Lies, damned lies and Trans Tasman Resources

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

By Cindy Baxter

I had to steel myself as I tuned in to watch Trans Tasman Resources’ CEO Alan Eggers give a presentation to the New Plymouth District Council last Wednesday. 

I knew it was going to involve me shouting at my computer. A big crowd packed the chamber,  and I take my hat off to their ability to actually remain silent. It was probably lucky I wasn’t in the room. The dog was my only company and even she was a little disturbed at my language.

I gave up counting his lies, his terrible extrapolation of science, his baseless claims and his spin.

First, he did make some points that confirm our concerns around this project:

He said there was black sand “right up the coast” of Aotearoa, claiming there’s a huge industry they’re kicking off like that was a good thing. Yep, if this project gets consent, this opens the floodgates to all those companies who’ve been waiting in the wings to get their hands on our black sand.

He talked about this project just being the beginning of TTR’s plans for the South Taranaki Bight. He even showed this map - again, like it was a good thing. 

TTR's big plans to trash the Bight. The current application to mine 66sqkm is labelled "Cook South". the whole area? 877sqkms.

Right now we’re fighting the destruction of 66 sq km of the Bight: but TTR just sees this as a first step - they have mining plans for a massive 877sq km. This would essentially,  go on for the rest of our lives: once they’ve mined the first 66sqkm then they’d move on to the rest. For decades.  

I’m not going to even try to refute every single claim he made here - I’d be here all day. Instead, let's take the example of how much he misled the committee around blue whales - a clear example of how he just made stuff up to make his company look good. 

The blue whales This is what he told the council about the pygmy blue whales in the bight:

"They come through the South Taranaki Bight to see their mates. They do not really live in there, forage in there, it’s not a whale nursery at all and it’s too shallow for blue whales… there aren’t really any to see.”

Dr Leigh Torres and her team  from Oregon State University have been studying these animals since 2014. They’ve now published ten peer reviewed papers from their research. They have established that Aotearoa has our own, genetically distinct population of pygmy blue whales which is pretty exciting, right? They estimate a minimum of 718 animals. 

A pgymy blue whale and her calf in the South Taranaki Bight. Photo: Oregon State University

Of course none of these peer reviewed papers were cited by TTR’s team and, perhaps unsurprisingly, don’t appear in the Fast Track application. This is why KASM wants to be able to give a submission to the Fast-Track process: without experts like Dr Torres, the panel won’t get the full picture.

This is an excerpt from the transcript of Dr Torres' expert evidence (for KASM), given to the March 2024 hearings in Hawera (you can read the full transcript yourself - it starts on page 108 of the PDF). 

Directly contravening Eggers’ claims, Dr Torres told the hearing:

“These animals are relying on the Taranaki Bight for feeding opportunities. So, in the spring and summer when there's upwelling and bringing productivity in, that creates food for the whales in the form of krill. And then we've also documented calves in the area, which means that the mothers are bringing their calves back to this region to teach them that the South Taranaki Bight is an important area for their livelihood, for them to live. 

“So, we've documented nursing between a mother and a calf in the Taranaki Bight, and also recently we've had documented likely breeding behaviour in the Taranaki Bight in the breeding months between May and August, there's elevated, very, very high rates of their mating call. So, blue whales make two types of calls, essentially; they make a foraging call and then a mating call. “And we have recorded high, very high rates of that mating call during that mating season. So really the area shouldn't just be thought of as a foraging ground for these blue whales but rather an important part of their whole life history. So, from feeding to nursing to breeding and raising their calves.” 

Eggers went on to tell the committee the blue whales he says are barely there wouldn’t be at all disturbed by the 24/7 noise from seabed mining.

Dr Torres pointed out that the worst of the noise is the low frequency noise, which travels a long way underwater: 

“...Because the South Taranaki Bight is such an important area for them, it's not like they can easily go someplace else for the same life history needs, for the food or mating opportunities. So if this is it for them, if this is very important, being displaced from that habitat because of this constant racket, imagine living for 35 years next to a vacuum cleaner,  that could cause stress to you.” 

Eggers went on to list the sightings of marine mammals reported to DOC, as some kind of evidence of his claims there are none to be found. But despite being advised to by the EPA, TTR still hasn’t undertaken a single marine mammal survey. It didn’t do one in 2013, still hadn’t in 2017, not for the hearings last year - and there’s no such survey in its fast-track application.

Yet one slide he posted made it appear the company had done these surveys. 

The reality is that the company simply took the random sightings of marine mammals reported to DOC, logged in a spreadsheet, and modelled them in an attempt to back this “nothing to see here” claim.

Dr Torres’ comment on the TTR attempt at modelling based on random sightings:

“It's like seeing a mean temperature map for all of the North Island for a year and then using that to try and predict what the temperature might be in Wellington on a certain day: the two different types of data aren't compatible for their application.”

This is just a small glimpse into Eggers’ twisting of facts in his effort to convince the committee. At best, he misled the committee; at worst, he simply lied.  This was also the case when he talked about everything from the modelling of the sediment plume to promising jobs in the region.

But of course his claims are now being reported by the media covering his presentation as fact.  It would be good if journalists covering this issue bothered to look at the evidence presented, and called him out. When they cite his NIWA reports maybe they should also to check the date to discover they paper is over ten years old. And read the transcripts of last years's hearings to understand the hard time the EPA committee was having in trying to understand why the company had done no new work. We'd all be better off.

Stand by for our next blog, which will be about the details of the sediment plume modelling.