A cold morning at the plant, and what followed

In July 1995, on the coldest morning of that winter, I watched the control room at a gas processing plant in south-west Victoria run every compressor it had while the pressure downstream kept falling. We met the demand, just. The plant manager told me afterwards that nobody would remember the three hundred ordinary days of that year, only the one on which we nearly failed. I have carried that remark through more than thirty years in gas. It now describes my company's central strategic problem better than it described a young engineer's shift.

I graduated in chemical engineering from Calvarley Institute of Technology in December 1992 and joined Ostlerby Gas Processing the following February. I worked on dehydration units, compressor maintenance plans and the plant's winter readiness. In 1997 I moved to Quambrook Gas Transmission as a capacity planning engineer. My work was hydraulic modelling: how much gas the system could move on a peak day, and where the next compressor or pipeline loop would be needed. I learnt that a pipeline's capacity is a statement about its worst day, while its revenue was then negotiated mostly on annual quantities. The gap between those two measures has followed me ever since.

From 2003 I managed the gas portfolio of Torlinden Energy, an Adelaide retailer, buying supply and transport capacity for about 210,000 customers. I now sat across the table from the pipeline owners I had once worked for. I learnt why a retailer will pay for firm capacity it rarely uses, and why it resents paying for capacity it can no longer justify to its own customers. I completed a part-time master's degree in commerce during those years, mainly so that I could argue with our treasury team in its own language.

In 2009 I joined Tennerby Advisory, a Melbourne energy-markets consultancy, and later led its gas practice. For seven years I advised pipeline owners, large gas users and state agencies on contracts, market reforms and investment cases. Consulting gave me range and a warning. I read many investment papers that described a forecast as though it were a contract, and I wrote a few of them. I also saw how rarely the people who approved an asset were still present when its customers began to leave.

Corrandale, one of my clients, asked me to join as general manager, commercial and capacity, in July 2016. Our current owners bought the company the following year. I renegotiated much of the contract book and began reporting to the board how long each pipeline's customers had actually committed, rather than how long its steel might last. In March 2021 I became chief strategy officer, with a mandate to decide what Corrandale should own, build, reprice or leave as gas demand changed.

That mandate has produced decisions some colleagues found uncomfortable. I argued against a hydrogen-blending demonstration in 2022 because no customer had asked to pay for it and the emissions reduction per dollar was poor; I would revisit it if either fact changed. We did connect a third-party biomethane producer in 2024, a small supply of about 0.3 petajoules a year, because its owner carried the production risk. I recommended pricing our western pipeline on a shorter life, delaying a storage investment until it was contracted and selling a battery project we had developed ourselves. Each recommendation reduced a figure that someone in the company valued.

I lead fourteen people through three managers, covering market and demand analysis, asset strategy and transactions. I ask them for forecasts that show the range rather than the midpoint, and for papers that name who disagreed. I would rather the board read a dissenting engineer's view in my own paper than discover the objection afterwards. Since 2019 I have also been a non-executive director of Wanderlie Community Energy Co-operative, a member-owned solar and battery co-operative in central Victoria. Its board has taught me how a community weighs a project's local consent against its financial return, and how little patience members have for a timetable that keeps moving.

People in our sector would probably describe me as the person who keeps asking which customer will still be paying in 2040. I do not believe gas infrastructure has no future. I believe its future is narrower, more seasonal and more valuable on particular days, and that owners who admit this early will make better choices about what to keep. The board seat I hope to hold is one where that kind of question about a long-lived asset is useful.

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