Brickworks and Delorean go Back to the Future to curb gas woes

Simon EvansSenior reporter

Aug 2, 2022 – 1.13pm

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Australia’s largest brick making company Brickworks says a final investment decision on whether to proceed with a $20 million-plus bioenergy plant to help power a Sydney manufacturing facility is likely to occur in the next year as it steps up work on a project with ASX-listed Delorean Corporation.

Brickworks and Delorean, a specialist operator in the field of bioenergy facilities where organic waste is converted to gas and electricity, announced on Tuesday they were now proceeding to the development stage of a partnership to try to prove up the commercial feasibility of a facility.

Christopher Lloyd and Michael J Fox with the time-travelling DeLorean in Back To The Future. In the second of the movies, Back to the Future II, the Doc Brown character used banana skins to help fire up the DeLorean.

Brickworks managing director Lindsay Partridge said on Tuesday the proposed plant, if it gets the green light, would likely power about half of the needs of a brick making facility at the group’s Horsley Park site in western Sydney.

“You’ve got to have a lot of irons in the fire,” he said.

It made sense to use organic waste to generate energy, with the high landfill fees for just dumping organic waste into landfill sites adding to the commercial impetus, he said. The rising gas prices in Australia meant more companies would begin pursuing such projects and Brickworks was trying to be on the front foot.

There is increasing focus on bioenergy around the world, but the industry is still at an early stage. Food scraps, agricultural waste, sewage and other forms of organic waste can be processed under a system where bacteria breaks down organic matter to generate the same gas – methane – that large fossil fuel producers extract from underground.

Mr Partridge said it was alarming to see what was occurring in Europe where the manufacturing sector was being hit with crippling rises in energy prices. He said in the United States, where Brickworks has acquired five brick making operations since 2018, gas prices were less than one-third the level being paid in Australia.

He said the potential cost of the bioenergy plant was in the vicinity of $20 million to $25 million. A comprehensive commercial assessment was now underway, with a decision likely by this time next year.

“I think within the next 12 months,” Mr Partridge said.

If it gets the go-ahead, the bioenergy plant would be located on the Horsley Park site. “We’ll put it on our own site,” he said.

Delorean Corp, which has its headquarters in Perth, has been working on a variety of bioenergy plants. Electricity is being fed into the South Australian power grid by a biogas plant utilising waste oat husks from Australia’s largest rolled oat mill. That plant is in Bordertown, in the south-east of SA.

Delorean Corp executive chairman Hamish Jolly said on Tuesday that industrial groups were increasingly looking at alternatives to traditional gas supplies before the latest gas price crisis which flared in the past few months.

“That was true even before the gas price hikes,” he said.

But that interest had accelerated as the push to decarbonise across industry stepped up.

Delorean Corp, which runs engineering, infrastructure and retail energy divisions, borrowed from the second movie Back to the Future II when it was established, because of the scene where the Doc Brown character played by Christopher Lloyd used banana skins from a rubbish bin to help fire up the DeLorean time-travelling vehicle. For Delorean Corp it was a simple way to portray the fundamentals of the bioenergy process.

Simon Evans writes on business specialising in retail, manufacturing, beverages, mining and M&A. He is based in Adelaide. Connect with Simon on Twitter. Email Simon at simon.evans@afr.com