CEFC turns focus to commercial-ready bioenergy for Australia

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation has signalled a new focus on biofuels as a potentially significant contributor to the nation’s future energy mix, ahead of this week’s Bioenergy Australia Conference in Adelaide.

The $10 billion clean energy investment vehicle set up by the Labor Gillard government – and since targeted for the scrap heap by the Abbott government – has so far contracted investments of over $900 million in projects with a total value of over $3 billion.

Of this, bioenergy investments make up about 10 per cent or nearly $100 million of the total portfolio, and have been focused on waste-to-energy and biogas.

But CEFC CIO Ted Dow told the conference on Monday morning that the Corporation was shifting its focusing on introducing internationally commercially-proven bioenergy technologies to the Australian market.

He said while bioenergy currently provided about 10 per cent of Australia’s renewable electricity, it had significant potential to develop further with the right support in place.

“Harnessing bioenergy makes good economic sense while contributing to fuel security and regional development, but for a range of reasons Australia has generally lagged the rest of the world on large and small-scale bioenergy projects particularly in the waste-to-energy sector,” he said.

“CEFC finance is helping accelerate bioenergy projects that reduce energy costs, waste and carbon emissions across sectors including manufacturing, agriculture, horticulture, utilities and local government,” he said.

The kinds of projects the CEFC can finance include converting food and meat processing waste into biogas, producing ethanol from bagasse and creating biofuels from feedstock such as sorghum, wood waste, or straw and waste biomass.

The CEFC can also finance associated or enabling infrastructure such as cogeneration facilities, storage, processing, refining, transportation, distribution and refueling infrastructure, distributed power generation solutions at individual sites as well as truck and shipping fleet upgrades and conversions to biofuel.

“We’re able to play a significant role in helping projects overcome a range of barriers by being able to structure investment terms tailored to suit the unique characteristics of a project. We work with private sector banks and share our expertise to pioneer new ways to accelerate investment in bioenergy,” Mr Dow said.

“It’s important for the right partnership to be in place to ensure successful bioenergy projects. The aligned interests of feedstock suppliers, energy off-takers, project operators and equity investors provide the framework for making a project bankable.

“Bioenergy has the potential for both domestic consumption purposes and the export market and our finance activities in this sector will help develop local industries, generate new employment opportunities and achieve emissions reductions.”