Boskalis expert meets Chatham Rock Phosphate project stakeholders
An environmental expert from the world’s largest dredging company is in Wellington meeting a wide range of people involved in the Chatham Rock Phosphate project.
Gerard van Raalte is the Royal Boskalis Westminster leader of the CRP project. Boskalis is CRP’s technical partner, contracted to design an extraction process for the rock phosphate resource on the Chatham Rise seabed, 450 km east of Christchurch.
Mr Van Raalte is a senior expert at Hydronamics, the in-house engineering company of Boskalis, and has a special focus on the environmental aspects of dredging and marine infrastructure design. Among projects he has worked on recently are development of ports in Abu Dhabi and other Middle East countries, and Melbourne.
He is team leader of the Building With Nature research programme, initiated by Boskalis to gain an industry-wide insight into the impact hydraulic engineering projects have on ecosystems with the aim of achieving a sound balance between ecological, economic and social sustainability.
The Boskalis approach has been very successful in managing potentially contentious projects in environmentally sensitive locations and it was one of the key reasons CRP selected the company as its partner.
His aims for the visit are to get completely up to speed on all environmental matters (particularly the incoming EEZ legislation), to meet all the key people, to demonstrate Boskalis's involvement in and commitment to the project and to plan how Boskalis can best be involved in future.
For further information please contact
Chris Castle 021 558 185 or
Linda Sanders 027 471 5593