Australian low-carbon fuels developer HAMR Energy has secured up to AUD 32 million ($21 million USD) in conditional funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA). The capital injection marks the first investment under the Australian Government’s AUD 250 million Low Carbon Liquid Fuels priority through the Future Made in Australia Innovation Fund. Structurally divided into two tranches, an initial AUD 12.5 million will support immediate project development activities, while the remaining AUD 19.5 million will unlock once HAMR Energy secures matching private co-funding to initiate detailed Front-End Engineering Design (FEED) work across its AUD 92 million integrated infrastructure network in Victoria and South Australia.

The project targets the severe decarbonization bottleneck in aviation, a hard-to-abate sector heavily reliant on liquid fuels for long-distance transport, alongside Australia’s ongoing dependency on imported liquid energy products. Currently, millions of tonnes of plantation forestry residues in regional zones like the Green Triangle remain underutilized or untreated, representing a missed opportunity for high-value carbon diversion. Without scalable processing capabilities and structured aggregation pathways to handle complex woody biomassBiomass is a complex biological organic or non-organic solid product derived from living or recently living organism and available naturally. Various types of wastes such as animal manure, waste paper, sludge and many industrial wastes are also treated as biomass because like natural biomass these More, establishing domestic sovereign refining capabilities for drop-in low-carbon liquid fuels remains commercially challenging.

To overcome these obstacles, HAMR Energy is deploying a multi-facility integrated processing model utilizing gasificationGasification is a high-temperature, thermochemical process that converts carbon-based materials into a gaseous fuel called syngas and solid by-products. It takes place in an oxygen-deficient environment at temperatures typically above 750°C. Unlike combustion, which fully burns material to produce heat and carbon dioxide (CO2​), gasification More, synthesis, and refining technologies. The system utilizes a regional biomass processing facility in Victoria to aggregate and process approximately 600,000 tonnes of plantation forestry residues annually. This prepared feedstockFeedstock refers to the raw organic material used to produce biochar. This can include a wide range of materials, such as wood chips, agricultural residues, and animal manure. More feeds into the Portland Renewable Fuels facility in Victoria to synthesize roughly 300,000 tonnes of low-carbon methanol per year, which is subsequently transported to Australia’s first proposed commercial-scale methanol-to-jet refinery at Port Adelaide (Gillman), South Australia, for final fuel conversion.

At full operational scale, the facility network is designed to yield approximately 140 million liters (140 megalitres) of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) annually, alongside renewable diesel and related co-products. Utilizing plantation forestry residues as feedstock reduces lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions by up to 85% compared to fossil jet fuel, displacing 390,000 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent emissions per year. Furthermore, the initiative strengthens sovereign energy security, creates over 200 ongoing operational roles, and establishes an industrial blueprint for transforming regional forestry residues into advanced drop-in biofuels.