From Stuff this morning, it looks like the closure of Marsden Point is a done deal:
Shareholders in Refining NZ will vote on August 6 on whether to close the country’s only refinery, at Marsden Point in Northland, and switch instead to importing pre-refined fuels.That's still only 42%. But with the big shareholders all on-side, it doesn't look like the refinery has much of a future.[...]
The result of the shareholder vote appears a foregone conclusion.
Z Energy and BP, which together own just over 25 per cent of Refining NZ, have agreed in principle to the import model.
Discussions are still continuing with Mobil, which holds a 17 per cent stake in Refining NZ, but it is not understood to be lobbying for refining to continue.
The Climate Change Commission looked at the refinery closure in its emissions budget risk scenarios, and estimated the total impact at a million tons of carbon a year, so the quicker we're rid of it, the better. As for the jobs, the article gives a figure of 240 direct job losses, while earlier ones say about a thousand. But even then, at the government's internal carbon price of $150 a ton, we're basicly paying $150,000 a year to subsidise these jobs, which seems like an absurdly high figure. But if we're concerned about a just transition, spending some fraction of that on creating new, emissions free jobs in Northland for these people to do seems justified.
