Call for government backing for 'green coal' prickly acacia plan

Speaking from Townsville, Katter's Australian Party leader Rob Katter joined Brad Carswell, the founder of Carbon Renewable Energy, in announcing the successful development of a torrefaction process that turns the invasive weed into a carbon-neutral alternative to coal, for use in cogeneration power plants.

Mr Katter described it as a real win for the environment and said his party had embraced it to ensure government investment was forthcoming.

"Prickly acacia is the cane toad of woody weeds," he said.

"The Reef has over $440 million spent on it but you'd be hard pressed to find $1m for prickly acacia, and it's a much bigger environmental problem for Queensland, I'd argue.

"The government can't sit back placidly and think this is something industry can deal with.

"We want to see the government not just talk about biomass, we want them to facilitate the start of the industry, just like they did in Gladstone.

"We want them to put their rhetoric into action - the resource is there but it's got to get started."

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Mr Carswell, a Brisbane-based arborist, said he was seeking government and private sector investment to develop and build a mobile torrefaction plant and to conduct a pilot program as a proof of concept for commercialisation, in real-world conditions in north west Queensland.

He has been working on the concept for 10 years and has invested $600,000 of his own money so far.

"The process removes the moisture but retains the energy," he said, adding that Newcastle coal testing laboratory ALS had shown that the torrefaction product was 33 per cent more energy efficient than any other product on the world market, and matched the calorific value of thermal coal coming from Queensland's Callide and New Hope mines.

According to Mr Carswell, he had been in talks with Mitsui in Japan prior to the onset of the global pandemic, who he said had indicated a willingness to take as much biomass as CRE could deliver.

"There is a ready-made international market for this product - worldwide demand is expected to exceed 50m tonnes within a decade," he said, emphasising the carbon neutral values torrefaction offered, releasing no more CO2 into the atmosphere than the plants sequestered, and the international appetite abounding for that credential.

"Coal is 250 million years of biomass, prickly acacia is 40 to 80 years of biomass - that's why we classify this product as green coal," he said.

When operational, CRE anticipates exporting 200,000 tonnes of torrefied pellets per annum, and Mr Carswell said in excess of 250 jobs would be created in north west Queensland once the plant was in full production.

To date, work on refining the technical aspects of the process has been carried out at Richmond, in the heart of the scourge that has infested 23m hectares.

Milestones completed include quantifying the biomass by mapping, producing sample pellets for analysis, and establishing local government and landholder agreements, and a framework for harvest access.

Mr Carswell said CRE was the only company with existing permits to both harvest and sell prickly acacia, issued by the Queensland government, and had agreements with three of the councils - McKinlay, Richmond and Flinders - that the weed was growing in.

"CRE has a vision for jobs, jobs, and jobs for the region to restore the next generations of farmers while future-proofing and growing businesses in the towns of Richmond, Julia Creek and Hughenden," he said. "Unless there is an economic benefit to addressing prickly acacia this problem will continue to grow and be ignored."

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The company is seeking $2m to move to the proof of concept on a commercial scale stage, from the government and the private sector.

"Capital is always an issue - it would definitely quicken the process," Mr Carswell said. "Ten years ago we were ahead of our time, now we've come of age."

Mr Katter said it was the start of something big.

"There's 23m ha of prickly acacia - there's plenty of resource that won't be going anywhere soon."

Mr Carswell contested the federal seat of Lilley in Brisbane for the LNP in 2019 and has the fourth position on Queensland's LNP Senate ticket, but he said he was happy to have KAP support for the project, because the problem was in KAP electorates.

"This is about fixing an environmental problem," he said. "I get no favours; I just need assistance to get it moving."

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