZ scientists in 1952 and investigated in detail during the late 1970s and early 1980s in a joint operation by NZ Geological Survey and its German equivalent, BGR, together with two private sector German companies and Fletcher Challenge.
Having invested $1.15 million to date, raised between 1,000 shareholders of his two Widespread companies, Chris is in the process of raising a similar amount to list the project overseas and to continue the final review and analysis of technical data, study of the environmental impacts, assess the project economics, and commence an exploration programme in conjunction with Crown Research Institutes NIWA and GNS, who he is currently working with. Currently he is also in discussion with the world’s three biggest dredging companies to evaluate the actual practical process of seabed extraction.
Chris explained the rationale behind the project.
“Rock phosphate is an essential ingredient of fertiliser and can be applied directly to pasture with far less environmental damage than superphosphate from runoff. Extensive exploration has already identified a potential 100-year supply for the New Zealand farming market, which has basically used up all the traditional and easily available phosphate resources. Extraction of the rock phosphate nodules from the seabed would provide a locally produced alternative to the one million tonnes that we currently import from Morocco, and also provide us with excess for a potential export industry to Australia. It would be a win-win all round.
“Apart from small quantities extracted in China, Egypt and Vietnam, much of the world’s traded phosphate now comes from Morocco, with their state-owned mining company OCP controlling world trade and driving up prices, like the high of $US500 a tonne it managed to command in 2008.”
Chris does anticipate initial opposition, at least from the environmental lobby. “Hopefully when the facts are looked at, they’ll see that mining the seabed would leave a far lesser carbon footprint than importing the stuff from the other side of the world. Not only that, but the Moroccan stuff has comparatively high levels of toxic cadmium, which the seabed nodules are completely free of.
“We’re only looking at mining around 300 sq km of the higher-grade reserves out of the entire 96,000 sq km Chatham Rise seabed plateau, and we are aware from our research that there’s very little commercial fishing done in this area that it would interfere with.”
Chris was recently heartened to hear from the office of Energy Minister Gerry Brownlie that PM John Key had asked for an update on Widespread Energy’s Chatham Rise phosphate project. Chris admits to a positive attitude and describes himself as a Kiwi battler businessman whose expertise is seeing the potential in untapped resources and pulling together all the right parties to ensure a successful outcome.
Originally from Wellington, where he graduated in business studies from Victoria University in 1975, Chris still travels the world investigating potential opportunities, many related to niche-market mining projects. His 13 overseas trips this year, to places like Russia, Vietnam, Fiji, Australia and China, amount to far less than the routine 150 days he spent abroad every year until recently, but he still maintains a hands-on international approach as a director on the board of several overseas mining projects.
Chris moved with his journalist partner Linda Sanders to their 4.5 hectares adjoining Onekaka Inlet in 2004, but his association with the Bay goes back to early 1970s when he owned land at Rangihaeata with his mother, former Community Board chair Ann Castle, who is commemorated in the name of the land’s access road, The Castle Way.
Despite the inevitable hurdles that he knows will arise, Chris keeps an upbeat outlook and sees his involvement in the phosphate project as long term. “Short-term projects bring short-term rewards, but the big ones can take decades to not only investigate but bring all the right people together. New Zealand is sitting on one of the world’s most strategically located rock phosphate deposits, and we’ve been looking at it for a long time. The time is perfectly ripe now to start reaping some of the benefits that we should be enjoying.”
Gerard Hindmarsh
