Waste not, want not: Bioenergy's economic bonanza

Australian Financial Review

7 October 2022

Organic waste, ranging from household garbage to crushed sugar cane, creates as much renewable energy in Australia as wind and solar combined, a little-known fact that the bioenergy industry believes should be shouted from rooftops.

“When I get up at conferences and tell people that bioenergy contributes 47 per cent of our renewable energy production, they look at me as if they don’t believe me,” says Bioenergy Australia CEO Shahana McKenzie.

“Bioenergy’s role is significant and incredibly powerful and, in most cases, by using it we are removing what would otherwise be greenhouse emissions going into the atmosphere,” she says. “It’s an area that that should be getting a lot more attention.”

McKenzie’s stance is backed by an Australian government “Bioenergy Roadmap” released late last year, which confirms McKenzie’s figure and foresees bioenergy growing to 20 per cent of total energy consumption by the 2050s.

Bioenergy could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 12 per cent, add $14 billion to Australia’s GDP and create an additional 35,000 jobs by the 2050s, the report says. Biofuels could also reduce the nation’s reliance on imported oil and petroleum and create an extra 63 days of consumption cover.

McKenzie says bioenergy can play a much larger role in sectors that are harder to decarbonise and don’t have other options, such as liquid fuels and gas.

“Because the capture of biogas is removing methane that would otherwise go into the atmosphere, it can play a major part in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions,” she says. “I would say over the next five years we will see a lot of the biogas currently being converted into electricity going into decarbonising manufacturing and the gas network more broadly.

“Our wastewater, sewerage and food processing industries create huge amounts of organic waste that emits methane, which is 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the atmosphere.”

Bioenergy Australia wants to see huge purpose-built facilities – “bio-hubs” – that extract energy and produce high-value fertiliser out the back end. “With fertiliser prices up 250 per cent in the past two years, that would be a fantastic solution for Australia’s agricultural industry,” McKenzie says.

“We could be providing 23 per cent of Australia’s domestic gas consumption with biogas, and 18 per cent of our domestic aviation with sustainable jet fuel by 2030, as well as providing 33 per cent of Australia’s industrial heat.”

Leading waste and environmental management company Veolia Australia and New Zealand, says using existing biotechnology to convert waste to clean energy could have solved the NSW energy crisis.

Richard Kirkman, Veolia ANZ’s CEO, describes the technology as a “silver bullet” that would also maintain consumer affordability and protect the environment.

“Providing more than 10 per cent of Australia’s energy production from new shovel-ready bio-renewables would create the additional network capacity needed to avoid brownouts and blackouts, prevent price disturbances caused by energy shortages, and provide the energy volume needed for more electric vehicles,” he says.

Kirkman says a number of market accelerators have converged to make bioenergy an attractive proposition.

“We’re looking at investing tens of millions of dollars a year into developing technologies and building new facilities,” he says.

“Those drivers include technological maturity, enough for us to deploy without much risk, and digital capability enables us to monitor, for example, energy use in buildings and industrial processes to make them more efficient.

“There’s also high investor appetite, which means there’s cash available to develop assets on the ground, and emerging policy drivers with the federal government’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent by 2030.

“Those drivers mean we are allocating a lot more of our resources to developing our renewable energy business.”

Veolia ANZ employs around 5500 people, working with heavy industry, retail and commercial businesses, governments and communities across 300 operating sites to deliver sustainable energy solutions.

Its French parent company, Veolia, is a world leader in optimised resource management and ecological transformation, employing more than 220,000 people across the globe in the fields of water and waste management and energy services.

“We are obsessed with what we call ecological transformation,” Kirkman says. “It’s a way to adapt to climate change pressures while maintaining quality of life, the natural environment and the wealth of citizens.

“Alongside traditional renewable technologies, such as solar, wind and hydropower, it can harness a triple bottom line effect, solving climate change, the energy resilience crisis and price in one big bang.”

Kirkman says his company’s services can solve customers’ pollution and energy problems “without having to go back to the bicycle”.

“A lot of people worry unnecessarily about stopping using materials, about resource reduction, closing down facilities that have emissions and effectively stopping development in order to be more sustainable,” he says.

“You can continue to develop and run your business or industry no matter what its size, but you can do it in a cleaner way and we can make that economically viable.

“Making the shift to bioenergy would allow us, and our children, to enjoy the Australian lifestyle we have today for generations to come.”

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