ACT businesses call for clear pathway as government pushes gas ban forward

The age-old craft presents a "unique" challenge to the ACT government's plans for electrification, says Elizabeth Rogers, chief executive officer at Canberra Glassworks.

"The glass is actually on the end of a steel post - you can't put a steel post into a type of furnace that's electric because we'll lose all our glassblowers," she said.

"They'd be electrocuted."

The two giant furnaces at the ACT government-owned glassworks are run on gas, contributing to the Kingston facility's rather hefty energy bill.

The energy-intensive practice of creating art from glass creates an annual cost of around $200,000, which is gas, water and electricity combined.

Kilns used for fused-glass and the cooling down process rely on electricity. A "lot of water" is required to keep glass wet before grinding. The building's heritage listing prevents the installation of solar panels to generate cheaper electricity.

Ms Rogers said there was currently no viable substitute for gas, and the more than $100,000 required to replace a furnace would be a major capital expenditure for an arts organisation.

"There are some processes in making glass that are always going to need some sort of gas," she said.

"There's work being done around the world to look at this. So we're watching what's happening with our international colleagues to hopefully come up with an adequate solution."

Soaring energy prices have threatened the livelihoods of glassmakers in Europe, the Italian government bailing out the industry in Venice.

Canberra Glassworks have engaged the assistance of an energy expert, who has advised biogas could be the next logical step.

Ms Rogers said looking at creating a sustainable industry with less reliance on fossil fuels was a key consideration for everyone when it came to the redevelopment of the Kingston Arts Precinct.

"We're highly specialist and odd organisations - we don't fit all the rules - with our quite bespoke needs," she said.

"I'm very relieved that they're not going to turn off the gas next year."

The ACT government has taken the next step in its plan to switch off gas by 2045, calling for feedback on proposed legislation to ban new gas connections from November.

Its preferred rollout would see residential-zoned regions banned from connecting first, ahead of stopping new connections across the ACT.

Tim Manning owns Redbrick Coffee. His business is one of several Canberra roasteries operating out of Fyshwick.

"There is no opportunity within the commercial coffee roasting realm right now to feasibly roast coffee without gas," Mr Manning said.

"There isn't an electric roaster that can produce the product that we produce, at the scale we produce it, and to the same quality."

Redbrick has purchased a new roaster that uses a quarter of the gas its current machines, to be delivered in 2024.

"We've done that because it is the most eco-friendly roaster available on the market today," Mr Manning said.

"We've started the process of offsetting all the carbon emissions associated with our business and becoming a certified carbon neutral business."

Mr Manning was in favour of the ACT taking further steps towards reducing carbon emissions.

"It's just knowing what those policy settings are going to be, with enough lead time, for us to then make smart business investment decisions around the technology that we need to continue to run our business effectively," he said.

As it stands, there's uncertainty for roasters like Redbrick if they were to need to upgrade to a bigger facility. The ACT government is yet to decide whether exemptions would be granted to some businesses or industries to allow a gas connection.

The use of liquefied petroleum gas is also up for debate, potentially providing a short-term fix for businesses that move into regions new gas connections are banned.

"I think most businesses within our industry are conscious of the need to continue to improve the way we do things," he said.

"I don't think any of the coffee roasters in Canberra would have an issue around a change to the policy around the use of gas. It's just doing it in a way where we can continue to operate whilst the technology and the facilities become available for us to continue operating."

Mr Manning felt hydrogen-powered equipment would come before electric, although one of the big European manufacturers was exploring both options.

"It's a bit of a race to see which is likely to land first," he said.

In discussion papers published this week, the government said the outcome of the current consultation would not prevent the ACT from using renewable forms of gas in the future if that technology emerged as a reliable and cost-effective energy option.

"Whilst we will continue to monitor and evaluate the research and economics of green gas, the ACT government does not currently view green gas as a viable wide-scale option to support the territory's emissions reduction targets," they wrote.

Ken Baldwin, professor at the Australian National University, said a circular use of carbon, biogas, could be one replacement for fossil fuel, which relies on taking carbon laid out millions of years ago.

Prof Baldwin said biogas was produced primarily through the decay of organic materials, which could include waste extracted from landfill or even sewerage.

"The main molecules that come out of that are going to be methane, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulphide and a few others," he said.

Prof Baldwin said extracting hydrogen from that required a lot of work and extracting methane was not much different than making methane from a gas well.

"The only difference, of course, is that you can regard this as a kind of circular process," he said.

"On the other hand, it also produces byproducts like CO2 which aren't captured in the biogas refinement. They could be captured and stored underground but often they're just let go. So it's not carbon-neutral, in a strict sense of the word."

Prof Baldwin has previously lent his expertise to the ACT government on precisely this issue.

He said hydrogen made in an emissions-free way was another alternative to natural gas. He said this could mean using renewable electricity from solar and wind farms, or hydro that then splits water into hydrogen and oxygen.

Prof Baldwin said it was possible to stick both biogas and hydrogen into the existing gas network.

He said problems arose when hydrogen got to be more than about 10 to 15 per cent of the gas in the pipes.

"If you go to 100 per cent hydrogen then you're going to have problems with the gas pipelines, because the hydrogen causes steel pipes to become embrittled and they then leak," he said.

He said prevention required pipes to be conditioned with high-density plastics to stop hydrogen from getting into steel welds and joints.

"So there's a lot of work that needs to be done to achieve that - and that'll be expensive - but it can be done," he said.

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"But you then have to change pretty much all the burner jets in things like gas cooktops, and industrial gas ovens and all these other things, because hydrogen burns slightly differently to methane natural gas."

Prof Baldwin said making hydrogen gas the primary energy source would not only require the reconditioning of the entire gas pipeline network, but also getting every customer to change their gas burner jets as well.

"This all has to be done in one hit, you can't just do some of it one time, some another time. It is going to be a change over dates and all that has to happen," he said.

"All of this makes it complicated to use hydrogen in existing natural gas networks as a replacement fuel.

"And this is part of the logic for going for electrification and not building new pipelines in new suburbs."

Prof Baldwin said specialised burners, including those used in glassworks, could be adapted in the future for using hydrogen from the existing network.

"If the gas network is no longer available to you, you can use bottled hydrogen to do what you need to do," he said.

"There will be industries, not only in the ACT, that will have to find non-electricity alternatives for what they do to replace natural gas.

"Hydrogen will be part of the options for which they might switch over and some might go for biogas.

"In a world in which there is a carbon price on emissions there will be no alternative for those industries - unless somehow they capture the CO2 they produce and store it forever underground - but to go for something that is either a carbon-neutral alternative or doesn't involve carbon at all."

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