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Southern Paprika has received a $5 million government grant to help reduce its carbon footprint.
The grant was announced by the Minister for Energy and Resources Dr Megan Woods when she visited the Warkworth greenhouses, on Woodcocks Road, on April 26.
The company plans to install a 10MW biomass heat and carbon dioxide (CO2) capture boiler, understood to be the first of its kind in New Zealand, to replace the natural gas it uses to heat the greenhouses.
The boiler will be fuelled by wood chips from forestry waste from Woodhill Forest and Matariki Forest at Warkworth. It’s anticipated the company will be able to take up to 20,000 tonnes of wood waste a year, with more available if needed.
The $14 million project will receive nearly $5 million through the Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry (GIDI) Fund, which is administered by the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA). A previous funding round saw the company receive $330,000 to help fund the installation of thermal screens in five hectares of glasshouses.
These improvements will see an abatement of around 16,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year or 250,000 tonnes over the lifetime of the boiler – a reduction of about 70 per cent.
Southern Paprika is one of the largest capsicum growers in the country with 27 hectares of glasshouses producing around 40 million capsicums each season. Around 75 per cent of these go to the domestic market through Foodstuffs and Woolworths supermarkets, with the rest being exported. The company is adding another 10ha to the operation – an increase of 40 per cent, adding 65 more jobs.
Southern Paprika owner Hamish Alexander said he had started looking for a way to reduce carbon emissions 17 years ago, but there was too much red tape then and the technology simply wasn’t available.
General manager Blair Morris said the biomass boilers alone hadn’t been the right solution, as they did not account for the carbon dioxide production.
“With this new technology, we can use the CO2 produced for something productive,” Blair said, with the boiler also producing ‘green CO2’, providing a clean source of nutrients for the growing plants.
The boiler converts wood biomass to heat the water stored in tanks, which is then piped around at the correct temperature for plant growth. The CO2 produced via combustion is stripped, purified and stored in ‘lungs’ and then used to feed the plants, rather than being released into the air. This Carbon Capture & Utilisation (CCU) system is crucial for the health of the plants, as any impurities can potentially kill the crops.
EECA senior account manager Pramesh Maharaj said many business owners wanted to do the right thing.
“Businesses are wary of the risk to production and many other hothouse producers will be watching keenly how Southern Paprika gets on,” he said.
Bioenergy Association executive officer Brian Cox said he had been following Southern Paprika’s progress with plans to use forestry waste with interest and was “rapt” to see they had included carbon capture with their move away from natural gas.
He said there were wide applications across horticulture with this off-the-shelf technology and he saw the new technology as a game changer for the north.
“If taken up by other horticultural enterprises under glass, and for other applications where heat is needed in production, the technology has the potential to turn the northern region into a food basket,” Cox said.
