Below are links to some recent publications. A full publication list is available here.
In this chapter we provide an overview of hydrogen development in Australia including the external dimensions of Australia's national hydrogen policy, which are closely linked to the opportunity for exports of hydrogen and associated vectors with low carbon intensity.
The Productivity Commission has contributed to the debate by noting that designing and implementing good policy is hard. Caution is important. But so is seizing the moment, as governments and industry scramble to benefit from the transition to low carbon economies.
What should Australia’s new Net Zero Economic Agency do?
We conduct an expert elicitation of future price expectations for offshore wind in the Asia Pacific region. We also examine views on public policies that are likely to support the more rapid deployment of fixed bottom and floating offshore wind technologies.
Collaboration on decarbonisation is a chance for Australia and Japan to exercise leadership, protect the region’s climate, boost security, and prepare the relationship’s future, Llewelyn Hughes and Richard Andrews write.
We assess the potential application of IAMs to the practice of strategic foresight in long-term national security strategy. We propose that IAMs are a potentially useful additional tool as an input for considering the implications of decarbonisation trajectories in the Indo-Pacific. We pay particular focus to testing the implications of assumptions about the availability and costs of different technologies on the composition of energy supply and demand in the region.
This study assesses key barriers to offshore wind power (OWP) development in Vietnam and policy options for the development of the sector. A survey of 39 experts from government agencies, research institutions, industry, and civil society plus 22 follow-up interviews were conducted over January–September 2021, coupled with a broader analysis of key barriers and policy options.
“Picking winners” has been anathema to Australian policy-making for decades. The federal government’s technology investment roadmap bucks the trend, targeting public investments in specific low-emissions technologies.
This study considers the emissions implications of co-combusting imported ammonia in coal-fired power stations. The results show co-combustion of ammonia produced with SMR-HB provides no net benefit for the combined country emissions, as ammonia production related greenhouse emissions in Australia are equivalent to the emission reductions in Japan.
During China’s 2010 embargo of rare earth elements supply to Japan, we show that Japan was able to adjust to avoid the Chinese sanction’s bite despite the dominance of Chinese producers and Japan’s seeming vulnerability as a key downstream consumer of rare earths.
The Net Zero Economy Agency commissioned the Australian National University through an open tender process to produce a rapid research report to inform the early design of a national Net Zero Economy Authority. The paper addresses three topics as they relate to the net zero transition: economics, social change, and regional communities.
We develop a framework for comparing site selection and consenting processes for offshore wind farms, and examine whether a more streamlined and centralized model of offshore wind governance is emerging in the major Asia-Pacific markets of Japan, the
Ammonia co-combustion could increase the cumulative emissions by 7% relative to the continued use of coal when ammonia is produced using the present business-as-usual method of Haber Bosch incorporating steam methane reforming.
Given Australia’s and Japan’s common economic and strategic interests in the Asia Pacific region, and the ample opportunities for learning from one another, a similar model could develop and build on the two countries’ shared agenda in the low-carbon energy transition.
The world will recover from the pandemic. But in the longer term, coal in Japan faces even stiffer headwinds – not least market competition and increasing renewables from offshore wind and other technologies. This creates real questions about the appetite of Japanese companies to wage the increasingly risky bet that coal-fired power represents.
The implications of regional decarbonisation for Australia’s role as a supplier of energy security depends on secondary technology developments in CCS, and cost reductions in renewables combined with batteries and other storage technologies.
China, Japan and South Korea are now looking to move away from public support for financing new international coal projects. The move away from overseas coal financing also sends an important signal that international support for the coal power pipeline is coming to an end.
This chapter reviews Japan’s hydrogen strategy with a particular focus on its international elements. It concludes with a short discussion of the geopolitical implications of Japan's hydrogen strategy.
Offshore wind offers another excellent renewable option as we decarbonise electricity. But more needs to be done to turn these plans into enormous turbines off our coast.
The COVID-19 economic crash threatens the international trade networks that make clean energy cheap — abandoning them puts the climate at risk.
Whether using ammonia helps tackle climate change depends on how it’s made.
Understanding the effects of global interdependence on clean energy transitions.
We consider the possibility of combining offshore wind with hydrogen production in the Australian context. A model is developed to represent an off-grid system powered by offshore wind and solar photovoltaics, with electrical storage providing balancing. The model optimizes generation, storage and electrolyser capacities to find the least-cost solution for hydrogen production under specified constraints.
This article argues that Swiss trading houses are part of the private governance arrangements that emerged in response to the wave of nationalization sweeping across the world’s prime oil producers. As the global crude supply chains deverticalized following nationalization, companies created mechanisms to manage the problems of price-setting, and matching suppliers and consumers.
Using firm-level data from the solar photovoltaics industry, we show that vertically specialized firms prefer open trade if they have ties to global supply chains.
National low carbon energy transitions can become interdependent and affect industrial development pathways. Policies developed in one country or jurisdiction affect policy choices made elsewhere, and support the development of supply chains that cross national borders.
We evaluate the treatment of climate-related financial risk by Japanese bilateral finance organizations and related policymaking bodies involved in the design and implementation of thermal coal power generation technology financing.
Localisation policies can face challenges remaining aligned with energy transition goals. We examine how the Australian Capital Territory's localisation policy underwent repeated updates to adapt to changing goals.
We introduce a framework for comparing public policies cross-nationally used to support the research, development, and deployment of electric vehicles and use it examine the extent to which policy instruments are neutral across technologies.