A Dunedin city councillor is calling for community debate over conflicting visions for the future of Dunedin's harbourside area, as civic and business leaders prepare to pitch the city as the perfect home for an operational base to multinational oil companies.
Representatives from the Dunedin City Council, Port Otago, University of Otago and a cluster of Dunedin engineering firms are preparing a marketing plan aimed at wooing a major international oil company to the city.
The campaign, in the form of a DVD, will be sent to about 12 international oil companies - possibly in the next few months - promoting the city and its harbourside industrial area as an ideal base for exploring oil prospects in the Great South Basin in the Southern Ocean.
Several companies, including oil giant ExxonMobil, have been exploring prospects in the area, and a major strike could result in parts of the city's harbourside being transformed if a 24-hour-a-day engineering support base was established in Dunedin.
Large-scale redevelopment would be required to accommodate more visits by support and oil infrastructure vessels and the operation could bring jobs for up to 5000 people.
However, Cr Fliss Butcher told the Otago Daily Times she was "very worried" after seeing the DVD at a council meeting this week. It included a computer-generated model depicting how the development could reshape the waterfront area.
Cr Butcher said she had been led to believe the city would provide modest administration facilities for oil companies, but instead saw an expanded industrial waterfront zone, new buildings, more large ships and storage facilities.
"I saw boats that looked like oil tankers and I saw structures that looked like [storage] tanks."
The picture conflicted with the council's harbourside district plan change, which gained resource consent in February, and was supposed to clear the way for the development of apartments, cafes and bars in the area over 50 years, she said.
"I'm very worried about it.
"Have we had a conversation with the people that live here about turning the city into an oil base? Someone tried to put an aluminium smelter out in Aramoana a few years ago and the community said 'No thanks'."
But Engineering Dunedin Incorporated chairman John Whitaker, who leads the engineering cluster involved in the promotional push, doubted any oil company base would include on-site oil storage facilities or large oil tanker visits.
Planning was only at a conceptual stage, but the most likely scenario - if a commercially viable oil find was confirmed - was that extracted oil would be transferred to tankers at sea and shipped to refineries in Australia or elsewhere, he said.
Dunedin would need purpose-built buildings and "quite a major expansion" of the area's existing engineering capabilities, within industrial waterfront areas, to support a full-scale oil operation. There would also be a noticeable increase in the number of oil support vessels and "bigger infrastructural ships" navigating Otago Harbour.
The benefits would be population growth and job and wealth creation - potentially second only to the University of Otago's economic contribution to the city, he said.
"It could be nothing . . . [but] if it does happen [there] could be 4000 people employed in this industrial area dedicated to looking after oil and gas. It's got the potential to transform the place."
However, he doubted the development would be compatible with the council's other harbourside plans, which he highlighted in a submission during the hearings process.
"If this oil and gas does realise its potential, the harbourside [district plan change] could undermine it. The support infrastructure needs to be a dedicated area. It's an operation overseas that runs 24 hours a day and that's not conducive to apartments and cafes."
University of Otago marketing lecturer Dr James Henry - a former oil worker who now leads the university's contribution to the project - agreed, saying other cities internationally had been adversely affected when industrial land had been changed to other uses.
However, he stressed any development would be "eight to 15 years away", even if a commercially viable oil field was confirmed and, based on other international explorations, there was a "less than 10% chance" of that happening.
A decision to drill a test hole, based on already-collected seismic data, would be "three to five years" away and it could be another five years "minimum" before any find could be commercialised, he said.
Any testing stage would likely see a small increase in vessel traffic, an office of 10-12 oil company staff established and helicopter traffic as crews were ferried to and from vessels at sea, he said. Additional infrastructure would be required only if full extraction began.
Dunedin City Council business development adviser Des Adamson said the development could "completely revolutionise Dunedin", but also stressed it was "not going to happen overnight".
The community would have an opportunity to debate the issues, but it was "really too early" at this stage.
"All we are doing at the moment is getting some information together and trying to position Dunedin as a logical supplier base."
Port Otago commercial manager Peter Brown was unavailable for comment yesterday.
