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The gas industry’s sponsorship of the latest series of MasterChef Australia is a misleading attempt to bring the climate wars close to home. By Mike Seccombe.
MasterChef is recruited to gas lobby’s last battle
The term “bait and switch” is defined by the financial website Investopedia as “an unethical practice in sales whereby the actual product for sale differs substantially from its advertised quality or other attributes”.
Bait and switch also describes the strategy behind a major sponsorship deal for this year’s series of MasterChef Australia on Network Ten, according to its many critics.
The bait, so-called “renewable gas”, was dangled in a media release last week from Australian Gas Networks (AGN), which owns and operates gas transmission and distribution pipelines, delivering to more than 1.3 million homes and businesses across eastern mainland Australia.
AGN, along with several other gas supply companies – ATCO, Jemena, Solstice and the Australian Gas Infrastructure Group (owner of AGN) – were part of what the release called an “innovative brand integration” with the show’s production company, Endemol Shine, and Paramount, the owner of Network Ten.
“Season 16 Sizzles With Carbon Neutral Biomethane And Hydrogen Gases,” began the release, which went on to elaborate that contestants in the show would be cooking with biomethane in the kitchen and with hydrogen for a “BBQ challenge, taking the iconic Australian pastime to the next dimension”.
It quoted Cathryn McArthur, executive general manager customer and strategy at AGN: “Carbon neutral biomethane and hydrogen on MasterChef Australia shows that we can keep cooking the way we know and love with fewer emissions than natural gas.”
Except we can’t, as AGN concedes online.
“Renewable gas is not yet available for direct purchase by consumers in the retail market,” it says in the FAQ section.
Biomethane, a renewable gas produced from organic waste, is essentially the same as the “natural” gas that comes out of the ground and produces the same emissions when burnt. It is renewable in the sense that new waste produces new gas.
It leaks out of landfills and waste treatment plants and other places where organic matter decomposes anaerobically and capturing it is unquestionably desirable, for it is a powerful greenhouse gas. Most projects that harvest the gas burn it onsite to generate electricity. The gas distribution companies sponsoring MasterChef would rather it was mixed in with fossil gas and piped through their networks to be used far from the source, in homes and businesses around the nation.
One small demonstration project in Australia currently does that, at a sewage treatment plant in Malabar, Sydney. It produces enough gas each year to meet the needs of only about 6300 of the 5.1 million Australian homes connected to the gas network.
That’s where the biomethane came from for MasterChef. It was a special order.
“Essentially, we bottled it up … and then we shipped it down to Victoria,” says a spokesman for Jemena, the energy company that provided the gas.
The hydrogen used in the MasterChef barbecue challenge was not emissions-free, either. Hydrogen can be a zero-carbon fuel, if renewable electricity from wind and solar sources is used to power electrolysers to split the hydrogen from water molecules.
The hydrogen used for this series of MasterChef, however, is so-called “grey” hydrogen, produced from methane.
The “renewable gas” website linked to the show blamed “scheduling conflicts” for the use of the dirty gas, and promised the hydrogen would be green next year, sourced from the CSIRO. Even then, the hydrogen, like the biomethane, will be a bespoke product not currently available to the sponsors’ millions of customers.
The products touted on MasterChef are substantially different from the product that is actually for sale, which is fossil gas, as Kelly O’Shanassy, chief executive of the Australian Conservation Foundation emphasises.
“We’re extremely disappointed that MasterChef has done this sponsorship deal with the gas industry and are spruiking gas solutions as viable, clean and here now. They’re not,” she says.
It is “extremely unlikely” either biomethane or hydrogen will power kitchens and homes of the future for a host of reasons, says Jono La Nauze, chief executive of Environment Victoria.
Hydrogen does have a role to play in the future energy mix, but not in the way the pipeline companies are advocating, he says.
“It’s just incredibly inefficient: first generating the electricity, then using it for electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, then transporting the hydrogen to the home – it’s a very difficult substance to transport – then converting it back into heat energy in your stove, or your home heating or your hot-water system.
“At every step of that process, you lose a whole lot of energy.”
Moreover, it’s roughly 10 times more expensive than just using electricity in the first place, he says.
The technical difficulties are daunting. Running a reticulation network on hydrogen, La Nauze says, would require the replacement of “all the pipes that currently get gas to your home, and also all your appliances”. Appliances designed for methane become explosion risks on hydrogen. Furthermore, every customer on the grid would have to make the switch at the same time, he says.
“You can’t run the risk that Granny from Belgrave didn’t get the memo and still has her old stove and … lights it up and hydrogen comes out the pipe.”
Studies suggest the network could run safely on a blend of up to about 20 per cent hydrogen; indeed the industry already is running several small pilot projects using a 10 per cent blend. That still leaves it a long way short of the carbon neutrality spruiked on MasterChef.
The use of biomethane is technically a lot less challenging. It is chemically more or less the same as fossil methane, so there is no need to replace pipes or appliances. It comes with other drawbacks, however.
First, there is simply not enough available. At best, according to Australia’s Bioenergy Roadmap (2021) from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, biomethane could make up only about 20 per cent of the total pipeline gas market by 2050, and then only if its cost could be significantly reduced.
It also poses serious health risks. Gas cooking produces pollutants including nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and fine particulate matter, that have been linked to respiratory and cardiovascular problems and cancer. At least one in eight cases of childhood asthma is the result of cooking with gas at home, according to multiple studies.
“When I was a kid, Benson & Hedges [cigarettes] sponsored the cricket. Well, the Benson & Hedges of today is the gas industry, and they’re sponsoring MasterChef,” says La Nauze.
It might seem odd that the gas distribution companies would choose to focus on cooking through their MasterChef sponsorship, given only about 4 per cent of their product is used for that purpose. Most domestic gas use is in space and water heating, which do not come with the same health risks, because the appliances are typically not inside the house.
People are attached to their cooktops, however, in a way they are not to their water and space heaters. Thus the right to cook with gas has become a major battlefront in the ongoing, politicised climate wars – and not just in Australia.
Last year when the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission suggested it might ban gas cookers in new dwellings, right-wing politicians fired up.
“If the maniacs in the White House come for my stove,” Ronny Jackson, a Republican congressman from Texas, said on X, “they can pry it from my cold dead hands.”
The belief persists that gas cooking is superior to electric, despite rebuttals from numerous top chefs. One, Neil Perry, said it again on ABC TV on Tuesday night: “I’ve been cooking on induction and electric … since 2006. It’s much more powerful and much more reactive than what gas is. It’s better for the environment. So for me, it’s a no-brainer.”
To date, two jurisdictions in Australia – Victoria and the ACT – have banned gas connections to new builds. Their respective governments immediately came under attack from the right, with claims the moves limited individual choice, would cost jobs at appliance manufacturers and increase costs for energy consumers.
The first is undoubtedly true. The second ignores that appliance manufacturers can switch from making gas appliances to making efficient electric ones. The third is untrue.
Numerous studies have found households make substantial savings by ditching their gas stoves, water and space heaters and going all electric. The Victorian ban on gas connections to new builds, for example, was informed by analysis showing annual cost savings of up to $1020 for homes with no solar on their roofs, and as much as $1250 for homes with solar.
The clear advantages of all-electric homes, in terms of cost, utility and human and climate health, says Dan Cass, co-founder of Rewiring Australia, is an “obvious existential threat” to the gas distribution companies.
“The gas pipeline companies are a regulated monopoly used to big profits and [are] rightly terrified that electrification breaks their business model,” says Cass.
The MasterChef sponsorship, he says, amounts to “a new greenwashing campaign straight from the climate denial playbook: confuse and buy time to eke out another decade of profits from their stranded assets.”
If, indeed, they have a decade.
The smart money has already moved away from gas, fast.
Steve Ford, head of sustainability with the property company GPT, which has a $32.6 billion portfolio of retail, office and logistics properties across Australia, says “the last building we did that wasn’t all electric was in the late 20-teens”.
That was a major development in Sydney. At the time, says Ford, the engineering advice was that gas was needed for heating.
“Now we’ve moved in just a matter of probably four or five short years to the point where new builds in a much colder environment like Melbourne, we can do 100 per cent electric. And obviously, it only really makes a difference if you go 100 per cent electric and renewable.”
To date, the company has delivered 28 certified carbon-neutral buildings, with four more in the works.
“You’re talking major office towers and retail shopping centres,” he says, and cites one under construction: a 30-storey “premium asset” in Melbourne’s CBD – all electric, all renewable, no gas.
While GPT was an early adopter of the all-electric model, Ford says, “the majority of our major property companies in Australia have a similar position”.
As far as the big end of town is concerned, he says, gas “doesn’t have a long-term future”.
Emma Chessell, energy policy advocate with the Brotherhood of St Laurence, says the shift away from gas is happening very fast at the household level too. She cites data from the Australian Energy Market Operator, showing gas use in Victorian homes was 14 per cent lower in 2023 than in 2022.
The up-front costs of making the change are a barrier to low-income households, however. The problem needs to be urgently addressed, she says, for as more people leave the network, the costs increase on those who remain.
This is a big problem but transitional.
Says Steve Ford: “Electricity in the future will probably come from your roof, into your car battery, and be free.”
Which makes the whole premise of “renewable gas” not only misleading but wrongheaded, says Kelly O’Shanassy.
“We need affordable electricity. The only way forward on that is renewables. We just need to get on with the job rather than spruiking an industry that’s on the way out.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 4, 2024 as "Cook off".
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