Geoff Ward

Geoff Ward is a chemical engineer who spent twenty-five years in energy and resources before becoming one of the more interesting CEOs in clean hydrogen. He trained at the University of Melbourne, took an MBA at the University of Western Australia, and worked his way through Woodside Energy, the advisory firm Azure Capital, and a five-year run as CEO of the geothermal company Geodynamics. From 2018 to 2022 he ran Hazer Group, the Perth-born technology company at the centre of his episode. He has since moved on, and today, based in Brisbane, he sits on the board of a solar technology company and chairs another business. The thing he is known for in water is what he built at Hazer.

Geoff Ward came on the show to explain an idea that sounds almost too neat to be real: making a wastewater treatment plant carbon-negative. The trick is a process called methane pyrolysis, which is a fancy way of saying you split methane gas without burning it. The usual way to make hydrogen, called steam methane reforming, takes methane and produces roughly 8 kilograms of CO2 for every kilogram of hydrogen, because all the carbon in the gas ends up bonded to oxygen and floats off as CO2. Hazer's process splits the same gas but lets the carbon turn straight from gas to a solid, so you walk away with hydrogen and a dry black graphite powder you can bag, truck, and sell.

Geoff Ward's clever move was where he chose to prove it. A wastewater treatment plant already makes methane, because the bugs that digest sewage sludge give off biogas, and most plants simply burn or flare it. Feed that biogas into the Hazer process instead, and the carbon you pull out was recently in the atmosphere anyway, so capturing it as solid graphite makes the whole chain carbon-negative rather than just clean. Hazer built its demonstration plant on the Woodman Point Water Recovery Facility in Perth, on land the local water utility lent them, running on gas that was otherwise being flared. It is the kind of overlooked, capital-starved corner of the water world I spend my days mapping in my Leviathan database, and Geoff turned it into a hydrogen plant with a million-dollar view.

Geoff Ward is refreshingly unsentimental about how hard this is. His hardest-won lesson, he said on the show, is that developing a new technology in an emerging market is incredibly hard, so convincing anyone to be the first to try something is the real battle. He is just as blunt about the cost of everyone waiting for someone else to move, which, he warned, gets you a lot of intent but very little action on hard-to-abate sectors. He is also careful not to oversell hydrogen against batteries: in his framing you are not competing against electric vehicles at all, you are competing alongside them to replace diesel.

Geoff Ward left Hazer in late 2022, before the plant he set up reached its goal, but the goal was reached. In early 2024 the Woodman Point demonstration produced its first hydrogen and graphite, designed for about 100 tonnes of hydrogen and 380 tonnes of graphite a year, which makes it one of the first working proofs that a sewage works can double as a hydrogen plant. His episode was the third and last part of a Hydrogen Economy trilogy, and you can hear Geoff lay out the whole idea, gently correcting my muggle questions about chemistry along the way, in the episode below.

“Rather than the carbon having the ability to bond with oxygen and come out as CO2, the carbon sublimates. It goes directly from a gas to a solid state, and we produce a dry black graphitic carbon powder.”