“With these proposed facilities, we will not be doing anything that has not been done before,” Houston-based Lewis told PetroleumNews.net in New Plymouth yesterday afternoon.

“Having said that, Port Taranaki is an usually good site.

“It has the deepwater, it already has a good breakwater and it is an industrial port with good port organisation. Some ports are not run nearly as well as this one.

“It also has the capacity and capability to support more energy activities.

“This is the select port on the west coast, probably in all New Zealand,” added Lewis, who has visited Australia’s North West Shelf Venture LNG project.

The ICF Consulting vice president has been advising New Zealand’s largest natural gas users, Contact Energy and Genesis Energy, for 18 months regarding their plans to import LNG later this decade to make up any domestic gas shortfalls.

Genesis and Contact made the long-awaited announcement yesterday that Port Taranaki had beaten Marsden Point, Northland, as the preferred site for any LNG importation.

Lewis, who has been involved in about 18 LNG projects in the United States dating from the first one in Boston in the early 1970s, said ICF had done a preliminary risk assessment of Port Taranaki that showed it would be a simple and safe LNG site.

The port company was presently deepening the harbour to a draught of 12.5m, with provision to increase that to 14m in the future. This would ensure adequate water depth for any LNG tankers likely to call. The port also had good shelter and the ability to locate storage and regasification facilities away from residential areas.

Vessel speeds inside the harbour, coupled with the entry and exit routes for ships, meant that a collision by another vessel into the side of an LNG tanker, with sufficient force to rupture the twin-hulled tanker, would be almost impossible, Lewis said.

Contact corporate development manager Frank Geoghegan said the proposed Contact-Genesis scheme would see 300m-long LNG tankers, of about 700 deadweight tonnes, visiting Port Taranaki every three weeks or so, bringing in about 50-60 petajoules per annum or just under half the country’s annual gas usage.

The tankers would use a specially built berth and offloaded LNG would carried by a trestle-mounted pipeline along the outside of the main breakwater to storage tanks behind Contact’s New Plymouth power station.

The regasification plant at the port would use seawater as its heat source and regasified LNG would be transported into the North Island high-pressure network using the existing pipeline spur from the nearby Maui pipeline into the power station.

However, he reiterated the companies’ preference for using indigenous gas, saying they intended deferring making the actual decision to import LNG until at least 2008-09, with any importation not starting until 2010-13 at the earliest.