The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) will provide up to $41.6 million in staged funding to support a large-scale industrial heat electrification project at Rio Tinto’s Yarwun alumina refinery near Gladstone, Queensland, aimed at reducing fossil fuel use in heavy industry.
The project will demonstrate thermal energy storage technology that uses electricity to generate and store heat for industrial processes, providing an alternative to fossil fuels traditionally used to produce high-temperature steam.
In a news release, ARENA said the initiative would be one of the first large-scale demonstrations of thermal energy storage for industrial process heat globally.
ARENA CEO Darren Miller said the project would help establish whether the technology could be adopted more widely across Australian industry.
“Industrial heat remains one of the toughest decarbonisation challenges facing heavy industries,” Mr Miller said.
“This project will test whether thermal energy storage can provide a practical pathway to lower emissions from industrial heat in a real-world operating environment, where reliability, performance and integration are critical.”
Under the funding arrangement, ARENA will initially provide $3.6 million for front-end engineering and design. Following successful completion of this stage, the agency will provide up to $38 million for deployment. It has also approved up to $33.3 million in conditional contingency support to address defined project risks, including cost overruns and electricity costs.
The project will install a thermal energy storage unit developed by Rondo Energy, with a discharge capacity of 30 MWt, charging capacity of 78 MWe and storage capacity of 360 MWh. The system will use electricity to charge a heat battery, which will release stored energy as heat to generate steam for refinery operations.
According to ARENA, the project is expected to reduce onsite emissions by around 67,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually.
Mr Miller said large industrial facilities such as Yarwun provided the operating conditions needed to assess emerging technologies and inform future investment decisions.
“Demonstrations like this will help build the evidence industry needs to make future investment decisions so the value of this project extends well beyond a single refinery,” he said.
The project is funded through ARENA’s Industrial Transformation Stream, which supports the development and demonstration of technologies to reduce emissions from Australia’s industrial sector. Round 3 of the funding stream is currently open for applications.
