Project Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus waste, run through pyrolysis, can be coaxed into several distinct higher-value product lines. The interest is in turning one overlooked feedstock into a portfolio of viable businesses. Pre-publication.

The setup

Australia has plenty of eucalyptus. Plantation residue, sawmill offcuts, post-fire salvage, prunings that currently go to chip or compost or burn pile. Pyrolysis itself is well-known: heat biomass without oxygen, get char, oil, and gas back. The chemistry has been understood for a century. The work that matters is elsewhere, in the product mix that comes out the other end and what you do with each fraction.

Most facilities in this space are tuned for a single output. Optimise for one product, the rest becomes byproduct, and byproduct is the part of the spreadsheet that quietly kills the economics. The framing here inverts that: portfolio over single-product. Tune the run for the right mix and each fraction becomes a separate revenue line. Several lines under the same feedstock, sitting across distinct end markets.

Why now

Two reasons. The first is feedstock. Australia sits on enormous volumes of eucalyptus residue that already exist as a logistics problem before anyone has tried to make anything from them. Plantation thinnings, sawmill offcuts, post-fire salvage, the prunings that local councils pay to remove. The supply curve is steep on the wrong side, so the input cost of the raw material can be negative once you account for what people are paying to make it disappear.

The second is sovereignty. A non-trivial fraction of what Australia imports could plausibly be produced from this feedstock domestically. That's a research conclusion. The policy conversation around it is the reason ASPI is in the loop. The import dependency itself is what gives the project its civic weight.

What I can say

The framing is portfolio over single-product. A facility tuned for one output discards the rest. A facility tuned for the right mix turns each fraction into a separate revenue line, with the byproduct economics flipped from drag to lift. The numbers behave very differently once that reframing holds.

The work to date has been desk research, pyrolysis literature, feedstock surveys, end-market sizing, and the long unglamorous task of working out which lines hold up under realistic input prices and which were always going to be a story.

Most of the engineering questions are unsexy. Particle size and moisture in the feedstock. Residence time and temperature profile in the reactor. The condensation train on the oil side. Catalyst choice if catalyst is on the table. None of it is novel chemistry. The novelty is in how the lines compose and what each one is worth at the gate.

What I can't say

The product lines themselves. The patent claims. The process specifics. The commercial strategy and the business plan. All pre-publication, all sealed until publication. ASPI outreach is part of the pathway. Beyond that, the conversation goes offline.

The redactions here are doing real work. The gap between "interesting research" and "filed claim" is the part of the project that has to stay on paper, in counsel's hands, until the right moment.

Why this is on the portfolio

Most engineering portfolios don't include chemistry. This one does because the patterns are the same: read a system carefully, find the part that's been miscategorised, run the numbers, name the opportunity. The substrate changes. The thinking does not.

Software, identity, agentic AI, biomass. Same instinct. The byproduct is the business.