Polysilicon plan a game changer
Quinbrook says Australia has enough renewable energy and raw materials to produce its own polysilicon and should be doing so.
Investor and developer Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners is planning to build Australia’s first polysilicon plant to give the nation its own access to the crucial solar power generation material.
Brian Restall, managing director at Quinbrook, says Australia has enough renewable energy and raw materials to produce its own polysilicon and should be doing so.
Around 97 per cent of the world’s polysilicon currently comes from China.
“It’s about a country standing up and deciding whether it wants sovereignty over its supply chain,” he says.
“Australia has the resources and our project is giving the country an opportunity to create sovereignty for itself in the renewable energy supply chain.”
Polysilicon is a purified form of silicon made from quartz. The quart is smelted down into metallurgical silicon and then purified further to form polysilicon. It is then turned into round ingots, which are in turn sliced into wafers of use in solar panels.
Quinbrook’s polysilicon will be sold to manufacturers of solar panels in Australia and around the world. Restall says that when fully operational the plant will have the capacity to fully meet Australia’s polysilicon needs.
The polysilicon plant is to be built on the outskirts of Townsville, where Quinbrook has 200ha of land in the city’s Lansdown Eco-Industrial precinct.
The plant will be powered by a large-scale solar and battery storage project and will source high-quality silica quartz from the North Queensland region, creating more than 1000 jobs in construction and operation.
Quinbrook is currently running a competitive tender to find an existing polysilicon manufacturer who wants to take the opportunity to come and manufacture in Australia. “We’re part-way through our tender process at the moment, and we’ve got incredible interest from many multinational businesses that are bidding to be the operating partner,” Restall says.
Along with its proximity to a port and its heavy industrial base, Townsville will also have access to overnight wind when CopperString is built, which comes in from the desert and produces renewable energy when other wind and solar aren’t available. Quinbrook believes the plant will rank among the greenest polysilicon plants in the world.
“Lansdown is close to the source of some of the best silica quartz resources in the world and it has the land and site infrastructure we need to build a truly state of the art manufacturing facility that will be powered by renewable energy,” Restall says. “Proximity to the port and multiple transport corridors make it a very compelling location for energy intensive, export driven ‘green’ manufacturing.”
Speaking at the launch of the project late last year, Townsville Mayor Jenny Hill said, “This is an especially exciting announcement because Quinbrook are not only the developers and sponsors, but also the project funders, which means the money is on the table.
“Once the right operating partner is chosen by the company, the project can move forward at a rapid pace, subject to the normal government approvals,” she said. Townsville will also benefit from the $5bn CopperString 2032 project, which will link Mount Isa with an area just south of Townsville with an 840km transmission line. An additional 200km of transmission will link renewable energy generators to the main transmission line.
Quinbrook is an infrastructure investment fund which takes investments from pension and superannuation funds, particularly those which are focused on ESG investing. Retail sector superfund Rest last year committed $1bn to invest in projects backed by Quinbrook.
The fund manager has made high-profile investments in renewable energy and storage investments in the US and the UK, and is a shareholder in the $30bn SunCable project to export solar energy from Australia to Asia, now owned by Grok Ventures, the personal investment company of Atlassian co-founder Michael Cannon-Brookes. Grok is also an investor in Quinbrook’s funds.
Restall says the polysilicon plant’s income will be structured so that it appeals to pension funds which want stable long-term income.
“One of the things that we look for is the right operating partner, a creditworthy party that operates the plant,” he says. “And they’ll be looking for longer term offtakes for their polysilicon, which will then underwrite the investment.”
“The secure revenue streams from that sort of strategy mean that it becomes an infrastructure play as opposed to a merchant revenue play.”
Demand for polysilicon, which is also used in the manufacture of computer chips, is forecast to surge in the coming years. The global polysilicon market size by volume was valued at 757.4 tons in 2023 and is projected to grow from 865.5 tons in 2024 to 2582.0 tons by 2032, according to forecaster Fortune Business Insights.
The polysilicon project will require another two to three years to secure the planning permits and so on and then three or four years of construction, so will likely be operating early next decade.
“This is a staged project. It could at a minimum supply enough polysilicon for Australia’s needs, but equally, if there’s export demand then it’ll be more,” Restall says.
Quinbrook was established in July 2015 by David Scaysbrook and Rory Quinlan who have invested in renewables for over two decades and in power infrastructure more broadly since the early 1990s. As fund managers, they have led investment teams and portfolio companies that have invested more than $US5.2bn ($7.8bn) of equity in over 200 low-carbon, renewable, storage and grid-support projects covering a wide spectrum of technologies.
Along with the polysilicon project, Quinbrook is also backing the development of a green iron project in Gladstone on the Queensland coast. It has partnered with Central Queensland Metals which holds the exploration permits for what is the largest known magnetite deposit in the state.
The federal government is aiming to make the nation a “renewable energy superpower” as part of its Future Made in Australia policy.
The $22.7bn Future Made in Australia policy announced in the budget last May includes $1.5bn in funding to build capability in solar and battery manufacturing that strengthens supply chain resilience.
Restall says that thus far Quinbrook had not applied for any government funding.