Return on Investment.

The basic demonstration facility project will take about 3 years to construct and ramp up production.  Depending on the oilseeds grown, payback on capital will range between 2 to 5 years at full production. State and federal government grants will be accessed to de-risk and increase impact of investment capital, in addition to R&D tax incentives.

Opportunity.

ABARES commodity statistics identifies that for the last 5 financial years between $2.4Billion to $3.1Billion was spent on fuel by Australian farms every year. For now we have letters of interest from 13 growers who combined use 416,000litres of diesel per annum.

Social Licence.

This project presents multiple points with regard to social licence. 

• The primary focus is to improve the economic viability of agricultural ventures that are generally family businesses that are not able to set the price for their inputs or outputs.  The option our project presents for growers is the establishment of a floor price on oilseed crop harvests that usually hit the market during periods of glut.
• Correspondence from carbon engineers identifies 2.6 tonnes of CO₂ is sequestered for every 1000 litres of biodiesel used by a farmer that grows their own fuel.  The agriculture sector has a challenge with regard to carbon mitigation steps that can be taken, with most of the action to tackle climate change being targeted at the electricity generation sector.  This project helps the agriculture sector reduce carbon emissions.
• Fuel security is needed for food security.  International affairs outside of the control of Australian authorities impacts on petro-diesel supplies and prices for Australian diesel users.

Why now.

Australia's capacity to process crude oil in the past decade has significantly reduced, with the majority of the nation's fuel supplies being imported from Singapore's mega refineries.  The diesel from these refineries is mostly used for electricity generation throughout Asia, which in conjunction with Australia's significant mining and logistics sectors, elevates the petro-diesel price faced by our agricultural sector.   Australian refining capacity has been permanently reduced to such an extent that even when the price of crude (TAPIS) dropped to US$20/barrel, our regional petro-diesel price remained above AU$1 per litre. John Blackburn report Part 2 identifies that by 2030 there will be no crude oil refining capacity at all.

To register interest in supporting this project please drop us a line at Interest@seed2diesel.com

Let us help agriculture in our nation get fuel self-sufficient.