THE DEFOSSILISED DATA CENTRE

THE DEFOSSILISED DATA CENTRE A New Architecture for the AI Era 20 MW CRT TRIGENERATION | FIRM POWER | INTEGRATED COOLING | CARBON RECYCLING | WATER STEWARDSHIP Designed for the future. Powered by circulation, not continuous fossil-carbon consumption. RENEWABLE ENERGY → H₂ RECYCLED CH₄ → 20 MW FIRM POWER CO₂ CAPTURE → CARBON RECYCLING POWER. COOL. CAPTURE. RECYCLE. REPEAT. CEWT is developing an integrated 20 MW net CRT Trigeneration platform for high-density AI and data-centre infrastructure. The architecture treats firm power, thermal energy, cooling, carbon and water as connected resources - not separate problems.   Carbon Recycling Becomes an Energy Asset DON'T JUST CAPTURE CARBON. RECYCLE IT. Conventional trigeneration can recover useful heat from onsite power generation. CRT goes further. Captured CO₂ is combined with renewable hydrogen to regenerate methane. The methanation reaction is exothermic, creating an additional thermal stream that can be recovered and integrated with cooling. 20 MW net continuous firm-power target ~19.4 MWth* prime-mover recoverable thermal resource ~8.9 MWth theoretical gross methanation heat ~28 MWth* combined gross thermal opportunity ~46% ADDITIONAL GROSS THERMAL RESOURCE FROM CARBON RECYCLING relative to the present prime-mover heat screening basis* Why waste heat when AI needs cooling? The additional heat created while closing the carbon loop can become a cooling asset rather than a rejected waste stream. At a screening absorption-chiller COP of 0.70, the theoretical 8.9 MWth methanation stream represents up to about 6.2 MW of incremental cooling potential before practical heat-recovery, temperature-grade and equipment losses are applied. DEFOSSILISATION IS NOT ONLY A CARBON BENEFIT. IN CRT, CLOSING THE CARBON LOOP CREATES AN ADDITIONAL ENERGY-INTEGRATION OPPORTUNITY. *Screening/design-basis figures. Final recoverable heat, temperature grade, cooling output and equipment performance remain subject to vendor validation and detailed integration engineering.   Cooling and Water Designed Together DON'T USE VALUABLE WATER UNNECESSARILY TO REJECT VALUABLE HEAT. High-density AI infrastructure is increasingly a power-and-cooling problem. CRT is designed to use recovered process heat productively and to minimise consumptive water demand through an integrated cooling and heat-rejection strategy. THERMAL RECOVERY Prime-mover heat plus additional carbon-recycling heat creates a larger thermal resource for useful cooling. INTEGRATED COOLING Recovered heat can support absorption chilling alongside the data centre's primary high-density cooling architecture. DRY HEAT REJECTION Dry cooling is targeted where technically appropriate to reduce dependence on evaporative water consumption. WATER CIRCULATION Methanation produces reaction water that can be recovered, treated and considered for reuse within the overall site water balance. ~7.0 t/h theoretical methanation reaction water DRY heat-rejection design objective PUE + WUE energy and water performance considered together Resource accountability ENERGY → CARBON → HEAT → COOLING → WATER Every MW has a destination. Every carbon molecule has a destination. Every unit of recoverable heat has a purpose. Every litre of water has a pathway.   From Fossil Carbon Consumption to Carbon Circulation CONVENTIONAL FIRM GAS POWER CEWT CRT TRIGENERATION Fossil methane ↓ Firm power ↓ CO₂ emission or separate capture ↓ Continuous fossil-carbon replenishment Recycled methane ↓ 20 MW firm power + recoverable heat ↓ CO₂ capture ↓ Renewable H₂ + methanation ↓ Recycled methane + additional thermal resource THE OBJECTIVE IS NOT TO ELIMINATE THE CARBON MOLECULE. IT IS TO ELIMINATE THE CONTINUOUS CONSUMPTION OF FOSSIL CARBON. A FIRST-OF-ITS-KIND APPROACH TO DEFOSSILISED DATA-CENTRE INFRASTRUCTURE CEWT CRT integrates firm onsite power, carbon recycling, thermal-energy recovery, cooling and water stewardship within a single architecture. The 20 MW platform is being developed for the next generation of AI infrastructure, where time-to-power, cooling capacity, carbon management and water availability must be addressed together. DATA CENTRES NEED MORE THAN POWER. THEY NEED AN ENERGY ARCHITECTURE DESIGNED FOR THE FUTURE. Clean Energy and Water Technologies Pty Ltd (CEWT) 20 MW CRT Trigeneration for AI Data Centres

MUST CAPTURED CO₂ ALWAYS BE STORED?

MUST CAPTURED CO₂ ALWAYS BE STORED? A recent S&P Global Energy report raises an important question for the next phase of carbon management. The global CCUS pipeline now exceeds 1,000 million tonnes per annum, yet S&P Global estimates that only around 25% of reported 2030 capacity is likely to come online on schedule under its risk-adjusted methodology. Horizons Clean Energy Expansion Week 2026 - CCUS Report.pdf One of the emerging differentiators is infrastructure. Shared CO₂ transport and storage hubs are increasingly helping projects reach sanction, while projects without access to such infrastructure face greater execution risk. Horizons Clean Energy Expansion Week 2026 - CCUS Report.pdf At the same time, another major change is occurring. S&P Global identifies rapidly growing data-centre electricity demand as a new use case for reliable gas-fired generation combined with carbon capture, estimating that data centres could account for approximately 10% of incremental global power demand by 2030. Horizons Clean Energy Expansion Week 2026 - CCUS Report.pdf This raises a broader engineering question: If we capture CO₂ from firm power generation, must we always transport and permanently store it? Or, where renewable hydrogen is available, can some captured CO₂ instead become a carbon resource—converted back into a fuel, used for firm power generation, captured again and recycled? The distinction is important. CCS: Capture → Transport → Storage Carbon Recycling: Capture → Conversion with renewable H₂ → Reuse → Capture again Carbon recycling does not eliminate the energy requirement. Renewable hydrogen must provide the energy required to regenerate the fuel, and the complete mass and energy balance must be economically justified. But where CO₂ transport and geological storage are difficult, and where firm power, heat, cooling and carbon management are required together, carbon recycling deserves serious consideration alongside conventional CCS. Perhaps the next stage of carbon management is not simply asking: “How much CO₂ can we capture?” but also: “What should we do with the carbon after we capture it?” Carbon is an element. Its sustainability depends on how we manage its cycle. #CarbonCapture #CCUS #CarbonRecycling #Hydrogen #DataCentres #FirmPower #CircularEconomy #EnergyTransition #PowerToX #Sustainability

Carbon Removal, Carbon Capture and Carbon Recycling Are Three Different Things

Carbon Removal, Carbon Capture and Carbon Recycling Are Three Different Things A great deal of climate discussion uses the words capture, removal and recycling almost interchangeably. From a process-engineering perspective, they describe very different things. Carbon capture asks: Can we separate CO₂ from an industrial gas stream before it reaches the atmosphere? That is an important first step. But capture alone does not answer the next question: Where does the captured carbon go? If it is compressed, transported and permanently stored underground, we have created a carbon capture and storage pathway. Carbon removal asks a different question: Can we remove CO₂ that is already in the atmosphere? Direct Air Capture, enhanced mineralisation and biological approaches are examples. Again, the carbon needs a final destination after it has been removed. Carbon recycling asks something fundamentally different: Can we prevent carbon from becoming a one-way material flow in the first place? Consider methane used for energy: CH_4 \rightarrow Energy \rightarrow CO_2 In the conventional system, the carbon journey effectively ends with CO₂ entering the atmosphere, being captured for storage, or requiring subsequent removal. But CO₂ still contains the carbon atom that originally entered as methane. If we supply renewable hydrogen: CO_2 + 4H_2 \rightarrow CH_4 + 2H_2O the carbon can be returned to methane and used again. The pathway becomes: CH₄ → Energy → CO₂ → CH₄ → Energy → CO₂ → CH₄ Now carbon is being treated as a circulating process material, while renewable hydrogen supplies new energy to the cycle. The same question applies to industrial syngas. If carbon monoxide is used as a reducing agent: FeO + CO \rightarrow Fe + CO_2 the process may have successfully reduced the iron oxide, but the carbon has not disappeared. It has simply moved from CO to CO₂. So describing a process as using syngas does not, by itself, tell us whether the carbon problem has been solved. We still have to ask: What happens to the CO₂? This is why CEWT believes carbon accounting should be approached in much the same way as a chemical engineer approaches a mass balance. Draw a boundary around the process. Identify every carbon-containing feed. Identify every carbon-containing product. Identify every recycle stream. Identify every purge, vent and fugitive loss. Then close the carbon balance. This leads to a very simple distinction: Carbon capture separates the carbon. Carbon removal retrieves carbon from the atmosphere. Carbon recycling gives captured carbon another useful cycle. None should be confused with the others, and each may have a role. But for industrial processes, perhaps the first question should be even simpler: Does every carbon atom entering the process have a defined destination? If we cannot answer that question, the carbon balance is not yet closed. At CEWT, that is the principle behind our Carbon Recycling Technology: Every molecule has a destination. Carbon should be no exception.

AI’s Next Bottleneck Is Not Computing — It Is Time-to-Power

AI’s Next Bottleneck Is Not Computing — It Is Time-to-Power Why the next generation of AI data centres may need to be designed together with their energy infrastructure Ahilan Raman | Managing Director, Clean Energy and Water Technologies Pty Ltd (CEWT) The global AI race is usually discussed in terms of GPUs, models, semiconductor supply and computing capacity. But another constraint is rapidly becoming just as important: Where will the megawatts come from — and how quickly can they be delivered? An AI data centre can increasingly be constructed using repeatable, modular infrastructure. The electricity network supplying it operates on a very different development timescale. That mismatch is beginning to reshape data-centre engineering. The power system is becoming part of the data centre Australia provides a particularly interesting example. AEMO reported that, by the end of the March 2026 quarter, 11 large data-centre projects above 5 MW, representing 5.4 GW of maximum demand, were already progressing through the National Electricity Market transmission-connection process. Around 40% of that capacity was in Victoria. AEMO said current experience suggested approximately a two-year application-to-energisation timeframe, although individual projects vary. The policy direction is also changing. In August, the Australian Energy Market Commission recommended that data centres should bring new clean, firm capacity, operate flexibly and make efficient use of the network. It specifically identified co-location with generation as one way of reducing network pressure. This points toward an important change in thinking. Instead of treating electricity as a utility connection that is considered after the data centre has been designed, perhaps the data centre and its energy system increasingly need to be engineered as one infrastructure project. Why 20 MW is an interesting scale Not every AI facility needs to begin as a 500 MW or 1 GW hyperscale campus. There is growing evidence for modular deployment at much smaller increments. Australian developer QORINAI describes a delivered modular project comprising eight transportable 2.5 MW modules, with capacity contracted in stages from 1.9 MW to 20 MW over five months. Its current development model describes repeatable campus blocks of approximately 10–50 MW, with dedicated substations, cooling plants and data halls. That is significant. A 20 MW facility is large enough to support substantial AI computing infrastructure, but still small enough to consider a dedicated energy island and staged deployment. And there is no reason that the modularity of the computing infrastructure must correspond exactly with the modularity of the power plant. A data centre might comprise several independently deployable computing blocks while a multiple-engine power island feeds a common electrical bus. Modularity should occur where it makes engineering and commercial sense — not because every subsystem must have the same module size. AI is also changing cooling Increasing rack densities are making the old distinction between electrical infrastructure and cooling infrastructure less useful. QORINAI, for example, is designing Australian AI infrastructure around direct-to-chip liquid cooling and cites design points as high as 250 kW per rack. As rack density rises, cooling becomes an increasingly important part of the total energy balance. That raises another engineering question: Why design power generation and cooling independently if the power plant is simultaneously producing useful thermal energy? A conventional assessment may look primarily at electrical efficiency. A trigeneration assessment asks a broader question: What useful outputs can we obtain from every unit of primary energy entering the system? Electricity is one output. Recoverable heat is another. Cooling produced from otherwise recoverable thermal energy can become a third. For AI infrastructure, that distinction matters. Behind-the-meter power is moving into the mainstream The trend is already visible internationally. Reuters reported in late September that demand for smaller gas turbines is rising as data-centre developers pursue rapid behind-the-meter generation to avoid grid-connection delays and long lead times for large turbines. Enverus projects 29.6 GW of behind-the-meter gas generation additions by 2030, with data centres accounting for 88% of that capacity. A few days later, Enerflex announced a contract to engineer and assemble 450 MW of behind-the-meter natural-gas generation for a North American data-centre developer. The attraction is straightforward. Instead of asking: “When will the grid be ready for my data centre?” the developer can begin asking: “Can I bring firm power to the data centre?” But there is an important problem. Simply moving conventional fossil generation behind the meter solves the time-to-power problem without necessarily solving the carbon problem. That is where CEWT is exploring a different architecture. Can the carbon itself be recycled? At Clean Energy and Water Technologies, we are developing a 20 MW grid-independent Carbon Recycling Technology (CRT) Trigeneration concept for data-centre applications in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley. The principle is different from simply installing gas engines beside a data centre. Methane provides firm power. The resulting carbon dioxide is captured. Instead of treating that CO₂ purely as waste for disposal, CRT treats carbon as a circulating process material. Captured CO₂ is combined with hydrogen-rich syngas and renewable hydrogen and converted back to methane through methanation. The methane returns to power generation. The carbon therefore circulates through: Methane → Power → CO₂ → Methanation → Methane Renewable hydrogen supplies new energy into that carbon cycle. The objective is not to claim that carbon disappears. Quite the opposite. Every molecule of carbon must have a destination. That requires a rigorous carbon ledger covering methane, CO, CO₂, recycle, inventory, purge, vents and losses independently of the plant’s energy balance. Trigeneration changes the system boundary Our current 20 MW concept combines a multi-engine firm-power island with carbon recovery, H₂-rich syngas, renewable hydrogen and methanation. But electricity is only part of the architecture. Gas-engine thermal energy and the exothermic heat released during methanation represent potentially useful energy streams. For a data centre, that heat can potentially support absorption cooling or other thermal services alongside conventional high-density liquid-cooling infrastructure. The appropriate measure therefore becomes broader than generator electrical efficiency alone. It becomes: How much useful computing-supporting infrastructure can we obtain from each MW of primary energy? That is a different optimisation problem. Why Latrobe Valley matters There is another reason we believe Latrobe Valley deserves attention. The region is already attracting major data-centre interest. Keppel has secured rights over a 123-hectare site near Hazelwood for a proposed data-centre campus with potential access to 720 MW of gross power. The Victorian Government identifies existing energy infrastructure, industrial land and access to sustainable raw water among the site’s advantages. Latrobe City Council’s September update says the Hazelwood North project has not yet lodged its planning approval and that community consultation is expected later in 2026. That is important context. It suggests Latrobe Valley is not merely a former power-generation region searching for a new purpose. It could become part of Australia’s next generation of energy-intensive digital infrastructure. A smaller 20 MW project can play a different role from a 720 MW hyperscale campus. It can demonstrate an alternative architecture. From grid connection to energy platform For decades, the conventional development sequence has effectively been: Land → Grid Connection → Data Centre. The emerging model could increasingly become: Land → Firm Energy Platform → Data Centre → Grid Integration when appropriate. That does not mean abandoning the electricity grid. Nor does it mean every data centre should generate all of its own power. It means recognising that time-to-power has become a fundamental project-design variable. And once power generation moves closer to the computing load, engineers have an opportunity to reconsider the whole system: electricity, cooling, water, carbon, hydrogen, storage and waste heat. For CEWT, the engineering philosophy remains straightforward: Every MW must have a source and destination. Every molecule must have a source and destination. Every litre of water must have a pathway. The AI infrastructure race may therefore not ultimately be won only by whoever has the most advanced GPUs. It may also be won by those who can provide those GPUs with dependable megawatts, cooling and supporting infrastructure at the speed at which AI capacity needs to be deployed. Time-to-power is becoming a design parameter. And that may fundamentally change how we design the next generation of data centres. Sources • AEMO, “Digital demand surge”, 2026. • Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC), electricity/data-centre policy developments, 2026. • QORINAI, Australian AI data-centre and modular infrastructure information. • Reuters, reporting on behind-the-meter gas generation for data centres, September 2026. • Enerflex, behind-the-meter generation project announcement, 2026. • ABC News, reporting on Keppel’s proposed Latrobe Valley/Hazelwood data-centre development, January 2026. • Latrobe City Council, Proposed Developments in Our Region, September 2026.

Design Philosophy for 20 MW Trigeneration fecility for Data Centres

Design Philosophy The 20 MW CRT Trigeneration demonstration will be designed around a simple systems-engineering principle: Every molecule has a destination. Every MW must produce useful work. The objective is therefore not merely to generate 20 MW of electricity. It is to maximise the useful output obtained from the primary energy entering the complete system. For an AI data-centre application, the energy pathway should be considered as an integrated chain: Primary Energy → Firm Power → Compute → Cooling → Workload → Useful AI Output This leads to an overarching performance metric: Useful AI Output per MW of Primary Energy Traditional generating efficiency measures the conversion of fuel or primary energy into electricity. Data-centre PUE measures the relationship between facility electricity consumption and IT electricity consumption. Neither metric alone describes the performance of the complete energy-to-compute system. CRT Trigeneration therefore proposes a broader systems approach in which electrical generation, carbon recycling, hydrogen, heat recovery, cooling and high-density AI computing are considered as one integrated energy architecture. Three nested performance levels can be measured: 1. CRT System Efficiency How effectively primary energy is converted into firm electricity and useful recoverable thermal energy. 2. Data-Centre Energy Efficiency How much delivered electrical energy reaches the computing equipment rather than auxiliary infrastructure. 3. Compute Productivity How much useful AI workload is completed for each MW of primary energy entering the overall system. The ultimate objective is not simply the lowest-carbon electron or the most efficient GPU considered independently. It is to maximise useful computational work from constrained primary energy while maintaining firm, continuous operation. This provides the engineering basis for the 20 MW CRT Trigeneration demonstration and a framework that can subsequently be scaled modularly to larger AI and industrial energy infrastructure.