Burning Desire: is biocoke the solution to Kangaroo Island’s wasting blue gums disaster?

By DANIEL CLARKE

25/05/26

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Kangaroo Island will be the Australian capital for biocoke production that at its peak will ship 50,000 tonnes a year to markets around the world, Wundowie Carbon claims.

 

Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer Haydn Smith said the company planned to use up to five million tonnes of blue gum timber from the island’s fire damaged plantations to turn into green carbon products for the resource hungry metallurgical industry, creating 50 jobs in the process. 

 

The commercial-scale biocoke processing facility currently being built on Macgill farm near Parndana is the first stage of a $60 million project that the company says will ultimately save about 1.1 million tonnes of coal from being dug up to power the world’s industries.

 

“In a nutshell what we do is keep coal in the ground and we utilize low value/no value sources of biomass to create carbon products,” Smith said. “It will be around 150,000 tonnes per year of CO2 that essentially won’t be released into the atmosphere.

 

“What a lot of these big companies are looking to do is actually swap out their fossil carbon in exchange for a biogenic carbon. That allows them to reduce their carbon emissions at industry scale quantities without any change to the production process.

 

“We have a fantastic opportunity to be the leading exporter of biogenic carbon - a green carbon - and it's happening first on Kangaroo Island. That’s an opportunity that no-one else in Australia will have for the next few years. Put a flag in the map. KI will be the epicentre of biocoke in Australia.”

 

The comments come one month after the shock loss of 34 forestry jobs from Kiland’s workforce when the company said it was shifting focus from harvesting the island’s timber to establishing agricultural operations across its18,000 hectares of land.

 

The Black Summer bushfires of 2019/20 burned over 210,000 hectares of land that impacted about 95 per cent of the company’s blue gum and pine forest plantations. 

 

Late last year Wundowie Carbon acquired Re-Vi Group Limited – the original builders of a smaller scale uncommissioned biochar facility - and has shifted the project’s focus from biochar and carbon credits to processing the timber into biocoke for the green metals industry to produce what is known as green steel. 

 

When asked whether Wundowie had purchased the still-standing blue gums from Kiland, Smith said “the short answer to that is no”.

 

“The long answer is that we've got a commercial agreement in place with Kiland to essentially collect and process fire damaged plantation timber, some of which has been felled and some of which has not yet been felled,” he said.

 

“We are essentially carbon recyclers or rather carbon upcyclers. Our job is just to come along and collect biomass whose owners were otherwise going to incinerate or send to landfill. We're not foresters - we're never going to be. Our job is to come and collect.”

 

However, he stated still-standing timber “is either not degrading or it’s degrading a lot more slowly. There is a degree of degradation on the biomass (that is cut).”

 

Smith said the sprawling log piles on the Macgill farm would supply Wundowie’s processing plant “for a number of years” but he expected to be sourcing wood from other sites on the island “in the fullness of time”.

 

His comments appear to confirm fears from many residents of the island that much of the logged timber across Kiland’s mass land holdings will be incinerated in coordinated burn patterns over coming years. 

 

“Absent Wundowie’s intervention all of this timber is going to be burnt in the paddock. Every single tonne. None of us want to see this resource go to waste,” Smith said.

 

“So we are very keen to recycle every tonne that we possibly can. Regardless of who the landowner is, we are conscious of the fact that if land is encumbered by unproductive timber, it's essentially costing that landowner money. They cannot earn an income out of the land. So we also appreciate there is a time factor involved.

 

“We can only build and expand our plans so fast. If we had unlimited dollars we could do it a whole lot faster but we don't. Essentially we are proud of the fact that every tonne that we do turn into a value-added product is a tonne that is not going to go up in smoke on Kangaroo Island.”

 

For that reason, Smith said he hoped Wundowie could acquire capital funding support from the Federal Government to advance the project to the production phase. 

 

“Ultimately we do need some additional capital to bring the project all the way through to not only completion in a physical sense but being able to ramp up the project and get it to steady state production,” he said.

 

“We haven’t disclosed the funding shortfall other than to say significant private investment has gone into the project thus far and further private investment has been committed, subject to Stage 1 (the $21 million commercial demonstration) being fully funded.

 

“We're driving heavy industry to a cleaner future and we’ve had some good support from private investors but ultimately we would appreciate some support from the Commonwealth Government for a project like this. 

 

“Domestically and internationally there is strong demand for this product. The metallurgical coal market is over a billion tonnes a year and our project is looking at 40 to 50,000 tonnes a year. We’ve got a market where demand is orders of magnitude higher than our ability to supply. That’s a nice position to be in when you're the supplier.

 

"We actually have a very strong structural advantage in Australia to be world leaders here. I'm completely biased of course but if there was ever a company and a project that warranted that sort of capital, it would be this. That’s really the enabling ingredient here.”

 

The build of Wundowie’s large shed on the Macgill farm that will be used to house the biocoke processing facility was now complete. Smith said he hoped the facility would be commissioned before Christmas with first production of material by January or February next year.

 

“We’re executing the build of the plant right now,” Smith said. “We've got equipment being fabricated and supplied both locally in South Australia and some also coming in from overseas. Now we're just waiting for additional equipment to be fabricated and moved. Essentially we are on budget and the schedule is broadly intact.

 

“There's been a little bit of slowdown as a result of the issues in the Middle East right now. Apart from what is looking like a minor delay we're on track.”

 

Smith acknowledged the limitations of exporting large amounts of material from the island given its lack of deep sea port and only a passenger ferry transporting goods to the mainland.

 

“It's definitely a challenge and I think one of the key benefits with our business model is that by taking a product and densifying it by about four times, we're shipping a lot more value per cubic metre than any alternate business models. So that has certainly been helpful - or it's made the freight issue less bad.

 

“My understanding is that there's a reasonable amount of empty trucks leaving the island every day so there’s a backhaul capacity there that we can utilise in the first two years of the project. 

 

“That could have benefits for those looking to bring freight onto the island. Longer term, as we grow, there may be an opportunity to work with other businesses on the island to look at some sort of standalone service should the numbers pencil out.”

 

Whether that was from Penneshaw or elsewhere on the island was “underdetermined at this point” but he ruled out any trans shipping from Kingscote that logistics company T-Ports had proposed for exporting timber in 2021. 

 

“In the immediate term we will be using the SeaLink ferry and in the long term we would look at the viability of moving material directly from the island to somewhere like Port Adelaide in a single movement, rather than doing any trans shipping.

 

“That is subject to a lot of variables but it's something that we're happy to discuss with others on the island because I think perhaps there's a case if we can all get together something might be beneficial.”

 

Smith wouldn’t be drawn on whether the island’s biocoke material was destined for the Whyalla Steelworks, which is aiming to transition from South Australia’s largest carbon polluter into Australia’s first green iron and steel facility.

 

“I think the best thing for me to say is that our product is very well suited to steelmaking. You literally cannot make steel without carbon,” he said. 

 

“So if, as a state or a country we're talking about making green steel, we really should be talking about making green steel with green carbon. And personally, if you're making green steel in South Australia, I think you should probably make green steel with South Australian green carbon.”

 

Smith said he was thankful to Kangaroo Island Council, Regional Development Australia and the wider community for the support it had shown for the project so far. 

 

“Doing business on KI has been an absolute pleasure in terms of the people, the support from locals, Council and of course the four-person team we currently have stationed there,” he said.

 

“We're not trying to make a big song and dance or do a whole lot of 'look at me' marketing. We're really just trying to keep our heads down, get this thing built, get it running smoothly, efficiently and safely.

 

“Am I confident this will work? Yes I know this will work. We've done an extraordinary amount of due diligence and physical test work using timber from KI with the actual equipment that we've ordered. So we know for a fact that this works. 

 

“I think everyone's going to feel very proud when we're at that point of saying we were the first in Australia to do this and it's making a real difference. You'll have global heavyweight companies that are now relying on our product and it's all come out of Kangaroo Island. That would be unreal.”