From disaster recovery to renewable-energy project development.

The emergency

The Adelaide Hills fires left a densely settled rural landscape — homes, sheds, vineyards, orchards and small holdings — covered in burnt building material, collapsed structures, damaged fencing and residues that could not simply be pushed into a heap and buried. Residents were displaced, insurers and councils were working to different timelines, and the practical task of clearing property after property had to begin before the fire ground had fully cooled.

Disaster waste is not ordinary waste. It arrives all at once, it is mixed, and it carries hazards that are invisible until someone looks for them. Asbestos cement sheeting fractures and scatters when it burns. Household and farm chemicals rupture. CCA-treated timber posts — the backbone of every vineyard and fence line in the district — concentrate copper, chromium and arsenic into the ash left behind. Every one of those problems had to be solved while people were trying to get back onto their land.

The operational challenge

The program had to move quickly without creating a second environmental problem. That meant reconciling several pressures at the same time: the safety of contractors and landholders; the regulatory obligations attached to asbestos, chemicals and contaminated soils; the limited capacity of receiving facilities; the distances involved in moving bulk material out of the hills; and the reasonable expectation of residents that their properties would be cleared properly, not just cleared.

It also had to be auditable. Public money was being spent on private land, so every property, every load and every disposal or recovery destination needed to be documented in a way that would stand up to scrutiny afterwards.

Mike’s role

Mike led and coordinated the operational side of the program. That covered the design of the clearance methodology, the engagement of demolition, transport and hazardous-material contractors, liaison with the regulator and the program’s government client, and direct dealings with landholders on the properties themselves. The role sat deliberately between the office and the site: writing the protocols, then standing on the ground while they were applied and adjusting them where reality demanded it.

The system developed

An asbestos identification and removal process was designed and implemented so that suspect material was assessed before machinery touched it, and removed under controls rather than discovered mid-demolition. Chemicals and other hazardous wastes were segregated, containerised and directed to lawful receiving points.

Temporary transfer arrangements were established so that trucks were not making long, part-empty runs out of the hills. Bulk containers were deployed into vineyards and onto properties, allowing material to be separated at the point it was generated — the single most effective way to lift recovery rates on a job of this kind. Landholders received written instructions and safety kits so they could participate safely rather than being kept at arm's length from their own land.

The CCA-treated timber stream was handled as a dedicated system in its own right. Intact posts, burnt timber and contaminated ash were each managed under separate protocols, with different handling, containment and destinations. That component alone involved around 132 bulk-bin movements and the recovery of approximately 164 drums of contaminated ash — material that, left in place, would have remained a long-term contamination liability across productive agricultural soil.

Measurable outcomes

• Approximately $3.68 million program delivered between January and May 2020.
• About 72 complete house demolitions and removals.
• More than 350 partial house, property and shed clearances.
• An asbestos identification and removal process designed and implemented.
• Chemicals and other hazardous wastes managed and lawfully disposed.
• More than 60% of the waste removed recovered or recycled.
• A dedicated recovery system for fire-damaged CCA-treated posts and contaminated ash.

Lessons for future disaster recovery

Recovery rates are decided in the first week, not the last. If separation is designed into the clearance method — containers on site, protocols agreed, contractors briefed — a disaster-waste program can recover the majority of what it removes. If separation is left until material reaches a receiving facility, it is already too late and the default becomes landfill.

The second lesson is that hazardous material must be assumed, not discovered. Building the asbestos and CCA controls into the front of the process kept people safe and kept the program moving. The third is that landholders are participants, not obstacles: given clear instructions and the right equipment, they made the program faster and safer.

The project

Redbank is an existing power station in the Hunter Valley, built to burn coal tailings and idle for years. The proposal was to restart it as a biomass-fuelled renewable-energy facility, explicitly excluding native-forestry residues from logging. That exclusion mattered: it removed the easiest and most contentious fuel source and required a supply strategy built on genuine residues and eligible waste-derived materials instead.

A power station is only as credible as its fuel. Turbines, boilers and grid connections are engineering problems with known answers. Securing hundreds of thousands of tonnes a year of a consistent, lawful, ecologically defensible biomass fuel — for decades, from a region that has never supplied one — is a different kind of problem, and it is the one Mike was appointed to solve.

The role

As General Manager Feedstock Fuels and Sustainable Energy, Mike’s documented responsibilities included managing and contributing to the State Significant Development process; developing the sustainable biomass fuel strategy; identifying and evaluating standard and eligible waste fuels; developing feedstock processing and quality specifications; examining transport and supply-chain requirements; and developing bulk-truck unloading and feedstock-storage arrangements at the site.

Building a fuel strategy from the ground up

The work began where fuel actually comes from. Mike engaged directly with landholders across western NSW, with Local Land Services, with harvesting and haulage contractors and with technical specialists, and carried out property inspections in the Cobar region to understand what material genuinely existed, in what volumes, and on what terms it could be made available.

A central strand was the invasive native species pathway: woody regrowth that landholders are already permitted to manage under established NSW frameworks, and which currently has little use beyond being pushed up and burnt in the paddock. Turning that into a fuel required a defensible answer to every question a regulator, an ecologist or a court would eventually ask — what material, from where, under what approval, measured how, and with what monitoring that the resource is not being drawn down faster than it regrows.

Invasive native species — Cobar region

Field work in the Cobar district looked at invasive native species regrowth in its actual condition on the ground: stand density, stem size, species mix and how much of it could realistically be recovered without compromising habitat, ground cover or soil stability. Representative samples were cut, labelled and sent to independent laboratories for analysis, so that calorific value, moisture and ash characteristics for this material were established from the resource itself rather than inferred.

Purpose-grown biomass

Mike has also worked on the development of purpose-grown biomass fuels as a complementary, long-term feedstock option for renewable-energy projects. This work involves assessing suitable crop types, expected yields, harvesting cycles, moisture content, processing requirements, transport logistics and compatibility with the power station’s fuel specification. The objective is to establish a reliable and sustainable biomass supply that can operate alongside approved waste-derived fuels, while ensuring that each proposed source is technically workable, commercially realistic and environmentally responsible.

Independent sampling and fuel testing were commissioned so that calorific value, moisture, ash and contaminant characteristics were established from real material rather than assumed from literature. Those results fed directly into the processing and quality specifications: what size the material had to be reduced to, what moisture range the boiler could accept, and what a supplier had to deliver to be paid.

Supply chain, transport and site handling

Fuel strategy is a logistics problem as much as a resource one. The work examined transport configurations and cartage economics over long inland distances, the staging and consolidation points needed between paddock and plant, and the receiving arrangements at Redbank itself — bulk-truck unloading, throughput rates, storage volumes, dust and fire management, and the buffer required to keep a base-load plant fed through wet seasons and harvest peaks.

Alongside the resource pathway, standard and eligible waste-derived fuels were identified and evaluated against the regulatory definitions that determine what a facility of this type may lawfully burn — a distinction that decides whether a fuel is an asset or a liability.

Assessment and current position

The proposal proceeded as a State Significant Development, with the fuel strategy forming a substantial part of the Environmental Impact Statement and of the response to submissions. It was a contested process, involving detailed technical scrutiny of the sustainability, ecology, transport and regulatory standing of the proposed feedstock.

The NSW Planning Portal records that SSD-56284960 was refused on 15 September 2025. The restart is therefore not approved and the station is not operating on biomass. That outcome does not diminish the nature of the work: leadership of a complex renewable-energy, sustainable-fuels and major-project-development process spanning engineering, planning, environmental assessment, fuel strategy, regional supply-chain development and contested regulatory proceedings.

The capability the project demonstrates is transferable and unusual — the ability to construct a fuel supply chain from first principles, to test it against physical, ecological, commercial and regulatory reality, and to defend it in a formal assessment process.