Ex-oil and gas engineers are using Australia's traditional industrial strengths to refloat one of the world's dirtiest industries - shipping.
Europe and China may have a head start, but a group of chemical engineers have backing for a $2 billion plant to produce a green shipping fuel from Australia's abundant sunshine, wind power and forestry waste.
Located in Portland, Victoria, the proposed methanol synthesis plant would produce around 300,000 tonnes of green methanol - the equivalent of removing 80,000 cars or decarbonising 150,000 tonnes of fossil fuels.
Start-up HAMR Energy, co-founded several years ago by David Stribley and Alex Smith, has joined forces with German giant ThyssenKrupp Uhde to produce the liquid fuel.
Unlike green hydrogen and its derivative ammonia, Mr Stribley said green methanol, often abbreviated as MeOH, already has a place in the market for new aviation and shipping fuels.
"Technically, it's ready today," he told AAP.
"Our view of hydrogen is that it's a very good building block, but it's a very challenging molecule to transport and use as an energy source," he said.
The engineers looked for the "greenest, best, renewable carbon" to attach that hydrogen to, to make it more useful.
Their large-scale green hydrogen development, at over 200 megawatts of electrolysers, will use renewable energy to split the molecules from water.
"We're having a lot of discussions with people wanting to buy fuel, rather than us trying to push product onto them," Mr Stribley said.
"We've been doing a lot of work in shipping because their demand is so high and obviously 300,000 tonnes of production is a globally significant project."
A ship ordered today has a life span of at least 25 years and would still be operating in 2050 in a world aiming for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.
And because there are already more than 300 new dual-fuel vessels ordered - with twin engines for traditional fuels and green methanol - there is a big gap emerging between supply and demand.
For the startup, it's now a question of when to pull the trigger on signing offtake agreements with customers, Mr Stribley said.
"By 2028, there's methanol bunkering happening in Rotterdam, there's been methanol bunkering out of Singapore - I was in Singapore last week and we're looking at potentially supplying into Singapore for that," he said.
Nadja Håkansson, CEO of ThyssenKrupp Uhde, said the project tapped into demand for the fuel while making a real difference to a carbon-intensive industry.
The market is expected to grow to 380 million tonnes and be worth more than $200 billion by 2050.
Global shipping giant Maersk alone will have 100 methanol-powered vessels on the high seas by 2027, after the successful launch in 2023 of its first container vessel powered by two engines - one running on green methanol and the other on traditional fuels.
The Portland project's new partnership with ThyssenKrupp means the project can use established gasification and green methanol technology to convert forestry residue into high-value green chemicals.
It's expected to be operational by 2029, with the support of the state government and the local industrial community.
Victoria's Minister for Regional Development Gayle Tierney said the "significant investment" in Portland positioned the region to be at the forefront of renewable energy innovation.
Mr Stribley said the area has the right "industrial logic" for a world-scale plant - biomass from the forestry region, one of the state's best renewable energy zones, deep-water port.
Located near Australia's largest forestry plantation production area, the facility would take residual materials, such as trimmings and damaged logs, that would otherwise be left on the ground.
And there's no need to wait for offshore wind to come online in the next decade, as there is already renewable energy capacity and proposed projects across that region.
"It's really good timing to have this coming online, probably backed in by a wind farm," Mr Stribley said.
"Offshore wind, because of its load factor is a really good way to ultimately get us off coal in the long term," he said.
"But I do think offshore is some way off, and we've been more focused on onshore wind - it's also going to be much more cost-effective."
HAMR Energy board chair Richard Owen, former chairman and lead country manager at ExxonMobil Australia, is passionate about retaining skills that could otherwise be lost.
"We're passionate about being chemical engineers and Australia having the skills to do these sorts of things, Mr Stribley said.
"One of the benefits of Portland is that it has a good existing workforce on the back of Alcoa," he said.
Having Alcoa's aluminium smelter and manufacturer Keppel Prince in the area means there's a local skill-set to build the plant's kit, and local workshops to fix pumps and compressors when the plant is up and running.
For governments, making new fuels is at the heart of clean energy and climate policies with shipping accounting for around the same emissions as aviation globally.
"The Portland Renewable Fuels Project will help us decarbonise the hard-to-abate shipping sector and accelerate the development of our renewable hydrogen and renewable fuels sectors," Victoria's Minister for Energy and Resources Lily D'Ambrosio said.
It would also create local jobs and support businesses in Portland and the state's southwest, she said.
Europe's emissions trading system is set to include carbon dioxide from large ships entering their ports regardless of the flag they fly, and more toxic methane and nitrous oxide emissions from 2026.
"Europe definitely has a head start, driven by regulation, which brings shipping under their emissions trading system as of next year and targets to reduce the emissions intensity of the fuels they use," Mr Stribley said.
China is, by far, the biggest methanol market in the world, founded on fossil-based methanol, but is also developing green methanol.
"China can build at scale and we can all benefit from that," he said.
"Where Australia has strength is in renewable energy, we have plenty of biomass and we have plenty of space."
Separately, a green methanol and hydrogen project is also on the way across the Bass Strait as an old power station is demolished to make way for new fuels.
Under a memorandum of understanding in place with global shipping lines, the Portland team and Tasmania's $1.2 Bell Bay Powerfuels Project could supply a future green methanol bunkering hub at Port of Melbourne.
