What does the development of hydrogen long-haul heavy transport need to progress from an exciting idea to a tangible option in realm of Australian supply chain and logistics?
It needs companies willing to take risks to improve the technology, of course. It also needs forward-thinking partners and investors looking to get ahead of the decarbonisation curve for the good of their operations and the wider industry, it needs time and space to develop, trial and implement new technology, and it needs a concept that works.
Lion Energy’s operations at the Port of Brisbane tick all these boxes, and then some.
The site Lion sits on at the port is under a 20-year lease and, almost fittingly, you can easily see the key freight route of the M4 motorway rising up over the terminal in the background.
The goal is, one day, for the majority of the five million heavy vehicles that travel along that key piece of asphalt to be powered by hydrogen.
This has not been a journey steeped in hope and luck though. Despite Lion’s comparatively recent pivot into the hydrogen sector, it’s had its finger on the pulse of the energy transition for years.
Executive Chairman Tom Soulsby has forged a career in energy and gas for decades through executive and non-executive stints at the likes of Risco Energy – the main investor in Lion – and Tap Oil.
He says Lion’s pivot into the hydrogen transport space in 2021 has set up a one-of-a-kind, scalable renewable project in the heart of a major metropolitan hub. One that has huge potential to shift the landscape of multiple industries.
“Lion is actually an oil and gas company by pedigree,” Soulsby tells ATN. “I’ve been running oil and gas companies since 2010 and been involved in the business for about 20 years, and we’ve been pretty successful in that space.
“Risco Energy is, today, a significant shareholder in Lion, and Lion is one of the zero-emission plays within the Risco portfolio.
“Risco has done a number of things since it was set up in 2010 like put together a number of oil and gas portfolios in Asia and sell them to the Kuwait National Oil Company, we’ve taken over an Australian-listed company called Tap Oil and flipped that to a Dubai-based group.
“In about 2014 we made a strategic investment into Lion and we’ve continued to support it. I was parachuted in to run Lion in 2019 and by 2021 as Chairman I pivoted Lion into hydrogen.
“We’re about three years later now and we’re in the best shape we’ve ever been in terms of having a very clear strategy, knowing exactly where we’re focusing, and getting the project funded with some international partners.
“We’re a first mover in Queensland, and our focus is green hydrogen for industry, heavy mobility, fuel cell gensets and logistics equipment, and we’ve got this 20-year site at the Port of Brisbane.
“This is the first project of its scale within an Australian capital city. The only like project would be Viva Energy’s project in Geelong.
“So, what we’ve done differently is set ourselves up in Port of Brisbane, right smack bang in the transport corridor.”
Aside from its metropolitan location though, what is it that sets Lion Energy apart from other players in the hydrogen transport game?
Hydrogen transport – and the same goes for electric vehicles – has not been immune from the rises and falls that often plague emerging industries, and for every success there are a litany of high-profile failures.
Perhaps the most notable of these was Hyzon, who pulled its Australian operations just months after releasing a brand new, Australian-designed hydrogen prime mover in the market.
Then, in early 2025, it announced it was closing its doors, just four years after promising to produce 40,000 trucks in that calendar year.
Lion Energy and Hyzon have both held drastically different portfolios, approaches and expertise in the broad industry that is hydrogen transport, but Hyzon’s demise is a clear indication of the ongoing volatility in new-age renewable projects.
Soulsby says one key point of difference in allowing Lion to steadily progress towards its goal in the Australian market is its private equity and long-term vision.
“We’ve recently signed with a company called DGA which is a 100 per cent subsidiary of Mitsubishi, and we’ve also signed a joint development agreement with Samsung,” Soulsby continues.
“We’re giving up 50 per cent of our project to these north Asian partners, but they’re funding 75 per cent of the project moving forward.
“Unlike pretty much every other green hydrogen project in Australia, this is private sector funded, so we’re not relying on the whims of politicians and changes of government to affect our project.
“There’s a natural tendency for myself and my management team to look towards longer term investors that have a five to 15-year timeframe to work on, as opposed to the two-to-three-year timeframes a lot of Aussie listed companies have, mainly because of the tenure of CEOs.
“The major equipment is already in Australia, or it’s under construction and we have a fairly significant cost competitive advantage versus other players.
“We’ve got about $3 million in the bank, we’ve got a project that’s funded at Port of Brisbane, we’ve got our eyes on a second site.”
While a key long-term aim for Lion Energy is to continue to progress its capacity within heavy transport and trucking, it is currently making strong strides in the bus sector.
Its Port of Brisbane site generates hydrogen from on-site electrolysers, where it is then compressed and stored at high-pressure.
Around 300,000 kilograms of green hydrogen can be produced per annum.
It is then exited into tube trailers, which can then be transported on prime movers to bus or fleet depots, and they can undertake hydrogen refuelling on site – however the Port of Brisbane base also possesses refuelling capabilities.
Soulsby says the versatility associated with this method of refuelling is showing strong capacity in both the bus and truck sectors due to its speed and accessibility.
“These tube trailers get delivered by prime movers,” he says. They just get dropped there, and then the prime mover comes back and picks it up.
“They might have to be changed every three or four days.
“Comparing that to an electric vehicle, and using a bus depot as an example, with grid constraints in south-east Queensland a bus depot site would have between two and three megawatts if it’s lucky.
“If you have two to three megawatts to charge 100 buses, that’s going to be a trickle. Because of the simultaneous draw on the grid that’s going to take six or seven hours.
“That’s not because of how fast the charging unit is, that’s because of how fast the grid is.
“As for hydrogen refuelling, that takes about seven minutes, and it’s very similar to refuelling a diesel bus.
“Brisbane City Council bought back the Sherwood depot from the private sector in 2020, and that has 150 parking spaces. It cost them $132 million to buy back that depot in highly urbanised land.
“That’s $800,000 a parking space.
“An electric recharging station needs seven times more space than a hydrogen refuelling station. Hydrogen refuelling infrastructure and operations are so similar to diesel that if you’re replacing diesel buses and have limited space, hydrogen is a great option.
“Where this is going to be economically competitive in relation to heavy transport is where there is a challenge for batteries to reduce carbon emissions, we realised hydrogen is a better option, so we focused on location selection where we could leverage that market, and we reached this conclusion fairly quickly.”
Why Brisbane then? Yes, it’s Australia’s third-most populated city and the entry point to the northern half of the country’s eastern seaboard, but it has less than half the population of Melbourne or Sydney.
Also, given the geography of Australia, long-haul northbound hydrogen-fuelled travel from Brisbane is vastly more difficult than from Melbourne or Sydney due to the size, scope and distribution of Australia’s population in north and Far North Queensland compared to the more comparably compressed population in the country’s south-eastern corners.
The simple fact of the matter is opportunity. Port of Brisbane’s extensive real estate along, the Queensland government’s desire to position the state as a world leader in the renewable energy sector and Brisbane’s strained public transport network means Lion Energy’s operations are not merely accepted, but they have been welcomed with the most open of arms.
“Queensland is our prima faci use case,” Soulsby says. “And there are two factors clearly working in Brisbane’s favour in its strong cases for the progression of renewable buses.
“The major one is Brisbane only has 2.5 million people, and it doesn’t have a large enough train network to support that population.
“So with the city being over-bussed and the state having a zero-emission mandate, the logical place to be was Brisbane.
“The other thing is we have access to land, access to the grid, access to water, access to renewable energy.
“Port of Brisbane is also about four times the size of Port of Melbourne. It can fit Port of Melbourne and Port of Sydney into it and you still have half of the port land size left.
“There’s plenty of land for setting up an operation like ours without being too land constrained, and it’s a really supportive port operator that wants us there.”
Despite its comfort at Port of Brisbane, there is no indication that Lion Energy is comfortable sitting still with just one site.
It’s recent Hydrogen Information Day showcased live demonstrations of hydrogen-powered trucks, cars and gensets with real-world applications.
But now, all you have to do is raise your eyes from Lion’s Port of Brisbane’s site to conceptualise some of the real change the company could begin to action on Australia’s heavy vehicle sector.
“You can see the M4 highway on the bridge, and right next to us is the Ampol truck stop, which is one of the busiest truck stops in the country,” Soulsby says.
“That’s the market we want to capture here with this physical location.”
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