Selected CSIRO media mentions for the week commencing 25 November. If you encounter a paywall, request a text version by emailing the article title here.
Redundancy costs rise at Australian science agency – The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) spent nearly A$11 million on redundancies in 2023-24, its annual report has shown—A$4m more than the previous year. Financial results in the organisation’s 2023-24 report show that despite increased revenues, CSIRO’s operating result dropped by A$3m, to A$14.7m, due to rising costs… Research Professional News, 27 November 2024 (link, text below).
CSIRO at Supplementary Budget Estimates (spillover) – Senator Hodgins-May on Exec bonuses, Data 61. Excerpt from CSIRO testimony at Supplementary Budget Estimates (spillover)… 25 November 2024, Copyright Australian Parliament (link, embedded video below).
Robotic hand helps cultivate baby corals for reef restoration – Researchers at CSIRO say they have developed a world-first soft robotic hand, or gripper, that could revolutionise the delicate, labour-intensive process of cultivating baby corals in laboratories, offering a groundbreaking new approach to coral restoration efforts… Lab and Life Scientist, Wednesday, 27 November 2024 (link, text below).
Coral Breeding Key for Great Barrier Reef Recovery – Southern Cross University’s Peter Harrison and his Coral IVF team are racing to develop the hardier next generation of corals in the wake of mass coral bleaching earlier this year across the Great Barrier Reef. The University’s Coral IVF team, comprising postdoctoral researchers, PhD candidates and staff members drawn from Australia, Philippines and Europe, are united not only by a shared passion for the breathtaking scale and beauty of the Great Barrier Reef and other global reefs but the urgent need to support coral and reef recovery… Mirage News, 27 November 2024 (link, text below).
CSIRO electrolyser pilot demonstrates efficiency and durability at Bluescope Steel Plant – CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, has successfully trialled its game-changing hydrogen production technology at BlueScope’s Port Kembla Steelworks in New South Wales, demonstrating affordable and renewable hydrogen can be generated at scale to help decarbonise heavy industry… Hydrogen Central, 28 November 2024 (link, text below).
Science breakthrough using plants as fuel without impacting food security – An Australian-led scientific breakthrough to increase oil yield from plants will help advance the production and use of biofuels, such as sustainable aviation fuel. Developed over a decade by scientists from Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, the technology was acquired by Australian agricultural innovation company Nufarm… Renewable Carbon News, 27 November 2024 (link, text below).
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By Jenny Sinclair. Research Professional News, 27 November 2024.
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) spent nearly A$11 million on redundancies in 2023-24, its annual report has shown—A$4m more than the previous year.
Financial results in the organisation’s 2023-24 report show that despite increased revenues, CSIRO’s operating result dropped by A$3m, to A$14.7m, due to rising costs.
Total spending on employee costs in 2024, including redundancies, jumped by more than A$100m from 2023, reaching A$984m.
The organisation earned A$61m in revenue from its intellectual property, which it says is “our highest result in nine years”.
Revenue from the private sector dropped from A$88.4m in 2022-23 to A$76.2m, but income from international deals went up, from A$84.5m to A$96.8m.
CSIRO has also confirmed that it will now fully fund the operations of Australia’s research vessel Investigator for at least the next couple of years.
In a Senate hearing on 25 November, CSIRO facilities director Elanor Huntington said “the Investigator will have full sea operations”. At hearings in February, CSIRO had said the vessel was “not funded for the full 300 [possible] days of sailing” in 2025-26.
After Huntington’s comments at the latest hearing, a CSIRO spokesperson told Research Professional News that the commitment to full funding would last until 2026-27.
“This came following a CSIRO review of funding sources for the Marine National Facility, which include CSIRO appropriation funding and National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy funding,” they said.
CSIRO chief executive Doug Hilton told a Senate hearing on 7 November that job cuts at the organisation had been forced by “an increase in operations costs higher than inflation—we’ve seen that with ICT and with our property portfolio—and the ending of the time-limited Covid budget measure”.
“We need to make savings of about 25 per cent in enterprise services,” he told the Senate’s economics committee.
When announced at the beginning of 2024, the cuts were estimated at around A$100m. Cuts have been made to research divisions including health and agriculture, Hilton said, but he added that CSIRO wants to protect its research while it works on restructuring.
“As an organisation, we’re going through a major reshaping of our research portfolio. We’re putting together different ways that we make investment decisions and prioritise what we do, and it was the organisation’s view that it was important to retain our research capability while we did that, and therefore we would find ways of ensuring that there are no additional cuts to research capacity this financial year. I should also say we recognise there’s a lot going on in the organisation. We’re undergoing enterprise service reform, and I think being able to retain our research capability through that process and through our strategic look at how we make investment decisions is the prudent way forward.”
Hilton told the hearing on 7 November that “we don’t plan to make any further major changes to research. But…we always look to strategically reshape our research portfolio to ensure that we have the capability that we need to address the questions the community expect us to answer. And that does require some changes over time.”
At the hearing on 25 November, Hilton added that there were no plans for cuts to the organisation’s Data61 research business unit in subsequent years.
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Lab and Life Scientist, Wednesday, 27 November 2024.
Researchers at CSIRO say they have developed a world-first soft robotic hand, or gripper, that could revolutionise the delicate, labour-intensive process of cultivating baby corals in laboratories, offering a groundbreaking new approach to coral restoration efforts.
The gripper was designed to be attached to a coral farming robot called Coral Husbandry Automated Raceway Machine (CHARM), invented by the President of Beyond Coral Foundation, Stephen Rodan. The foundation aims to deploy this technology in aquariums and coral farms worldwide, enabling the large-scale production of coral to restore reefs.
The gripper project is part of CSIRO’s Kick-Start program, which offers dollar-matched funding and access to research expertise to Australian startups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Dr Josh Pinskier, Soft Robotics Scientist at CSIRO’s Data61, said the project aims to partially automate the time-consuming process of coral propagation.
“Cultivating hundreds or thousands of baby coral colonies in the lab demands significant effort and precise handing,” Pinskier said.
“Each coral must be carefully transferred between tanks to maintain ideal growing conditions, a process currently managed entirely by hand.
“This gripper replicates the dexterity of a human hand, allowing it to handle delicate coral tissue without damaging them, while being strong enough to lift various sizes.
“By automating this process, we can contribute to broader global efforts to scale coral farming and help restore the world’s reefs.”
The grippers were designed using CSIRO’s AI-powered generative design algorithms, which identified the optimal structures to safely and effectively handle delicate coral. Sarah Baldwin, a Mechatronics Engineer who conducted the research while at CSIRO, said the gripper design was innovative due to traditional robotics’ unsuitability in corrosive salt water.
“To overcome corrosion, we 3D-printed the gripper from hard polymer and soft rubber, with only a few screws and bolts,” Baldwin said.
Rodan said this is the first time in history that a robot apparatus has ever picked up a coral and transferred it safely between tanks using a soft robotic gripper of this kind. The gripper is just one of several attachments CHARM can support, alongside tools such as a soft brush for removing algae, further streamlining coral farming operations.
Rodan said the partnership with CSIRO has provided the specialised engineering capability needed to advance Beyond Coral Foundation’s reef restoration efforts. “The next challenge is placing the corals back in their natural habitat, and a well-designed gripper could facilitate the transition from growth to deployment,” he said.
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Mirage News, 27 November 2024
Southern Cross University’s Peter Harrison and his Coral IVF team are racing to develop the hardier next generation of corals in the wake of mass coral bleaching earlier this year across the Great Barrier Reef.
The University’s Coral IVF team, comprising postdoctoral researchers, PhD candidates and staff members drawn from Australia, Philippines and Europe, are united not only by a shared passion for the breathtaking scale and beauty of the Great Barrier Reef and other global reefs but the urgent need to support coral and reef recovery.
From modest beginnings with a small trial site in 2016 near Heron Island, off Gladstone, this spawning season the Coral IVF team is working with colleagues from the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP) at five locations across the Reef – including the southern, central and northern sections – to scale-up the solution.
Some are helping share the knowledge with traditional owners, marine industries and tourism operators to train them on using the innovative coral larval restoration technique.
At Lizard Island, northeast of Cairns, researchers working with colleagues from CSIRO are set to trial new techniques aimed at increasing the efficiency of settling larvae onto Reef areas, thereby increasing recovery rates for coral communities damaged by increased sea temperatures that led to the recent mass coral bleaching.
“Now, more than ever, there is a sense of urgency with this work to scale up by scaling out: to expand the number of reef sites and get more partners and people involved. Monitoring surveys have clearly shown that many areas of the Reef have been hit hard by mass bleaching,” said Distinguished Professor Peter Harrison.
“Having teams operating in four regions along more than 1000km of the Reef and adapting the technique to suit the skill level or the location while all using the same Coral IVF technique to generate many tens of millions of larvae, is exciting.
“At the same time, it’s rewarding to see this project grow in scale to generate many millions more larvae by replicating sexual natural reproduction processes and increasing larval supply to support the Reef’s natural regeneration process.”
As November’s supermoon awed sky gazers, Southern Cross University’s coral larval restoration team was busy preparing for coral spawning: the annual underwater ‘snowstorm’ of trillions of eggs and sperm bundles released by many of the Reef’s coral species in synchrony under the cover of darkness, triggered by the lunar event.
During spawning last week, the team worked around the clock to collect a high diversity of these egg and sperm bundles from multiple coral spawn slicks.
Now, in specially-designed nursery pools floating on the sea surface, more than 100 million larvae bred from corals that survived the bleaching are being reared. Over the next few days, teams will release the larvae to settle and create baby corals on damaged sections of Reef, and the best adapted of these newly settled corals will grow to adulthood to help bring new life to these Reef areas in future.
Professor Harrison is increasingly concerned about the expanding impacts from climate change.
“We’re continually working out ways to improve the efficiency of the larval restoration technique and use surviving heat-tolerant corals to create new populations that are more likely to survive the next bleaching events and adapt to rapidly-changing reef conditions as the impacts of climate change increase,” said Professor Harrison.
“The global community must recognise the urgency of the climate crisis and rapidly transition to renewable energy production to better manage climate impacts on reefs and all of Earth’s life support systems, otherwise we will continue to lose corals and healthy reefs at faster rates that exceed the capacity for natural recovery.
“There are fewer breeding corals on many reefs due to recent bleaching events, so each of the surviving corals becomes more important and therefore we want to make sure we’re breeding from as many of them as possible so we can increase the genetic diversity of the many millions of larvae that we’re releasing back onto the Reef system.
“We expect these coral offspring to have increased tolerance for higher-than-average sea temperatures. Once they reach breeding size and sexual maturity, they’ll pass on these qualities to the next generation of corals.
“If we don’t support the process of natural selection by focussing on the survivors and rapidly expand the scales of successful coral restoration, we’re going to lose everything.”
This research is part of the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program which is funded by the partnership between the Australian Government’s Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation. Partners include the Australian Institute of Marine Science, CSIRO, Great Barrier Reef Foundation, The University of Queensland, QUT, Southern Cross University and James Cook University.
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Hydrogen Central, 28 November 2024
CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, has successfully trialled its game-changing hydrogen production technology at BlueScope’s Port Kembla Steelworks in New South Wales, demonstrating affordable and renewable hydrogen can be generated at scale to help decarbonise heavy industry.
CSIRO’s tubular solid oxide electrolysis (SOE) technology has clocked 1000 hours of successful operation in the trial with BlueScope Steel which commenced in October 2024.
Unlike conventional hydrogen electrolysers, which rely heavily on electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, CSIRO’s advanced SOE technology uses both waste heat (for example, steam from the steelworks) and electricity to produce hydrogen with greater efficiency.
Dr Sarb Giddey, Senior Principal Research Scientist and Group Leader in CSIRO, said the trial produced hydrogen with an electrical input of less than 36kWh per kilogram of hydrogen, by using the steam produced in the plant by the steelmaking processes.
“Since electricity takes up the lion’s share of variable production costs for renewable hydrogen, a substantial reduction in the electricity required (up to 30 per cent saving) for hydrogen production could be a game changer for the nascent hydrogen industry.”
“Taking a new technology out of the lab and into the field can highlight unforeseen challenges, so we are delighted to see that our technology is meeting the performance requirements in terms of hydrogen production, electrical efficiency and reliability.”
Chris Page, Head of Future Technologies at BlueScope, sees hydrogen as an important part of BlueScope’s pathway to net zero. BlueScope is proud to support pilot projects on site, which align with our goals of low carbon emission steelmaking in the future.
“The CSIRO electrolyser pilot has produced positive outcomes in its short-term operation, and we look forward to seeing it evolve.”
CSIRO spinout Hadean Energy has licensed CSIRO’s SOE technology and is on a mission to accelerate industrial decarbonisation.
Chris Rowland, CEO of Hadean Energy, said the tubular SOE technology has a further advantage of being inherently less expensive to build because of the simplified manufacturing process and more readily available materials.
“The 1000-hour milestone validates the technology in a real-world industrial setting, increasing the technology readiness level to prepare for commercialisation.”
“It shows the potential for Hadean Energy’s electrolyser to decarbonise hard to abate industries.”
This research is supported by the Science and Industry Endowment Fund.
While CSIRO is trialling the tubular SOE electrolyser in the field with Bluescope, Hadean Energy is testing the long term durability and performance of the modular design at CSIRO’s Hydrogen Technology Demonstration Facility.
Following these successful trials, Hadean Energy is preparing to showcase a 5kW demonstration unit as part of the Australia-UK Renewable Hydrogen Innovation Partnerships. This will serve as a stepping stone toward a large-scale industrial pilot, positioning Hadean Energy as a leading global clean hydrogen technology provider.
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Renewable Carbon News, 27 November 2024
An Australian-led scientific breakthrough to increase oil yield from plants will help advance the production and use of biofuels, such as sustainable aviation fuel.
Developed over a decade by scientists from Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, the technology was acquired by Australian agricultural innovation company Nufarm.
The Biomass Oil Project has been announced today, with Nufarm leading a new global research partnership to further develop the technology.
Oils from plants are produced by specialised seeds and fruits, but CSIRO scientists looked at extending that to the biomass of the plant, including the leaves and stem.
CSIRO’s Dr Thomas Vanhercke, who has been working on the project for more than a decade, said the technology would have the potential to create an important new global energy source.
“We were inspired to develop this technology in response to the world’s need for increased production of plant oil without impacting on food security,” Dr Vanhercke said.
“With CSIRO’s existing expertise in the area and the partnership with Nufarm on the Omega-3 canola project, we started thinking about how to extend that to the challenge of developing industrial scale feedstock oil from plants.
“We took the genetics for seed oil production and incorporated them across a range of crops with promising success.”
Current project lead, Dr Xue-Rong Zhou, said the world-leading research in boosting oil yield from plants is a major breakthrough for Australia and beyond.
“This development of new biofuels and renewable oils will support a sustainable future,” Dr Zhou said.
“We are looking forward to working with Nufarm and our global research partners to deploy the technology into high biomass energy cane and sorghum varieties and make it a reality.”
Nufarm CEO, Greg Hunt, said the company is now bringing together researchers from CSIRO, the University of Florida (UF), USA and the Instituto Agronomico (IAC), Brazil to take the work to the next level.
“We have assembled a consortium of world-class R&D and technical partners who bring unique experience to develop this technology,” he said.
“Nufarm is also working with key strategic partners to further support the technical project development and future downstream commercialisation.”
