Few places in Australia concentrate heavy process industry the way Gladstone does. Alumina refining, aluminium smelting, three LNG projects on Curtis Island and cement, all inside one industrial catchment, and all now reporting against obligations that decline each year.
The work that pays here is making measured plant data answer a question that will be examined later. Our principal consultant spent 18 years on operational and reporting data projects for BHP, Rio Tinto, Senex Energy and Mackay Sugar, delivered while working with previous consulting employers. Those companies are not Solve8 clients.
Continuous process plants with long-lived assets, high energy intensity and reporting obligations attached to the numbers.
Energy intensity per tonne is the number that matters and it is assembled from several systems. The usual problem is that two parts of the business calculate it differently and both can defend their method, so the figure gets debated instead of acted on.
High-resolution process history, flaring and venting records, and reporting that has to reconcile across plant, commercial and regulatory boundaries that do not share the same period or the same definition of a unit.
Baselines that decline, which turns an annual report into a trend you have to defend. The work is data lineage: showing what a figure derives from, in a way that still holds up when the person who built it has moved on.
Asset modelling so a query can ask about a unit rather than about a tag, retention that survives an audit window, and getting reporting load off the systems that are running the plant.
Most facilities can produce the number. Fewer can produce the working.
When a reported figure is challenged, the calculation is rarely where the difficulty lies. The difficulty is that the inputs came from four systems with different boundaries and different periods, somebody made a reasonable judgement about how to align them, and that judgement was never written down because at the time it was obvious.
A year later the person has changed roles and the spreadsheet has been copied twice. The figure is probably still correct. What has been lost is the ability to demonstrate it, and under a declining baseline you are demonstrating it repeatedly rather than once.
The durable fix is to put the alignment decisions and the calculation somewhere the organisation owns, so that producing the figure and explaining it are the same action. That is unglamorous modelling work. It is also the difference between a reporting obligation that costs a week and one that costs a quarter.
Because the value here sits in process and emissions data rather than in customer-facing tools. Gladstone hosts alumina refining, aluminium smelting, LNG processing and cement, which means several of the largest emitting facilities in the country sit within a short drive of each other. The useful work is making measured plant data answer questions that currently take a team and a month: what a figure is derived from, how it moved, and whether it will survive being audited.
It turns a reporting exercise into a decline obligation with a number attached, so the question stops being what you emitted and becomes whether you can show how the figure was derived, consistently, year after year. That is a data lineage problem. Facilities that already model calculations in a durable layer can answer it. Facilities where the number is assembled in a spreadsheet each period can usually produce the figure but not the working, and the working is what gets examined.
Yes, and that is almost always the better option. We support the PI System and other historians and have no product to sell you, so there is no incentive to recommend a migration. Most emissions and energy reporting problems are solved by modelling context and calculations over the history you already have, not by moving the data. If your historian genuinely cannot support what you need, we will explain specifically why rather than asserting it.
Yes. Our principal consultant built Power BI reporting frameworks over operational and emissions data on projects for Senex Energy and others, delivered while working with previous consulting employers, and separately built Carbonly, an emissions and compliance product, which is his own project rather than a client engagement. The recurring difficulty with NGER is not the calculation, it is that the inputs live in several systems with different boundaries and periods, so reconciliation consumes the time.
No. Solve8 is Brisbane-based and works across Queensland. Historian, reporting and integration work rarely needs anyone on site, because the problem is usually in how data is modelled rather than in the equipment. Where walking the plant genuinely helps, we travel. We would rather tell you a trip is unnecessary than bill you for one.
Scoped work starts from around $3,500 for a focused assessment, for example tracing one reported figure back to the measurements it comes from and documenting where the lineage breaks. That usually tells you whether the rest is a small fix or a program. Larger work is quoted after scoping, because the cost depends on how many systems hold part of the answer.
Tell us which number you would least like to have questioned, and we will trace what it derives from. That exercise usually settles whether you have a small gap or a programme.