Woodside sponsored a building that ditched gas due to climate impacts

More so than the coal and oil industries, gas really works hard on its branding and marketing. There’s an obvious reason for this: it’s a consumer product as well as a power system and industrial fuel. It heats air and water inside homes, particularly in Australia’s southern states, and it fuels cooking and barbeques in many homes.

The industry has used influencers and Instagram to convince consumers to use fossil fuels in and around their homes. They also like to focus on universities – the worsening public image of the fossil fuel industry is causing a talent crunch and they’re trying to correct it by pouring cash into the struggling tertiary education sector, not always with success.

Much of the PR and marketing effort is ramping up as the prospect of bans against new connections to the gas network arise in various parts of Australia; mostly in the ACT, but potentially spreading across to Tasmania and Victoria.

Converting the power grid to clean electricity, and electrifying technologies reliant on fossil fuels is comfortably the best pathway to rapid decarbonisation. The gas industry sees otherwise: they want to retain the very expensive network of pipelines and processors that supply fossil gas to homes and buildings, and instead mix it – slightly – very, very slightly – with some hydrogen that may or may not have been produced using a zero carbon option like renewable energy.

In January this year, RenewEconomy reported on the major Australian gas company Woodside Energy signing a trial project to blend renewable hydrogen gas – produced using wind power – into the main Tasmanian gas network. Woodside’s glossy brochures insist that “hydrogen can be used in our homes, from cooking to heating”, with fossil hydrogen (“blue”, in fossil industry parlance) paired with the purchase of tree planting offsets comprising a core proportion of hydrogen supply.

The very, very fancy building

It was recently announced that Woodside had scored the naming rights to a very, very fancy new building at Monash University. The “Woodside Building for Technology and Design”, according to the architects website, ” initiates new models of learning alongside academic research with industry-related enterprise, while simultaneously integrating precedent-establishing environmental innovation”. It comes from a partnership between Woodside and Monash, with Woodside handing over $16.5 million to the construction of the building (out of a total cost of $170 million).

“Woodside and Monash share a commitment to developing innovative responses to real-world challenges and we recognise that finding a sustainable path to a lower-carbon economy is one of the biggest we face”, said  Woodside’s CEO, Peter Coleman, in 2019. “This challenge can only be solved by companies like Woodside, which is applying disruptive data-driven technologies to our operations, working with the best and brightest minds at universities such as Monash”. How modest.

The official opening of the building was yesterday, featuring current advisor to the Australian government, Dr Alan Finkel, and Woodside’s Coleman at the event.

It is a pretty spectacular piece of engineering. It’s designed to be extremely energy efficient, adhering to the German ‘passive house’ philosophy. Impressively, it shuns the ‘no windows’ way of building a passive house and features huge windows. It also comes with a decent-sized solar installation on the roof. “Passive House is typically about keeping the sun out. We were doing the opposite”, said one of the architects.

It’s well insulated, airtight, maximises thermal comfort and air quality and has significantly reduced energy demand. Honestly, it’s pretty cool.

Though it’s not quite as deluxe as Woodside’s headquarters in Perth, which features a 25 metre lap pool for “employees and clients”. That building runs its heating on fossil gas, emits 2,610,098 kg CO₂-e per annum in total and purchases 0.00% green power, according to NABERS.

Of course, my first question was whether the Monash building is connected to the gas network. The answer is very, very hard to find – it’s not in any marketing materials, it’s not mentioned by any of the developers and certainly not by Woodside. But dig deep enough, and you can find it in a document on the Passive House website detailing the technical characteristics of the building.

“Buildings domestic hot water is produced using high efficiency CO2 heat pump units with COP ranging from 5 to 7 depending on ambient condition. This allowed the building to be fully electric building with no reliance on natural gas or any fossil fuels, this allows Monash University to achieve their net zero target as soon as possible”

It is a very nice example of Monash actually putting someone else’s money where their mouth is – their ‘net zero by 2030’ plan is genuinely ambitious, developed in partnership with ClimateWorks Australia.

“Ending our dependence on natural gas …. We’re replacing our inefficient gas boilers with electric heat pumps”, they write on their site. In a building named Woodside.

It’s Monash University’s second all-electric building, after the Biomedical Learning and Teaching Building, which features a 1 MWh battery on their rooftop. Another building at 30 Research Way features a 70 kilowatt rooftop solar installation, and the Chancellery features an all-electric thermal plant.

For 2019/20, 12% of the university’s carbon emissions came from fossil gas, the third highest before air travel and the purchase of electricity (from Victoria’s notoriously coal-heavy grid). Energy efficiency measures avoided the use of 67 gigajoules of fossil gas, and the university’s solar PV systems have been ramping up (with a large dip in early 2020 due to COVID19 forcing people to not work from campus). Monash now has 4.1 megawatts of installed solar capacity.

In their latest annual report, they highlight that one of the key pillars in their net zero initiative is “Campus electrification, switching from gas to all-electric campuses”.

It is a pretty great plan, and a pretty great building. It focuses heavily on disabling fossil fuel infrastructure, instead of adding in almost unnoticeable quantities of possibly-green-hydrogen into gas networks – a permanent, sustainable and obviously superior pathway to deep decarbonisation.

It should be offensive that a key symbol of this project has been stamped with the logo of the company set to lose out from this transition, but instead it’s darkly comic.

The emissions from Woodside’s sale of fossil fuels in 2020 were 84.9 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent, more than double the total emissions from Victoria’s coal-fired power stations in 2020, all of which could be avoided if the demand for fossil fuels were removed by immediate, urgent and technologically sound actions like those taken by the Monash University campus.