Harnessing the full power of community investments
Mathew Murphy IN SEPTEMBER, Origin Energy's Grant King announced a plan to harness the resource from Papua New Guinea's Purari River to generate 1800 megawatts of hydro power that would be shared between PNG and Australia. It is a project that was 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. As projects like the $US15 billion ($A15.2 billion) Exxon Mobil-led PNG LNG development have 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,