Velkommen til lørn.tech. En læringsdugnad om teknologi og samfunn med Silvija Seres og venner.

 Silvija Seres: Welcome to Lørn. This is a podcast in collaboration with ons and my guest today is Francis Norman from Nera - National energy resources Australia. I have a guest from the other side of the world, Welcome! 

Francis Norman: Hello. I won’t say good morning or good afternoon because that just confuses me too much. 

Silvija: You found out about Lørn from listening to the Ons series that we made. And reached out saying that you also do podcasts about energy, technology and innovation in Australia. And I wanted to learn about this and I am looking forward to learning about how you innovate on energy in Australia and what can Norway learn from Australia. And what sides of Norwegian innovation are inspiring for you. 

Francis: I am very much looking forward to having that conversation with you as well.

Silvija: Before all that, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what drives you?

Francis: Absolutely. So, my name is Francis Norman. I have a wonderful role of general manager, innovation and strategy with Nera which is National energy resources Australia. We are very national as the titles suggest. We were established by the Australian government to work with the Australian natural energy resources. Which is Oil and gas, coal, uranium and then increasingly hydrogen is starting to come in as well. To work with them on innovation, commercializing. Identifying future job skills. And just generally trying to bring the industry together. The nearest I've been able to find for an analog between what Nera is and what you have in Norway is Innovation Norway. We are similar, but different. We have been in existence now for little more than three years. And we are really now starting to understand what the opportunities and challenges are. And starting to be recognized by the industry here as well. Which is really good and strong position to be in. 

Silvija: Norway is highly dependent on its energy sources both for national Gdp and welfare but also for expanding internationally. And we have done that with oil before. We have done that with hydropower and the side effects of it in aluminum and fertilizer and so on. I think Australia is somewhat similar. You have a lot of natural resources, not that many people to divide them on and are really good at exploiting them?

Francis: Yes. We are one of the two world largest exporters of LNG. We have been exporting LNG since the 70´s. Show we have huge reserves of offshore natural gas. Witch are produced in Western Australia, the Northern Territory. And in Queensland we have a lot of unconventional natural gasses produced. We have historically very large reserves of high quality coal both for firmal and for steel production. Increasingly we are looking at what alternative energy resources we have as well. We don't have a lot of hydro. Geography doesn't really work for us as well as Norway. But we have huge amount of sunlight. Which is clearly one of the reasons other people would like to come visit Australia. We have all this solar energy that hits the country. And finding ways we can turn these sources into usable and also exportable energy products is part of the really interesting conversations happening here at the moment. 

It is a very quickly changing energy landscape. Very similar in so many ways to Norway history. 

Silvija: You talked about Nera, but you did not say so much about yourself. Are you technology by training or?

Francis: I'm an engineer by background. I was an industrial control engineer for 30 years. And one of the reasons I was so interested with the Ons podcast and finding you in the first place was that for a large part of my career the company that I worked for was through many different names. Mostly it was Kvaerner before that it was Aker Solutions, Aker Kvaerner. 

I spent a lot of time working with good friends in Oslo on a few projects over the years. And I have been fortunate enough to work with some similar people and same people from time here in Perth, Australia in that technology exchange that we are so good at. 

Silvija: Does it sound like you are not really Australian but more Manchester?

Francis: Not Manchester. I am from the area that is North East of Yorkshire. I traveled to much warmer climates. I have been in Australia now for 20 years.  

Silvija: I know you have a lot of sun. But I don't know if you have innovated a lot around sun technology, wind technology. Imagine you have some wind as well?

Francis: Yes. We have wind, we have sun, we have Hydro. And we are one of the world's largest producers of Uranium. Where are our innovation in the energy space has much been deployment of scale, not as much the development of the new technologies as much as it has been to take that technology and really institute it at scale. So, our LNG industry is 18 + million tons per annum LNG export. We have lots and lots of solar which is actually becoming a challenge into our electricity network. We are starting to get instability in the grid because we don't always have the firming power that we need to backup when the sun is not shining, and the wind is not blowing. So, we can start to have some instability in the grid. 

Silvija: And just by imagining how busy Norway is making more efficient houses when it comes to heating, you are doing the same thing on the cooling?

Francis: Yes. A lot of the country is very warm. So, a lot of people in different parts of the country have air-conditioning that they need at various times of the year. For some people it is all the way through the year. For the people that live here in Perth it´s for at least 6 months when it gets really warm. 

But our houses are not designed to be necessary energy efficient. They are designed to let fresh air through the house. They are designed to be bright and airy.  And that does not always mean that you have the best efficiency in the properties. Similarly we are a very large country. We are slightly smaller than Canada. It takes as long to travel from where I am in Perth to Brisbane as it takes to fly from London to Moscow. So, it is a big Country. A 25 million population. 

Just to run the infrastructure and to run a Country at that size takes a lot of energy as well. So, it is a country where we have some different challenges. 

Silvija: I haven't actually travelled in industry but people that have are telling me that you are driving and driving and driving for going to some of these rocks in the middle of your country. It is not a half day drive. So, I am imagining monitoring these networks from 2000 kilometers away. It must be an interesting remote challenge, automation challenge, predicting monitoring challenge. How do you work with these things in Australia?

Francis: That would be one of the areas where our industry really has innovated. A lot of our Rna minds for instance operate almost their entire mind remotely.  The mine can now be 2-3000 km away from the control center. They are running remote trucks, remote drilling equipment. A lot of the control now is being operated by people who live in Perth and other cities. They work where there is public transport, they work in a big city office. But they are actually running equipment that is thousands of kilometers away. And they are running it reliably and safely. And that level of skills and technology has been a huge step forward for our sector. 

Silvija: One of the first applications I´ve heard about autonomous vehicles in action was some of the lorries working on some of your mines. And basically, they have their own regulations and the sort of work they do is really unbearable for human beings because of the heat. So, they found a really nice application in this crossing of heat and distances. 

Francis: Yes. And those vehicles driven autonomously are more accurate in terms of following the tracks. They are more accurate in reducing energy consumption because they don’t change gear as much as a human would do. And they are very reliable. And it's taken the humans out of the caps by doing that 8-12 hour shift driving a truck between the mind and the plant. The same people are now in a different job and their job now is to monitor those vehicles to make sure that they are following the rules that they need to follow. And it is an incredible step forward in technology, that you couldn’t really do on the roads. Because as you said, it's controlled with in a mind site so that they can control access. You don’t have people stepping out in front of them. So, it´s an area that has been really well developed.

Silvija: So where is the Australian government putting their focus now. You talked about LNG being one of the two largest in the world. Is the focus on efficient energy use, efficient energy production, climate? How do you deal with all this aspect? 

Francis: I can't speak for the government itself. We are founded by the government but we are not actually government. What is happening in Australia is what you described. At the industry level we are trying to improve the efficiency of the facilities that produce the traditional energy resources. We are trying to bring in new technologies to make that facility safer for people working there, and to get more liability from it. But alongside we are also working as a country towards bringing in new technologies and alternative energy sources to try and find ways that we can integrate them. And we are possibly where we can start to build new industries by using some of the skills and some of the technologies that we have right now. For instance, the brown coal is the least valuable of all the coal deposits that we have. We have large brown coal deposits in Victoria. Which is the state that is around Melbourne. And the commercial value from that coal is hard to acquire. But there is a pilot project happening now to convert or at least extract hydrogen from the brown coal. So, they can then export that hydrogen to Japan. So that the Japanese can use that potentially as part of the fuel source for the Japanese Olympics next year. So, it is a really clever idea going through that. And what it brings together. Liquid hydrogen is hard to manage but there is a lot of expertise in Australia in terms of managing LNG. So, there are a lot of skills that can transfer across from one to another. And it's a really fascinating opportunity in that space. And the LNG is producing itself and are looking along the same avenues to see if there are ways they can build their next generation of energy by using the skills that they have from LNG to produce Hydrogen and export it through their existing networks as well. 

Then another challenge that we are working to overcome is in the marine space. We have this wonderful wall of water that surrounds most of our country. But because these are warm, high UV nutrient rich environments we have problems in our subsea installation with our marine growth and shipping. If the ships come in and they stand still for a short period of time suddenly they start to get all this marine growth on them. So, we have to develop new skills and new knowledge to understand how best to manage and deal with the marine growth. And how it impacts our subsea equipment. So we are looking at different technologies in terms of different materials and different pieces for our subsea technologies to make it reliable in our environment, rather than reliable in the colder, darker environment rather than the colder darker environment such as Mexico.

Silvija: We have some really cool new robots actually. Subsea stuff for cleaning these kinds of growth. and I am sure some would love to be applied in your waters.

Francis: Yes. And that is why it is so important that we have these conversations. To share what's happening in Australia, with what's happening in Norway. Where the challenges are in different parts of the world. It is such an important thing that we maximize our technology development and technology marketplaces, so that we can move things around. So that new ideas that are coming out of Australia and are valuable in other parts of the world can go there. And new ideas coming out of Norway can find a way to Australia. This is the world we need to be in. 

Silvija: How do you build up public private collaboration on these things? Some of these projects are owned by very large companies with wonderful engineers. How do you set that up in Australia?

Francis: We are still working to understand that for ourselves as well. The companies that we work the best with are the growing technology companies. So not the really big ones, but the ones that aspire to be really big ones, the ones that have the really novel ideas. And on the other side of it, the ones who have a problem they haven't been able to find a solution to from the normal sources. So, the big technology companies sometimes don't have all the answers, so it is about finding them and matching them together. 

Silvija: Same here actually. Can you give us three names of growing Australian companies in your sector that we should know about? What are these growing companies focusing on?

Francis: You mentioned robots earlier. There is a little robotic company that we are working with called Nexsis. They are working with CSI, which is our big national research organization, to help find the lies in development and then commercialize some of their inspection robots.   There is a company called Subcon, they are building artificial reefs they are an engineering company that designs habitat for artificial reefs to grow on. And that both work where you have fishing where it has been removed all of the infrastructure that the fish would live in. There is a little company we are working with called Clean Subsea, they have a machine to clean the holes of ships when they are stationary and in the oceans.

Silvija: You have also been mentioning to me before a couple of clusters. Seka – Subs innovation cluster of Australia and Aoge the Australian ocean energy group.  What do these do? 

Francis: Seka is a cluster that was formed in Perth. And that is a collection of 35-37 different companies who are working in or around the inspection maintenance and repair of Subsea. Some of these are smaller companies, some are larger companies. There are two or three universities involved, and several operators as well. So, it is still in that drawing space. 

The other one is Aoeg who are working as a collective of small ocean energy companies. So, this can be wave companies who have novel technologies that are still in that early stage and still are getting to the point of commercializing. They are a national cluster that operates around the coastline. So, it is very hard to have them as a geographically located cluster.

Silvija: What do you get inspired most about Norway. And what do you think we should really focus on when we want to learn from Australia? 

Francis: The inspiring thing for me for Norway is how well you as a nation have been able to capitalize on the strengths of your natural resources. That you strategically in the 60s some very clever people in your government and industries saw the opportunities of what was found in the offshore world, as a way to really build an industry and an economy that was beyond those resources. And to take that and to build that as a National project. And also the companies that have grown out of that have been very inspiring.

When people try to dry an analog for me between Norway and Australia, what I see in terms of similarities is that you're a high value, high cost base nation. But what you do is to look at where the opportunities are to develop technology and skills where people are prepared to value that high cost base. So, it's not volume work, it is high skill work and high intelligence work. That is what I find most fascinating. In terms of the way you build your economy.

And what you could learn from us? We had to learn to work in a different climate. And to learn to work across distances where In Norway you have your own climate challenges. But the distance we have to navigate here to do things, to run businesses. We got 5 time zones across Australia, during our summer we have three timezone. So, three-hour difference from one side to the other. To run a country like that has been very challenging. And we don't take ourselves so seriously. But my Norwegian friends don’t take them self so seriously either. So, there is a lot of similarities. 

Silvija: So I think there are a lot of things that Australia is doing good regards both inside the country, but also when it comes to exporting out of the country. There is a lot of innovation with seaways and liquid gas transportation vehicles are going to be a big thing in shipping I understand in the coming years.

Francis: Yes. There are possibilities for that. It's the cleanest of the alternatives that are viable at the moment. But it requires some redesign of the vessel fuel. In terms of how it is managed and handled. And it also means that we have to have LNG Bunkered around the world, that we don't have the facilities for. 

Silvija: I also want to ask you briefly about coal. You mention brown coal. My understanding is that world needs more gas simply because we need it to replace coal. How easy is that kind of an operation for a country like Australia. How dependent are you on continuing the coal journey? 

Francis: We produce 450 million tons a year of coal. And 80% of that is for exports. 20% is used domestically for producing electricity. And what will happen here is that the coal power station will reach its end of life and be switched off. And something else will replace them. Sun, Wind, Waves. It could be all sorts of different technologies that will come through. If It is sunny we would need a lot of battery storage, whether it is a chemical battery or whatever. We need some way to store some of the energy that's generated from the sun during the day, so we have something to use in the evening as well. So, we export 200 million tons of  firmal coal, 200 million tons of metallurgical coal a year. The metallurgical coal goes to the production of steel in places such as Korea and Japan. And it is very good metallurgical coal. As clean as it can be. And it is not really an alternative for metallurgical coal, there are some developmental technologies around, but right now there's nothing that we can use as an alternative. 

And the other 2 million tons goes for the firmal production of electricity in various countries. And for what I understand the coal that we produce here is relatively clean. It burns cleanly it does not have a lot of the other chemicals in it. And right now, there is a solid market for that coal. As time goes by, we just have to wait and see in, terms of the market go. Who wants it, who does not want it? Where our economy goes in terms of if we are prepared to continue to produce it. Those sorts of questions are right now brought to society. They are not questions I am able to answer. 

Brown coal is more like paint. It is very soft and very wet. And there is so little energy in it that it costs you more than you actually get from it. 

Silvija: We are coming close to the end of our conversation. I always ask for recommendations on some reading and I love your recommendation. You mention Viktor Frankys “Man's search for meaning” and then a book that I read when I was a child -the seagull.

Francis: And I did as well. Jonathan Livingston´ seagull. I read that when I was about 8 years old. And It was one of those books that I read as a child and it was so different from everything else that I had read. It's just really stuck with me. I don't think I still own a copy of it. I think I gave my copy to somebody. But it was just one of those really different books that made you think differently about life. So, I find that book very inspirational. And as I got older the book “Man's search for meaning” was the one that did something similar for me. To have survived what he did, living through the concentration camps and coming away from that with such a positive mental attitude was very inspiring story. So, there is two different generation in my own consumption of the books. Very different subject matter but bought really inspiring. 

Silvija: I also asked you for a quote. Do you want to read it? 

Francis: “For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself». 

we can get very wrapped up in our own life to actually think I will only be a success if I do this. We are in reality you can be successful just by doing the right things and living the right kind of a life. And by doing the things you are good at. You can have that success without actually choosing that one thing to be successful. That was one of the little take away I had for his story.

Silvija: If people should remember one thing from our conversation. What would you like them to remember? 

Francis: There are a lot of big challenges we are looking at right now. As a planet. The Solutions of those challenges will come from us collectively, not necessarily from one person or one company. We have to work collectively to address and to solve all of these big problems. And we got to do it in a way that is collaborative, and we got to do it in a way where everybody gets to contribute and everybody gets to be a part of it. And I really think that is what I would aspire to. In terms of going forward. We have to look at everything and we have to have everybody engaged in these conversations. 

Silvija: Francis Norman from NERA thank you so much for joining us here in Lørn. And teaching us about Australians' chase for the new world of energy. 

Francis: Thank you very much for the opportunity. 

Silvija: And thank you for listening. 

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