Engineer, buyer, adviser, then strategist

Mandate

Decide what Corrandale should own, build, reprice or leave as annual gas demand declines and peak-day risk rises.

Outcomes

• Set stated economic lives for the pipelines, beginning with a 2042 basis for the western line
• Brought the second LNG tank to investment decision with 71 per cent of its capacity contracted
• Sold a 250-megawatt battery project with its community commitments intact
• Advised against a hydrogen-blending demonstration that no customer had asked to fund

Decisions in context

The role exists because our owners asked a question the company had avoided: what is a gas pipeline worth when the gas it carries is declining? My answer has been to decide asset by asset rather than adopt one corporate view of the energy transition. I work with the chief financial officer on asset lives and impairment, with the commercial team on contract terms and with engineering on what each asset physically needs. The strategy team prepares the board's annual portfolio review, and every investment paper above A$20 million passes through us. I present to the board and its investment and risk committee, but I am not a director, and the decisions described on this site belonged to the board. My task was to give it a recommendation, the dissent attached to that recommendation and a candid account of what each choice would cost.

Reason for the move

Current appointment; seeking one compatible non-executive role alongside it.

Mandate

Renegotiate expiring transport and storage contracts and report the committed life of each pipeline's revenue.

Outcomes

• Renegotiated contracts covering about 40 per cent of annual revenue
• Introduced a board report showing contracted years by pipeline and by customer
• Sold the existing LNG facility's full winter capacity for five consecutive years

Decisions in context

I joined from consulting with a clear view of what Corrandale's contracts said and a less clear view of how its customers would behave. The first two years were spent renegotiating expiring agreements, often with people I had previously advised. I declared those relationships and stepped back where a former client's confidential information could have helped us. The more durable work was a new board report. Instead of showing throughput and revenue, it showed how many years each pipeline's revenue was actually committed, and by whom. In 2019 that report revealed that the eastern lateral relied on a single power station for 70 per cent of its revenue. The board asked who was responsible for judgements of that kind across the whole portfolio. That question, and our new owners' interest in it, led to the strategy role I hold now.

Reason for the move

Appointed to the newly created chief strategy officer role in March 2021.

Mandate

Advise pipeline owners, large gas users and state agencies on contracts, market design and investment cases.

Outcomes

• Built the gas practice from three consultants to nine
• Advised on about thirty pipeline and supply contract negotiations
• Prepared independent demand reviews supporting four investment decisions

Decisions in context

Consulting gave me seven years of other people's decisions. I worked for pipeline owners, for industrial users negotiating against them and for state agencies designing market reforms, and I learnt to argue each side's case well enough to see where it was weak. The practice grew from three consultants to nine. Much of our work was the demand and contract analysis behind investment decisions, and it taught me a discipline I still apply: separate what a customer has signed from what a forecast says it might do. I also learnt the limits of the adviser's role. An adviser can be right about a risk and still leave before anyone has to live with it. By 2016 I wanted to be accountable for a portfolio's results rather than for the quality of a report about them, and Corrandale's offer gave me that accountability.

Reason for the move

Invited by a long-standing client, Corrandale, to lead its commercial function.

Mandate

Buy supply and transport capacity for 210,000 customers without paying for capacity the business could not justify.

Outcomes

• Built the retailer's first daily demand model for winter planning
• Restructured transport contracts to separate peak-winter capacity from base load
• Reduced annual capacity costs by about A$6 million without a supply shortfall

Decisions in context

At Torlinden I learnt how pipeline capacity looks to the customer who pays for it. A retailer must be able to supply its customers on the coldest day of the year, but every unit of firm capacity it holds for that day is a cost on all the others. My five analysts and I built the company's first daily demand model, and it showed that we were paying for winter capacity through the summer months under contracts written years earlier. We restructured those contracts with three pipeline owners and saved about A$6 million a year without a supply shortfall. I also completed a part-time commerce master's degree at Calvarley. The experience made me sympathetic to customers who resist paying for an asset's decline, and it showed me why firmness on peak days deserves a price of its own.

Reason for the move

Joined an energy-markets consultancy to work across more of the gas supply chain.

Mandate

Model how much gas the system could move on a peak day and where reinforcement would be needed.

Outcomes

• Rebuilt the hydraulic model used for peak-day planning
• Recommended a compressor upgrade that deferred a A$40 million pipeline loop by six years
• Prepared capacity statements supporting commercial negotiations

Decisions in context

My work was to answer one question repeatedly: how much gas could the system move on its worst day, and what would it take to move more? I rebuilt the hydraulic model we used for peak-day planning and tested it against winter records, which exposed several optimistic assumptions about pressure at the far end of the system. In 2001 I recommended upgrading an existing compressor instead of building a new pipeline loop, deferring about A$40 million of investment by six years. The commercial team began asking me for capacity statements to support their negotiations, and I noticed how differently they talked about the same steel. Engineering spoke of peak days; contracts spoke of annual quantities. That difference interested me more than the hydraulics did, and it explains why I eventually moved closer to the people buying capacity.

Reason for the move

Moved to a retailer to understand how customers bought the capacity I had been planning.

Mandate

Keep the processing units reliable, particularly through periods of winter demand.

Outcomes

• Prepared the plant's annual winter-readiness plan from 1995
• Redesigned a dehydration-unit maintenance schedule to avoid winter outages
• Documented compressor performance later used in capacity planning

Decisions in context

I began on the production side of the gas chain, at a processing plant that cleaned and dried gas before it entered the transmission system. As a graduate I worked on dehydration units and compressor maintenance, mostly under engineers who had been there since the plant opened. From 1995 I prepared the annual winter-readiness plan, which meant scheduling maintenance in summer so that every unit was available when demand peaked. The cold morning in July 1995, when downstream pressure kept falling despite every compressor running, taught me that reliability is judged on very few days. I also learnt that a plant engineer sees only one link in a long chain. By 1997 I wanted to understand the system our gas entered and how its owners decided where to invest, and that curiosity took me into pipeline planning.

Reason for the move

Moved into pipeline capacity planning to work on the system the plant supplied.