SA renewable fuel innovator to meet the moment
With the Iran war having exposed supply chain risks in the diesel market, an SA-based company is seeing demand for its alternative, renewable fuel solution.
South Australian renewable fuel business 34MJ might be on the precipice of breaking through into a more mainstream market, with the global fuel shock caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz driving interest in its biodiesel solution.
Founded by Morgan Hunter in 2006 with an instinct that renewable fuel could be the future, the business invented a method to turn canola oil into biodiesel at a price point that was becoming more and more attractive to heavy users of diesel.
The company’s full turnkey system can be dropped at regional farms where canola seed would be crushed on-site to extract oil, which was then processed, filtered and purified to meet Australian fuel standards.
“It’s ready then to be used on a farm or by whoever wants to use diesel fuel,” Hunter said.
It was a long journey for Hunter, an automotive mechanic, who spent five years attempting to perfect the technology.
A grant in 2011 gave the business some runway to develop the novel tech, but the 2019 bushfires set the company’s pilot operations in the Adelaide Hills back: “We’ve been rebuilding since then”.
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Until this year, Hunter said the only interested buyers were those who wanted to use renewable fuel for environmental reasons, as the product could not compete with typical diesel on a price point.
“Now it just makes financial sense to go this way,” he said.
Hunter hoped the company could lead the nation on a renewable fuel revolution, and was planning on scaling now to take advantage of the petrol price crisis.
34MJ – named after 34 mega joules (the energy excess after producing a litre of renewable fuel) – is field-proven and operating today. The company had sold four machines and 300,000 litres of fuel, meaning a reduction of 810 tonnes of CO2.
All manufacturing of equipment is done in SA, and through trials, businesses, including those in the wine industry, can use the fuel to run wineries and vineyards.
Even SA heavy engineering specialist Bowhill Engineering – which is doing work on the $15 billion giant Torrens to Darlington project – was using 34MJ’s fuel now.
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Interest was set to grow too, Hunter said.
“We’re in talks with multiple farming groups from KI to York Peninsula, Mid North, Eyre Peninsula, all wanting to set up farming-based systems,” he said.
“They’re concerned about fuel security for the next ten years. They face the issue this year of not being able to have it for seeding.
“Their big concern now is: are we going to have it for harvest later this year?”
But diesel prices were holding compay’s potential back, until now, Hunter said.
“A year ago, it was always renewable fuels were green and costly and only for the people that want to be green or need those carbon credits,” Hunter said.
“Now, it’s ‘I need fuel. This can produce fuel for me’. It’s a totally different mindset.”
But Hunter was not hoping to be a big renewable fuel retailer – seeing his company as a technology business first and foremost: “We want to build and scale our equipment to manufacture the fuel”.
“We expect to have around ten sites built in the next year,” he said.
“We’ll then look to expand because it’s not just South Australia that we can deal with, we can roll this out across the country because we build them in containerised systems – shipping containers – so we can easily track them and set them up within a week of the equipment landing on a farm.
He also said the company was in early talks with the Egyptian government, which saw the “benefit of having their own renewable fuel system”.
“We’re designing for farmers so they can secure their own fuel for the future,” Hunter said.
“We’re really optimistic about where it’s going to go in the state.”
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