September 2014
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Stunning home wins Page 38
Pipe technology a dream for scheme Hugh de Lacy In a world-wide first, one of the country’s biggest-ever rural construction projects is seeing underground irrigation distribution pipes up to 250 metres long being manufactured on-site for immediate installation. Australian minnow Aquaduct is working for local construction heavyweight Downer to install 135 kilometre of high-density polyethylene pipes to distribute water to farms from the main canal of the $375 million Central Plains irrigation scheme in Mid-Canterbury. Downer’s is one of two $60m contracts let for the first stage of the scheme, which will irrigate 60,000 hectares of the Canterbury Plains southwest of Christchurch and produce an economic gain for the region of between $1 billion and $1.4b a year.
The other contract, to build the 17km canal from the Waimakariri River to store water in electricity generator Trustpower’s Lake Coleridge, has been let to Fulton Hogan and its long-time Australian joint venture partner John Holland Pty. Construction of the canal is well under way, and Aquaduct and Downer are just getting started on the underground distribution network, following Aquaduct’s completion of a $30m contract to put underground the 84km of piping of the nearby longestablished Valetta irrigation scheme. Valetta supplies 45 farms on 13,000ha, and replacing the old open distribution network of trenches and drains with underground piping has, through elimination of leakage and evaporation, increased the amount of water reaching the farms by 28%, and the irrigateable area by 37.5%. The pipes are produced on-site by Aquaduct using three giant Dutch-made extrusion machines temporarily housed in a purpose-built marquee
120-metre long and 20m wide. Plastic chips fed into the extrusion machines at one end turn out pipes up to 250m long at the other, with one machine producing diameters from 180mm to 450mm, the second from 450mm to 900mm, and the third from 900mm to 1600m. The length of the pipes, which are hauled on dollies from the extruders to the pipeline, are a key to the economics of the on-site extrusion system because they hugely reduce the time spent welding pipes – usually 40 hours per kilometre - which would otherwise be supplied in 12m lengths. Further significant savings arise from the elimination of the cost of transporting pre-formed pipes to the site. Capable of producing up to 120 tonnes of pipe a day, Aquaduct completed the first 58km of the Valetta job in just two months, and the machinery has since been moved in 60 truckloads to the Central Plains site.
In developing his on-site extrusion system, Aquaduct’s principal, Australian Gerard van den Bosch, has incorporated the latest pipe manufacturing technology to include ultrasonic monitoring of the output to ensure its strength. According to independent tests, the pipe that Aquaduct produces is 25% stronger than the ASNZS Standard 4130 for PE100. Once laid along the line of the trench, the pipes are then welded using a high-interface technique that is faster and more secure than traditional methods. The Central Plains irrigation scheme is one of the country’s biggest construction projects, and the savings it produces in construction costs and water-use efficiency, no less than its application to other underground reticulation and infrastructure systems, look set to make it one of the most significant civil construction machinery breakthroughs in years.
SOE listings distort IPOs Hugh de Lacy Take out the distortion created by the Government’s sale of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and New Zealand initial public offerings (IPOs) on the sharemarket over the past year have performed pretty well as badly as they do anywhere. That’s the conclusion of sharemarket commentator Brent Sheather of Whakatane-based firm Private Asset Management, who says overall IPOs issued in the last 12 months “have done quite well because of the Government ones”. There have been nine new listings on the New Zealand Stock Exchange in the past year, more than double the average of four a year between 2005 and 2012. Globally, IPOs are regarded as nearcertain losers in the short term because they are vigorously promoted to create the expectation that the float price will rise following listing. However, Sheather says New Zealand’s IPOs have bucked that perception, because of the Government’s floating of 49% of its energy assets such as Mighty River Power and Genesis, where “underlying politics” demands a float price low enough to virtually ensure sustainability and growth. “Obviously this is a short-term thing: once they’ve sold all the SOEs, that’s it, and we’ll be back to the standard IPO performance.” Sheather says the technology IPOs’ performance in particular has been “terrible”. These include Gentrack, down 11% from its listing price, Serko down 15%, Geop down 16% and SLI Systems down 28%, he said.
INSIDE
Doing their bit for sustainability.... Queenstown Primary School pupils plant out native trees in their community. The school is one of 4000 throughout New Zealand who have joined the Paper4trees waste minimisation programme. Under the scheme schools recycle paper and cardboard they collect and are rewarded for their efforts with native trees to plant on their sites or in their community. Run by the Tauranga-based Environmental Education for Resource Sustainability Trust, the scheme has so far been joined by a massive 88% of schools and 47% of preschools. See story page 5.
No tillage gains momentum - PAGE 2
Kiwi firm tackles food fraud - PAGE 3
Helping to ‘green’ NZ business - PAGE 4
Clean-up for toxic mine - PAGE 79
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