Red tape earns quarrying spot on Jones’ critical minerals list

The term critical minerals conjures images of cobalt, gallium and other rare metals used in the production of electric vehicles.
It’s a notion thrown by New Zealand’s proposed critical minerals list, with the first mineral explicitly named in the document as “aggregate and sand”.
Hardly rare or pricey (and only at the top of the list due to alphabetisation), aggregate and sand don’t appear on the critical mineral lists of New Zealand’s international partners.
(A comparison of New Zealand’s draft list and those of other nations can be found at the end of the piece.)
It also has the lowest supply risk score of all 35 minerals put forward in the draft, only beating out lime and iron in all the minerals discussed.
Resources Minister Shane Jones said it might appear “incongruous” at first, but its inclusion showed the list was about what New Zealand needed.
“If you dwell upon what actually is critical to New Zealand, the woeful state of our quarry sector and the shortage of sand for our construction sector, meant that for the consultation phase, at least, we thought it was a good idea to include it.”
Jones, one of the three ministers with fast-track decision-making power, is a vocal advocate for quarrying and mining, believing all quarry resource consents should be extended for 30 years.
These industries unsurprisingly support Jones and his party, New Zealand First.
When election donations were released earlier this year it was revealed a donor that gave $50,000 to the party and $5,000 to Jones’ campaign was linked to quarrying business Kings Quarry.
Since the election another quarrying business, J Swap, donated $11,000 to NZ First, having given $5,000 to Jones during the election campaign.
And while J Swap submitted on the fast-track bill wanting it to include QEII covenant land, Jones has long (and often) maintained political donations don’t hold sway over his policy decisions.
Consultancy Wood Mackenzie, which prepared the draft list on behalf of the Government, said while aggregate and sand ranked low on the supply risk assessment it was recommended for inclusion because of its high level of economic importance to New Zealand.
The rationale given was regulatory constraints were limiting new supply in New Zealand and alternate sourcing came at a significantly higher cost.
Building New Zealand out of an infrastructure deficit will require substantial amounts of these materials.
Jones said quarries were often located on Department of Conservation estate, but he wanted quarries to be closer to the point of utilisation.
“Far too many quarries are located some distance away from where the resource is actually deployed, and if we can have a situation where more quarries are consented in a short period of time and in more strategic locations, then it can fuel the infrastructure deficit.”
He gave the example of the much-delayed Transmission Gully project just outside of Wellington, saying the level of difficulty and the time it took to get a quarry consented to enable the project was evidence the process was broken.
“Sadly quarries where they already exist are costing far too much money to reconsent and new quarries, I don’t think there’s enough accent being placed on how critically important that resource is for economic resilience in New Zealand.
“Hopefully by including it on this list, there’ll be a higher level of recognition given to the role that resource plays in our economic equation.”
The idea of a sand shortage (used in the production of concrete) was exacerbated in 2022 after an Auckland Council panel rejected a resource consent application for sand mining at Pākiri Beach filed by the dredging company McCallum Bros.
An attempt to appeal the decision was shut down by the Environment Court earlier this year.
Jones referred to the Pākiri Beach case, saying the case had had an impact on the availability of sand in Auckland and that sand mining was a controversial issue.
“But this list is not about any specific resource consent application, it really speaks to the fact that unless we boost our resilience in terms of infrastructure with concrete, sand and aggregate, we are probably going to increase the costs and protract the length of time it takes to deal to the issue in New Zealand.”
Te Whānau o Pākiri chair Olivia Haddon is the third generation of her whānau to be involved in the fight against sand mining at Pākiri Beach – she says there has been no shortfall of sand supply to the Auckland market since McCallum Bros withdrew from the majority of their mining activities at the beach.
“Thankfully we now have an established and growing alternative sand supply throughout Auckland,” Haddon said.
“Kaipara Quarries are now using crusher dust in their quarries to produce as much sand as was taken from the seafloor at Pākiri, and Kayasand is also producing alternatives without mining it from the sea.”
Haddon said if the Government moved forward on sand mining, she hoped they followed best practices set out by the United Nations Environment Programme, which explicitly recommended banning the extraction of sand from beaches.
Aggregate and Quarry Association chief executive Wayne Scott said his group had some long discussions as a part of the formation of the critical minerals list.
“There’s a couple of things that really make us a little bit different to most of the world – we’re large consumers of aggregate per head, about the third in the world.
“We use around a million tonnes a week and alternatives to local supply are almost zero.”
Scott said it didn’t appear on other countries’ critical mineral lists because other countries can import it far easier than New Zealand, which would be expensive and logistically challenging.
He said constraints included geography, central government policy and local government policy.
“There’s a little bit of not in my backyard stuff, but we have very tough resource management to work through, it’s just very time-consuming.
“There’s almost been an industry created around resource consenting in this country, it just takes so long to get anything done and that can be off-putting. Auckland hasn’t had a new quarry in 15 years and that’s the biggest market by a long shot.”
Scott said New Zealand needed to have “some adult conversations” about the need for quarrying to meet infrastructure goals.
Jones also believes the country needs to have some serious discussions: “We will encounter situations where a project will have a disruptive effect on the skinks and god forbid the frogs and the bats, and I don’t know, other little critters that are wandering around the environment.
“When conditions are imposed on those projects, we need to ensure that those conditions are proportionate to the risk. Economic development using natural resources always involves disruptiveness and the inevitable death of lizards and things like that,” Jones said.
“But if the overarching outcome is there’s more wealth in the nation and mitigation, where you grow that skink or frog population in another location, then you can still have that extractive activity and have boosted in an overall sense, through mitigation, the population of a certain species.”