New Shell boss Tony Nunan outlines focus on clean energy

Global oil and gas giant Shell’s new Australian boss Tony Nunan grew up in Toowoomba but never imagined his career would involve tackling so many tricky problems in his own backyard.

Counting down to the end of high school in Toowoomba in 1995, Tony Nunan had no grand plan for his career other than wanting an opportunity to solve tricky problems.

He knew he was headed to university in Brisbane, but with no firm idea of the exact problems he wanted to tackle he chose to study environmental science and law.

It’s a choice he acknowledges “was a bit of a strange combination” at the time but it eventually threw him into the middle of a fiendish problem centred in his wider backyard of the Darling Downs.

And nearly two decades later, as the new chairman of global energy giant Shell’s Australian operations, Nunan is still in the thick of what is now the solution to that problem: Queensland’s booming coal seam gas industry.

Previously the head of Shell’s eastern Australian operations, he stepped into the top job this year after his predecessor, Zoe Yujnovich, moved to company headquarters in The Hague.

In his first extended interview since taking the helm, the father of four school-aged children says the easiest question for him to answer is whether he had ever imagined ending up where he is now.

“No,” he says.

His first job after graduating from UQ was as a soil scientist for Queensland’s Department of Natural Resources and Mines, based in the small coal mining town of Moura, about 170km south-west of Rockhampton.

Shell Australia chairman Tony Nunan. Picture: Mark Cranitch

The problems he faced involved sitting down with property owners and creating soil conservation plans. He loved helping the tight-knit community and playing bush football but after three years decided it was time to give his “law a bit of a go”.

Moving back to Brisbane and eventually settling into HopgoodGanim’s resources practice, he soon noticed a small trickle of companies seeking advice on a problem facing Darling Downs coal mines.

The mining industry was desperately trying to reduce the dangerous levels of methane gas in their operations while his clients, including Arrow Energy and QGC, were searching for additional gas supplies.

“I was a young lawyer who was asked to take on board this first wave of clients and it just grew,” he says. “What happened is that those small entrepreneurs found a solution to a problem that is what we see today, which is an enormous industry with a whole heap of global investment.”

The creation of that industry meant his clients could drill into coal seams and bring gas relatively safely to well sites dotted across the surface.

“We were then able to get enough scale to develop an LNG industry and take gas, which was previously being used in small quantities in Australia, and be able to create an entire export industry off it,” he says.

Recognising the exciting potential of the industry, Nunan joined QGC as legal counsel in 2008.

A worker walks through She’’’s Queensland Curtis Liquefied Natural Gas project in Gladstone.

The company only had about 60 employees at the time but was attracting global interest and investment, culminating with British multinational BG taking it over later that year. About eight years later, Shell acquired BG for more than $US50 billion and Nunan took on senior roles in their Australian operations.

“I saw the opportunity and I didn’t think it would go as far as it has, but what happened was that once that opportunity started to grow and grow and grow, then there was more and more development and more people and more jobs and opportunity,” he says. “We’ve created something I think that is quite special.”

Taking on responsibility for all of Shell’s Australian operations, Nunan’s horizons stretch to the company’s WA gas interests and the defining challenge facing all legacy fossil fuel companies of transitioning to cleaner technology. Throw in the unprecedented challenge of navigating the COVID-19 uncertainty, and Nunan has another set of tricky problems to solve.

He’s confident Shell’s globally co-ordinated COVID-19 response will provide the outlines for what he has to do in Australia, with his focus on reassuring the company’s thousands of local employees with the most updated information while also preparing for what happens if the problem escalates.

A worker at Shell’s Queensland Curtis Liquefied Natural Gas (QCLNG) project in Gladstone.

And he’s excited about the equally vexing challenge of leading Shell’s transition to cleaner technology in the energy system.

“The reason why that excites me is that there’s no simple answer,” he says.

“There’s no one company, there’s no one community that solves that problem.

“It requires all of us to move in a direction to be able to address it.”

Nunan says Shell’s recent acquisition of ERM Power, one of Australia’s largest electricity retailers, and its 120 megawatt Gangarri solar project just north of Chinchilla, shows the company’s “real ambition” of providing cleaner energy for its Australian customers.

And that includes a major focus of ensuring the company’s environmental footprint is as small as possible, harking back to his early working days trying to protect the soils of central Queensland.

“In the way that I lead, I will never put our business in a position where we’re going to do something that either impacts significantly on our local communities or results in environmental damage because it means so much to me, and I know, particularly for our communities here in Queensland, the long-term sustainability of the land resources is absolutely fundamental,” he says.