Bringing waste back to life: clean power today, and sustainable fuel tomorrow.

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Australia sends millions of tonnes of waste to landfill every year, including around 7.5 million tonnes of municipal waste and even more commercial and construction waste. Landfills are increasingly congested, methane and environmental costs are mounting, and the levies charged to dispose of waste are rising. Turning that waste into something valuable, whether energy or fuel, has been an ambition of the waste and energy industries for decades, and aside from incineration at the mega scale (which does not produce fuels), limited commercial solutions exist.

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Wildfire Energy has demonstrated that this same waste can be a source of low-carbon, firmed power, and has the potential to be used as a feedstock to satisfy the growing demand for low-carbon liquid fuels (LCLFs) that hard-to-electrify sectors such as aviation and shipping need. The barrier has always been the feedstock itself, where mixed, unsorted waste is so variable that conventional processes either cannot handle it or must first sort, shred and dry it at a cost that makes the process uneconomic.

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Wildfire is unlocking the resource almost no one has been able to use: unsorted, mixed “red bin” waste otherwise known as municipal waste.

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Perfecting a centuries-old technology.

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Gasification, the process of converting carbon- based materials into syngas (a useful mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide), is over two centuries old. Historically, gasification has only worked reliably on clean, uniform inputs such as wood chips or coal. Heterogeneous municipal waste, with its unpredictable jumble of materials, moisture levels, and impurities, has defeated a long line of hopeful technologies.

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To address this problem, Wildfire has designed a new gasification process, where instead of moving the feedstock through the gasifier, it moves the heat source through the feedstock, creating a controlled reaction front that travels through the waste. Because the reaction stays localised, the reactor walls remain at low temperature, enabling the units to be built from low-cost carbon steel instead of using the exotic materials needed to line other vessels. Wildfire’s reactor can process mixed waste with almost no preparation, and anything that will not gasify, such as metal, glass, rocks and stones simply remain stationary without disrupting the process. Despite being a deceptively simple solution, nobody had thought of this approach, so Wildfire has been able to patent multiple key aspects of its technology in addition to building trade secrets around the plant’s operations.

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A versatile product with a feedstock that Wildfire Energy is paid to take.

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The syngas produced can serve several markets. In the near term it can be burned to produce low-carbon, firmed power and heat, which could be fed into the grid or used to support the decarbonisation of an industrial process. The syngas can also be cleaned and upgraded into methanol and eventually other LCLFs such as sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), or separated to release hydrogen. The power and heat business can deliver strong economics today, giving Wildfire a solid footing while the higher value fuels pathway is developed and proven out. A key component of the economics, regardless of the use case, is the “gate fees” Wildfire receives for processing the waste. That is, by processing the waste, projects using Wildfire’s technology can earn revenue from companies or councils disposing of the waste, in the same way that these companies would otherwise pay to dispose the waste in a traditional landfill.

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Wildfire's plants are assembled from standardised pre-fabricated modules rather than single bespoke builds. The low cost of the modules also make the economics compelling at smaller scales, unlocking the opportunity to build compact plants, for example, at regional landfills, thereby avoiding costly and burdensome transport of waste to centralised locations and opening up the market for remote towns and islands.

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Combining technical expertise with commercial acumen.

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Wildfire has strong commercial traction with local councils and industrial partners for both feedstock and power offtake, and is developing its first commercial plant at Bulwer Island in Brisbane, with the Queensland Government committing $18.6m of grant funding to the project. In parallel, Wildfire is proving out the fuels pathway by upgrading its existing pilot plant to produce bio-methanol. This project, which will also assess the commercial and technical feasibility of producing bio-methanol and SAF in large scale plants is co-funded by a Japanese materials company and a $3.2m grant from ARENA.

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Wildfire was founded by Greg Perkins, Denis Doucet and Grant Bollaert, gasification experts with decades of industrial experience, who invented and developed the technology and took it from concept to a fully operational pilot plant in Brisbane. At the pilot plant, they have demonstrated raw municipal and construction waste conversion into syngas. Through this raise, the team will build on that foundation toward its first commercial deployment. Reference calls across the industry repeatedly praised the team’s depth of gasification expertise and the size of the market opportunity which Wildfire’s modular gasifiers could unlock.

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We are excited to be investing in Wildfire through Climate Tech Partners' Fund I and Aviation Sidecar, backed by aviation partners Qantas and Airbus. We see Wildfire as one of the most credible routes to turn abundant, low value waste into clean energy and sustainable fuel.

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