A Sydney company’s laser focus on energy’s holy grail

As our panel of expert judges go about the marking of nominations, the Australia’s 50 Most Innovative Manufacturers campaign looks at a company trying to turn theoretical physics research into the impossible dream of clean, abundant energy. Brent Balinski speaks to HB11 Energy founder Dr Warren McKenzie.  

The nation’s record on turning research inputs into commercial outputs is sometimes lamented, in different ways and from different perspectives.

Dr Warren McKenzie, a materials scientist/entrepreneur, decided during a business degree to make research commercialisation his life’s work. He realised that too few people could do it, especially in Australia. 

“If you consider all economic growth that has ever been, it’s all through the commercialisation of a technology,” he tells @AuManufacturing. 

“So that’s where I dedicated my career, to that gap understanding science and trying to bring it for the benefit of the world.”

McKenzie founded and is currently involved in two companies based on Australian research, one focussed on the emerging class of materials known as “high-entropy alloys”, and the other concerned with producing clean energy from nuclear fusion.

As far as converting research into economic impact goes, taking Australian physics discoveries going back to the 1970s and turning them into technology that promises abundant, cheap, non-polluting energy would be an extreme case.

According to HB11 Energy, which McKenzie is co-founder and Managing Director of, known reserves of its fuel source could power the world for 10,000 years. In another statistic involving the number 10,000, this is how many tonnes of coal it would take to create the energy released by a gram of the company’s fuel.

And unlike other approaches to fusion – which often use deuterium-tritium fuel – the company’s method of hydrogen and boron-11 fusion does not use radioactive substances, create neutrons, or produce any radioactive waste.

Needless to say, it is not in use yet, but progress in fusion – “a decade away, and always will be”, according to the joke – is brisk, according to McKenzie. And his company aims to play a meaningful role in this.

“Surveying the industry, most people and companies and efforts around the world are expecting the first fusion energy to be on the grid in around about ten years,” says McKenzie. 

“Now that is the source of debates and jokes and has been for a very long time. What’s different now is that all of these efforts are getting results and there are significant investments going into them.”

According to McKenzie, his company’s fusion method is at TRL 2 or 3. He puts its program to build high-powered lasers, which only began last year, at TRL 4 “and rapidly increasing”.

Picture: credit HB11

If fusion power plants are going to be built, of HB11’s design or somebody else’s, plenty of lasers will be needed.

“We’re ultimately trying to sell to countries who have a national strategy and interest in building the world’s first fusion power plant…. So we essentially are the technology providers for that, explains McKenzie. 

“Ultimately all the laser energy that we’d need in a pulse is well into the megajoules. Again, this is similar to what the National Ignition Facility [at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where fusion ignition was achieved in late-2022] did.

“What that means [is,] if you imagine that a 1 gigawatt power plant might have several football field-sized lasers driving it, if we’re to roll this out across the world, most of the capital investment into fusion power plants is actually going to be in the form of lasers.”

HB11 hopes to serve that demand, as well as licence its designs, and manufacture fuel pellets.

As for what makes a company innovative, McKenzie says it ultimately comes down to the courage (and everything else required) to do something new.

“I’ve seen many, many manufacturing companies who are so busy looking after their existing customers that they don’t have time to do anything else,” he says.

“It really doesn’t take that much work to try and claim some science that might have been done in a university, use your existing facilities to try and exploit that as a manufacturer, and then have a competitive advantage, potentially globally. But it does take some courage, time and money to do that.” 

In this episode of @AuManufacturing Conversations, McKenzie tells us about the progress of fusion and the global race to bring it to energy grids, his company’s origins in the work of theoretical physicist Professor Heinrich Hora, who “defined the field of laser fusion at large”, and more.

Editors note: a previous version of this article incorrectly mentioned that the company’s process does not require extreme temperatures.