Petrol retailing and refining giant Ampol has landed another $100 million from the federal government to help roll out a further 200 electric vehicle fast charging bays by 2025, and to pursue efforts on renewable fuels and other technologies.
The new funds are being delivered as a loan through the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), and will also support hydrogen refuelling infrastructure, (if it can find any hydrogen cars), and solar PV installations at its retail and charging sites.
Ampol has previously landed grants from both the NSW state government and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency to begin its rollout of EV fast charging stations under the AMPCharge brand.
However, it fell well short of its target of reaching more than 180 charging bays by the end of 2023, with just 82 charging bays installed across 36 sites. In the company’s 2023 annual report, it blamed delays with grid connections and landowners.
“Despite our best efforts the pace of the rollout was impacted by the time taken to obtain approval to make the electrical connection across numerous network service providers and other development approvals including working with third party landowners,” it wrote.
“This meant that only 82 bays were able to go live during 2023 with many more in various stages of completion. We continue to manage the approvals processes as we continue to expand the EV charging network during 2024.”
It had aimed to reach 300 charging bays by the end of 2024, although it is not clear how many of those will be delivered on time. In April this year it announced a deal with shopping centre owner Stockland to locate more than 100 EV charging bays.
The new funding comes a day after the CEFC announced a $20 million investment in Splend to help it support another 500 EVs for car sharing.
Climate change and energy minister Chris Bowen says more EV charging infrastructure is essential as the number of EVs grow, and the announcement also coincided with an update of the federal governments National EV strategy.
“There are more than 200,000 EVs on our roads, with more and more choice of affordable to buy and run EVs coming into the market” Bowen said. “There are now 22 EV models selling for under $60,000 in Australia, up from 14 models in 2022.
“With more Australians opting for cheaper-to-run EVs we need to make sure we’re keeping up with demand for charging. We’ve already seen growth in EV charging locations from 464 in December 2022 to around 900 at the beginning of 2024.”
The funding deal with Ampol also includes rooftop solar. It has been installing around 50 kWQ of rooftop solar capacity at each of its retail locations that host EV chargers. Up to the end of last year, 25 locations had solar panels installed.
The funding also includes its renewable fuels programs, including the newly announced feasibility study into a significant renewable fuels production facility at Ampol’s Lytton refinery in Brisbane, where it is looking to produce low carbon liquid fuels including Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) and renewable diesel.
Giles Parkinson is founder and editor of The Driven, and also edits and founded the Renew Economy and One Step Off The Grid web sites. He has been a journalist for nearly 40 years, is a former business and deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review, and owns a Tesla Model 3.
I was pretty impressed with the Ampol ev charging I saw on the way to Sydney. Keep it up!
You saw but you did not try….user experience is not always impressive…
All very good and laudable. What percentage of the time do they have to be kept operating to receive such large taxpayer largesse? The splendid ones on the Hume Highway at Eagle Hawk are often out of order.
It’s a loan….
There are 2 units at a servo on Kororoit Creek Road in Altona and they do a lot of business
Modest progress. I’ll grade it C+
What a Sham!
Ampol is highly profitable provider of fueld and yet gets its third injection of finanical support, be it grant, cofunding or investment to transition its business model to be EV ready.
$100m in 2024 (CEFC)
$9m in 2022 (cofunding with NSW Gov)
$7m in 2021 (Arena Future Fuel Fund)
All, 1 year after Fed’s gave $100m to support Caltex’s maintenance of its Fuel refineries.
Perhaps its time they consider bring back their old trading brand ‘Golden Fleece’
It’s a loan…
It has to be paid back.
Petrol Stations are subsidised, otherwise they would never be built in rural areas.
The money is being loaned to Ampol, it is not just given to them, Ampol needed to meet all the minimum requirements to get the loan. Ampol will pay back the money to the Federal government
A pity that one of the chargers in the photo (back right) was not working last week and marked as such. The one in front appeared to be working but when I plugged in, it wouldn’t start with the app and then the app seemed unresponsive and the plug could be unlocked from my car. Eventually needed to use the car’s emergency disconnect. The third charger (left) did work to charge but then would not stop charging when trying to stop via the app. I ended up at 90% when I only needed 80%. Forced a disconnect again and the app appeared to be still charging. Seems I was not billed for the charge, which is some compensation for the bother of moving the car twice and being literally stuck there longer than I wanted to be.
“could be unlocked” I meant ‘could not be unlocked’
The charging facility pictured has no effective weather shelter, rubbish bins, or windscreen cleaning gear, and is not suitable for vehicles towing anything. At the same location ICE vehicles enjoy all of those.
Just towed a trailer with a Tesla 900km and yes, it was possible but charging infrastructure is a bad joke.
Loved how I was standing in the rain making the app work whilst the ICE colleagues where watching from under a roof (Ampol Carseldine).
Where’s the roof cover for rain hail or shine?
So, another Electrify America rollout where the company has no real skin in the game and hence over charge an under perform? Their chargers in the US are only operative about 75% of the time compared to Teslas at about 99.97%. The government is giving Big Oil some more incentives etc. Who really thinks alternative fuels is still a thing?
Can they start installing decent chargers? They advertise 150kw on the units but these abb units can only charge at a maximum of 80kw on any 400v car, leaving only Taycan, Ev6, the ionics and a few others etc to charge at the theoretical maximum.
Yes DCFCs are limited by Current not by Power. In case of the ABB Terra units used by Ampol those are limited to 200A instead of going for the 400A version. It was probably incompetence as most relevant project managers don’t even drive an EV.
Yep, and don’t get me started on CHAdeMO plugs. We aren’t adding new vehicles that use that system, so why do we need to waste valuable bays with a plug that most EV owners can’t use!
So what hospital or school are they closing
The money is being loaned to Ampol, it is not just given to them, Ampol needed to meet all the minimum requirements to get the loan. Ampol will pay back the money to the Federal government.
So your comment about what hospital or school closing is demonstrating that you have not read the article properly.
I wish that oil and gas companies ploughed some of their megaprofits back into renewable infrastructure rather than dividends, share buybacks and bonuses.
Another sweet handout to the fossil fuel industry.
At least this is only $100 000 000
We cannot even transition to electric vehicles without them taking funds that should be given to green industry.
Whomever is in charge of this should be incredibly ashamed of themselves.
Because whilst handing them billions of taxpayer dollars they aren’t even holding them accountable for the massive health issues they’ve caused.
My experience with AmpCharge are mixed: Station layout difficult to access, App not always reliable and prices high. Being an inland traveler in noticed almost nothing has improved along the routes I use whilst massive improvements in the cities. Gov fail.
Whoever spends one cent of public money on hydrogen charging infrastructure should walk straight into jail. All trials overseas resulted in massive fails and no, we don’t need to repeat that here in Australia.
Why are these being supported with tax payers money?
Any business which is truly viable should be self funded.
One BIG rory which will eventually come crashing down.
Locating EV chargers at existing petrol stations makes a lot of sense. They are in good locations, have shops and toilets or are close to them plus grid access. As much as i despise oil companies it gives them a path to redemption.
Ive used Ampol EV chargers a couple of times. The one at West Gosford took 5 attempts to connect The new ones at Pheasants Nest, northbound on the Hume Hwy- one of 3 units not working but the problem everyone was having is the need to use the awful Ampol app to pay but phone reception is very bad on all networks.
Surely Ampol could borrow from regular banks?
I hope they don’t waste too much money on BIPV, which costs about 3x the price of standard PV panels.
They need to get serious about the capacity of the PV systems on the chargers.
Focus more on delivering good quality charging with large capacity PV, & less on unnecessarily fancy boutique PV canopies.