About this episode
Roughly a third of Australia’s primary energy still comes from liquid fuels. Dave Stribley thinks we have barely started on replacing them, and that the gap is where the opportunity sits.
He spent 15 years at ExxonMobil. Ten of those supported the Bass Strait assets, about 22 facilities that supplied the gas the east coast ran on. Three were spent in Qatar on LNG mega trains, where he watched scale drag costs to numbers he calls eye-watering. He came back to Australia to take the Bass Strait facilities apart, then left with Alex Smith to start HAMR Energy.
HAMR’s flagship project sits in Portland, Victoria. It takes residual biomass from the Green Triangle plantation forestry region, adds low-carbon hydrogen, and produces renewable methanol. A second facility in South Australia upgrades that methanol into sustainable aviation fuel. Total investment is around $1.8 billion. HAMR has also built a second arm, HAMR Fuels, to supply customers with low-carbon fuels today. It has just supplied 1,000 tonnes of biofuel to BHP.
Joy McConnochie and Fraser Thompson work through the development problem with him. Dave is consistent on one point: the technology is not the barrier. His answers often come back to risk, and to who holds which piece of it. Reaching financial close means making a long list of things true at the same time.
About the guest
Dave Stribley is Co-Founder and Business Development Director of HAMR Energy. HAMR is an Australian low-carbon liquid fuels platform. It develops renewable methanol and sustainable aviation fuel projects for aviation, shipping, heavy industry and chemicals.
He co-founded the company with Alex Smith, also ex-ExxonMobil, after 15 years at ExxonMobil across the Bass Strait assets and Qatar’s LNG projects. He is based in Melbourne.
”One of the single biggest missing things in any of these new liquid fuel projects is ultimately the customer.
Dave Stribley
Key Links
We cover
- Leaving ExxonMobil, and the gap the founders saw in liquid fuels
- What HAMR Energy does, and why HAMR Fuels exists
- The Series A: Qantas, Airbus and thyssenkrupp Uhde as shareholders
- Portland Renewable Fuels: forestry residue, hydrogen and methanol
- Why methanol, and the commercial flexibility it buys
- The hub and spoke model, and the limits of the mega train
- Feedstock: the Green Triangle, and what comes after it
- The BHP biofuel trial with Berge Bulk and GCMD
- The partnerships that got the projects this far
- Why a demand signal matters more than more supply-side funding
- Sulphur, lead, and valuing the externality
- What a credible Australian demand mechanism needs
- The Investor Front Door, from the inside
- The three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle of FOAK
- Financing $1.8 billion in an undeveloped market
- Risk, and the better conversation to have with government
- What first-of-a-kind changes, and what it does not
- Advice for other first-of-a-kind developers
- Supply chains, ecosystems, and the China cost question
- Kathmandu to Everest: what Dave is excited about
