Carbon Footprint

As part of our commitment to minimising the impact of our activities on the environment, we actively assess, monitor and reduce – as far as possible – the company’s carbon footprint as a result of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions.

At the Buller Project, almost all of the carbon footprint results from the use of diesel in the mining fleet – a common situation amongst mining operations.

Additional common sources of CO₂ emissions are from explosives and power use.  At Buller, the impact from explosives measures around 200-400 tonnes per year of CO₂ equivalent emissions – a relatively small amount – and as the project uses Kawatiri Energy’s Lake Rochford Hydro Scheme to power the coal processing plant, there is no power-related impact on our carbon footprint.

The total operational carbon footprint at Buller as a result of the above emissions is approximately 85 kilotonnes CO₂ per annum, which is at the lower end of industry averages.

In terms of product carbon footprint in the final steel making process, approximately 5% of Buller’s coal will end up in steel during processing and the remainder will be converted to CO₂ at a rate of 2.3kg CO₂/kg coal. At a production level of 1Mtpa of coal, approximately 2.2 Mt of CO₂ will be produced, which will in turn produce 1.6Mt of steel.