Silica operation plans 2030 opening for Awarua plant

Thursday, 4 June 2026

A company planning a giant silica processing and manufacturing operation to create up to 1400 Southland jobs has a memorandum of understanding to acquire 200ha of Calder Stewart’s Awarua Quadrant industrial project.

Southland Silicon Materials Ltd director David Halstead outlined plans at the recent Murihiku Regeneration wānanga in Invercargill.

The company planned to have completed its final feasibility work within the next 12 to 15 months, to start moving soil in 2028 and open in 2030.

It intended to refine locally mined high-purity quartz into silicon wafers, which were used for solar panels.

“Those highly polished wafers which go behind the [solar panel] glass is what our core business, our parent company and our group’s core business is about,’’ Halstead said.

The company was wholly owned by the Australian-registered Quartz & Silicon Materials Company Pty Ltd, which was itself owned by the US-based Graphene & Solar Technologies Limited.

“This is a profitable organisation and we have forecast, going forward, to be a lasting venture for the next generation.’’

At present 99% of the world’s solar panel wafers were made in China, Halstead said.

“So all the panels we see around New Zealand mostly come from two companies in China. We have signed memorandums of understanding with both, with a view to ultimately being able to manufacture panels [themselves] in New Zealand — but that’s a long way out.’’

Halstead said the Awarua project was envisaged to have a 50-year lifespan.

“So there needs to be a 50-year supply of silicon pebbles, which will be coming from Waimumu,’’ he said.

Southland had long been identified as rich in large, high-purity natural deposits and Waimumu was part of a huge resource that also existed at Awarua itself and Pebbly Hills.

When the Tiwai smelter was threatened with closure in the early parts of the decade, the company had initially inquired about taking over that site.

That option closed when Rio Tinto committed the smelter’s future to at least 2044 but then, Halstead said, “we came across Steve Canny’’ at regional development agency Great South, and the ”huge amount of research’’ that had already been done in feasibility studies for using the silica resources.

The company had hired former Invercargill City Council infrastructure group manager Erin Moogan to lead its work locally, was this week opening an Invercargill office and would be exporting through South Port.

“And we will be bringing in huge machines from China through the port.’’

Moogan told the Murihiku Regeneration audience she had been attracted by the potential of crating up to 1400 jobs.

“[It’s] something that our young people can have here — yet another great industry. To keep them and give them opportunities here in Southland was really exciting for me.”

She said the company was well aware of other “really exciting projects looking to go ahead in the region’’.

She said the company wanted to partner with them “to make sure we create a really nice pipeline of work’’ during the initial construction periods, so they were not all competing for the same resource at the same time.

Sam Stewart of Calder Stewart outlined to the Murihiku Regeneration audience the potential for the rest of the 500ha that the company had acquired at Awarua from the Invercargill City Council in 2021.

Importantly, its heavy-industrial zoning meant that renewable energy generation was a permitted activity.

So Calder Stewart was planning the quadrant to have its own energy precinct, making the site “something unique, globally, at this scale”, he said.

New Zealand Trade and Enterprise was already pitching Awarua overseas as an energy hub, he said.