Another tenuous link to industrial decarbonisation this morning
By Max van Someren | 29 October 2026
Another tenuous link to industrial decarbonisation this morning.
A few months ago I took my first ride on one of Perth's electric buses. The most surprising thing about it, apart from the new-bus smell, was how unsurprising it was. Same route, same stops, same bus really. Just a little quicker.
That's what successful industrial decarbonisation needs to look like: the same outcome as before, at a life-cycle cost that isn't any higher, and perhaps a few things done better along the way. Customers won't make up the difference. In one breakout at the HILT CRC conference in Adelaide last week, the estimate was that only about 1% of the green metals market will pay a green premium.
Some industrial systems are ripe for electrification. But heat is a different matter. Senator Tim Ayres told the conference that Australian industry uses 234 TWh of heat a year, and only 3% of it is electrified. That part is more like flying than catching the bus: hard to do technically, and harder still at a sensible cost.
We also heard that many industry partners face major investment decisions in the next three to five years. Those decisions will set the course of their emissions out to 2050. That's the bus fleet problem at industrial scale. Buy diesel buses today and you'll probably still be running them in ten years. A smelter or a refinery lasts a good deal longer than that.
None of this is easy. But "it's hard" isn't a good enough reason to buy the diesel bus. The business cases need building now, before the capital is committed, and that's why HILT CRC's work matters. The conference was billed as HILT at Halfway: five years in, five to go.
Some examples of successes so far: Swinburne's work on electric smelting furnaces for Australian ores has moved from lab-scale slag tests to the techno-economics, where capital cost is now the biggest hurdle. There's also work on high-temperature thermal storage, carbon capture for alumina and iron, and the energy infrastructure for net-zero industrial hubs (my own corner at Bivios). One point from that last session stuck with me: the cheapest energy pathway on paper may not be the best one, if another keeps your options open for longer.
Over the next five years, HILT CRC's job is to give industry and government evidence solid enough to choose decarbonisation over business as usual.
The green iron in the jar Milan Padhi from Siemens Energy is holding is about the size of a pepper shaker. The next step is a shipload.
And the Lego airport? No link to industrial decarbonisation at all, tenuous or otherwise. It just brightened up my evening at Adelaide Airport on Friday.