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Future Fuels CRC holds its Brisbane Roadshow 2025 – 6 May

May 6, 2025

Future Fuels CRC visited Brisbane on 6 May as the first of a series of roadshow events across Australia focusing on knowledge transfer with our members and also providing an update on the formation of the Gas Infrastructure Research Australia (GIRA) initiative. The Brisbane event was hosted by UQ’s City Hub, with 30 members attending and featured a welcome and overview of the CRC’s key achievements from its seven year program delivered by CEO David Norman and showcasing a selection of high impact research projects throughout the day.

Neil Smith and Doug Proud started off the research dissemination with an engaging Q&A session focused on appliance testing results and investigations. There was lots of discussion about the capability of different industrial appliances to cope with hydrogen blends up to 100% hydrogen and the audience was pleased to know that they had ‘solved’ the mysterious case of the orange hydrogen burning flame – caused by a reaction with sodium in the air. Hydrogen ready pipelines was also a key topic introduced by Doug covering their recent research on how this may be addressed in the context of moving towards certification. Doug, who has recently taken on a new role as GIRA’s Research Manager, also provided some insights into areas of focus that GIRA will be considering as its research focus areas.

Amrita Kambo took members through UQ’s extensive social licence research program on hydrogen and biomethane which covered surveys and deliberative forums to understand the shaping of public perceptions across key demographics. Professor David Close, Director of UQ’s Gas and Energy Transition Research Centre followed this up with highlighting the capabilities of the new centre and shared some system planning focused insights that highlighted future challenges for the NEM, including system resilience that was a recurring theme later in the programme.

After lunch, Holger Maier and Sam Culley from Adelaide University took members through their biomethane investability mapping tool and key findings of their technoeconomic analysis, including important factors that determine project viability – energy density and feedstock availability across the year, as well as of course proximity to pipelines! There was much interest from the audience in the tool’s adaptability to easily accommodate extension into new feedstocks and markets.

Jennifer Yarnold, an adjunct researcher from UQ now working at CSIRO, took us all through their policy pathways assessment of options to provide effective targeted support to scale biomethane market development in Australia. This comprehensive assessment included a review of Australia’s current policy settings as well as taking learnings from a selection of international case studies of varying stages of biomethane market maturity – Canada, Denmark, Italy, UK and US. Members were interested in knowing the recent progress for key policy developments that address barriers or provide material incentives to biomethane projects in Australia, such as NGERs recognition of biomethane to monetise safeguard mechanism credits and the renewable gas target consultations in Victoria.

Last but not least, Sleiman Mhanna shared the findings from UoM’s extensive technoeconomic modelling and assessment of NEM reliability and resilience focused on underground hydrogen storage (UHS) project opportunities in Victoria and Queensland. The research highlights the role that these UHS projects can potentially play given the opportunities to secure greater revenues with lower costs in modelled NEM scenarios when compared to pumped hydro and the limitations of current LCOE approaches. The research also has identified new resilience assessment considerations to better define wind lulls that are not currently reflected in the AEMO ISP and illustrate additional beneficial roles for UHS in the future. The inadequacies of current NEM resilience approaches was a view shared amongst the members attending, while there was also some debate regarding whether UHS or other gas-related options would fill these potential future market need.