The Taihape Daily Times THURSDAY, JULY 15, 1915. A NEW INDUSTRY.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 7, Issue 252, 15 July 1915, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times

THURSDAY, JULY 15, 1915. A NEW INDUSTRY.

AND WAIMAEINO ADVOCATE (With which la incorporated The Taihape Post ‘insS Wnimarlno News.)

Yet another valuable industry has been discovered in the low-lying country north of Auckland that was at one time, in the far back ages, covered with immense kauri forests, by which we may reap without having sowed. This land is at present nothing but great peat swamps, so wet as to be valueless for any purpose of useful and profitable cultivation. Our schoolmasters, or rather we shuld say, our chemists, are abroad and they have found that in these ancient swamps lies an almost endless supply of oils, pitch, and other products that are the country's everyday needs. Lying concealed by nature, in that ugly black mass of water and decaying vegetation, are oils of great value and variety, suitable for all purposes, some for oiling machinery, and others for painting our houses. The chemist got hold of some of this black stiff mud and in his analytical processes he has separated its constituent elements, presenting quite an array of commodities, that are destined to “fill the place if those for which New Zealand la just now paying a lot of money other countries for. In addition, in hia diatallatione .of this, swamp dirt, the analyst has found large and payable quantities of "various , chemicals, . such as ascetic ..add, ammonia ami other also a fairly valuable return of

formaldehyde. Here in this great bog covering a million of acres lie, packed safe by nature, enough alkali and acid to set a few miles of the ocean into a great phizz, -waiting for our chemists to separate them and pass them on for the nation’s use; oils to run our machinery ! for probably the next century, and to paint all the houses in the Dominion for a like period, to say nothing of the wax and the insulating pitch this country will need so badly when it commences in earnest to utilise its latent store of waiting energy in the generation of electricity. Lying, also, in the million acres of unsightly, decomposing mud is a most valuable preservative and disinfectant; indeed, it is hard to say what other prizes may be found in this ugly complomerate, decomposing mass. We know that the substances mentioned are there because they have been separated, and they have been found in such quantity as to warrant the erection of a plant that is capable of treating from 500 tons to 1000 tons of the peat a day. This promising industry is attracting a good deal of attention in the city of gold, gum and timber just now. An engineer has been employed for several months in prospecting this great swamp on behalf of a syndicate, j and he now declares that he is quite satisfied with his experimenting and The scheme he proposes involves the erection of works ready for which the peat has to be excavated and dried. It will then be fed into large retorts, from which the oil will first be drawn at various points; it then passes on through processes of distillation and redistillation, cleansing and discolouration until, in only a few hours it is metamorphosed into valuable commodities. This is the aspect derivable from information already to hand, but if this is a correct statement, and there is no reason to doubt it, who i shall say what the value of this discovery is to this country? It will open up new fields for labour, right from the excavator of the mud to the manufacturer and chemist. The State must also benefit largely, as, in addition to what will accrue from new avenues of production it still owns immense areas of this worked-out gum swamp. When these mud-beds are finished with by the chemist they will be drained and in salable condition for agricultural purposes, so that the proposition from beginning to end seems, from expert reports, to be one that will work ut immensely to the advantage of the whole Dominion.