Origin: PNG-Qld hydro plan doable

DESPITE analysts labelling the multibillion-dollar PNG-Queensland hydro plan as “ambitious’’, Origin Energy says technically, it can now be achieved with little fuss.
Last September, Origin Energy’s Grant King announced a plan to harness the resource from PNG’s Purari River to generate 1800MW of hydro power that would be shared between PNG and Australia.
Mathew Murphy, an analyst, wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald last week that it was a project investigated 30 years ago but abandoned as impractical due in part to the electricity that would have been lost along the transmission line.
“Analysts have labelled the multibillion-dollar plan ‘ambitious’ but King says that technically, it can now be achieved with little fuss.
“However, there is an acknowledgment from Origin that building the project in PNG may prove the most ‘ambitious’ part,” Murphy wrote in SMH.
As projects like the US$15 billion ExxonMobil-led PNG LNG development has already done, Origin has started preliminary work to determine what it can leave behind for the locals as its ‘’social licence’’ to operate.
As Newmont Mining’s former president Pierre Lassonde said:  “You don’t get your social licence by going to a government ministry and making an application or simply paying a fee.
It requires far more than money to truly become part of the communities in which you operate, Murphy said.
It was something that Origin had already recognised, Lassonde said.