Community meetings in Murupara and Kaingaroa have put New Zealand’s first integrated bio hub proposal in front of the people it is meant to employ, with Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Manawa backing a six-month feasibility study into what the villages could host.
That is according to Kani Edwards, chair of Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Manawa, who briefed both villages on the biorefinery bid and cautioned the project must still clear several hurdles before ground breaks.
“We think this is the opportunity that can change that,” Edwards told RNZ, naming decades of economic decline across the two villages as the condition the hub exists to answer.
Over the next six months, NZ Bio Forestry will test opportunities in advanced wood processing, renewable energy, green chemistry, land assessments, and other high-value bio-based industries. Any development must still clear due diligence, commercial viability, governance approvals, regulatory processes, and community engagement before it proceeds.
Wood Central understands the study area sits beside the nearly 190,000-hectare Kaingaroa estate, returned to tangata whenua in 2009 in one of the largest settlements in Treaty of Waitangi history.
First planted a century ago, the estate made the district a magnet for forestry workers through successive harvesting booms before private operators left the area or shifted to Rotorua and Taupō. Workers and their whānau followed the jobs out, Edwards said, leaving acute socio-economic challenges the rūnanga has spent years trying to turn.
“The place where New Zealand’s next industrial transformation can begin,” NZ Bio Forestry chief executive Wayne Mulligan said of Murupara and Kaingaroa, confirming the company wants a scalable model it can replicate at other sites across the country.
Ngāti Manawa already holds a workforce record in the district, having built the Manawa Tū Work for Life Centre and the Manawa Rere digital hub in Murupara with Provincial Growth Fund backing of $2.7 million. Outreach from both programmes now extends to Kaingaroa Village, giving the rūnanga a skills pipeline should the hub proceed.
The meetings follow a heads-of-agreement between NZ Bio Forestry and the iwi for an integrated wood-processing hub at Kaingaroa, combining sawmilling, biochemical extraction, and bioenergy on a single site. An industrial site is already moving through consent, with mill residues destined for biochemicals and sustainable aviation fuel.
Ngāti Manawa speaks for 5,000 mana whenua across a district where Kaingaroa’s 400 residents are 98 per cent Māori and where the exodus of working families has left challenges Edwards describes as acute. Construction could begin late this year or early next if the numbers add up, NZ Bio Forestry confirmed, and with the study now running, Kaingaroa and Murupara hold their firmest date for a new industry since the reforms emptied the villages in the late 1980s.
