Inquiry ordered into Auckland fuel pipeline outage

Wednesday, 13 December 2017

A leak in the pipeline which carries fuel into Auckland in September stretched supplies to petrol stations and caused a number of flights to be cancelled.

The Government has announced an inquiry into the pipeline outage which threatened fuel supplies into Auckland.

The 170 kilometre pipeline which connects the refinery at Marsden Point to Auckland, carrying almost all of the city's fuel, was shut down for 10 days following a leak discovered on 14 September 2017.

As well as putting pressure on fuel supplies for motorists, the outage forced a number of flights to be cancelled or to make additional stops, highlighting a well known vulnerability in New Zealand's fuel network.

Woods said the inquiry would look into how to make New Zealand's fuel supply more secure.

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* Refining NZ defends not re-testing Auckland fuel pipeline before upgrade**

'The inquiry will investigate not only the immediate causes of the outage, but also the maintenance and operation practices at the pipeline and if they are fit for purpose,' Wood said.

'We will also look at how we can make our fuel supply more secure in the future – investigating options for improving resilience.'

Warnings about the vulnerability posed by the pipeline date back to at least 2005, with independent reports highlighting the risk of a lack of aviation fuel in particular.

Back in 2012 Z Energy issued the former National Government a blunt warning that the industry was failing to invest in infrastructure, urging it to take steps to improve it.

On Sunday, there were fresh fears, after a false alarm caused the pipeline to be shutdown for most of the day.

Woods said that the terms of reference for the inquiry will be issued early in 2018, but in the mean time officials would investigate short term ways to improve resilience 'as well as to ensure all parties involved have effective response plans in place' in the event of another outage.

'We need to get to the bottom of exactly what went wrong in September and how we can help prevent this sort of thing from happening again. This is about making sure important assets like this are protected in the future.

The inquiry will be conducted under the Inquiries Act 2013, which could compel parties to release information in a way the fuel market study into prices earlier this year could not.