Daily Times

New Zealand is delivering on its climate commitment to ban new coal boilers and to phase out existing ones by 2037, Energy and Resources Minister Megan Woods said on Friday.

The government’s decisions will reduce emissions by about the same amount as 100,000 cars would produce in a year, Woods said.

“Currently, more than half of the heat used to process raw materials into products such as paper and dairy production comes from fossil fuels,” she said.

Switching to cleaner ways of generating process heat presents a huge opportunity to reduce domestic greenhouse gases and paves the way for greener export products too, the minister said. The new policy follows the government’s recent announcement of New Zealand’s biggest-ever emissions reduction project, in partnership with New Zealand Steel Limited, to introduce an electric arc furnace and reduce carbon emissions by 800,000 tonnes per year – the equivalent of 300,000 cars to produce in a year, she said.