Robyn Williams: What if you'd invented a gadget to save the world or developed a process that would be a boon to millions? Can you expect nice, helpful folk with money bags and good advice to beat a path to your door and lay out the red carpet? Not quite, and this is why Dr David Mills took his solar power technology from here to the United States this year. And now Dr Prame Chopra has been negotiating another set of snags to get his geothermal technology up and running. His saga begins back in 2001 when Dr Chopra was still at the Australian National University in Canberra. Here's how he told the story in Ockham's Razor.

Prame Chopra: This tale begins when my colleague and I discover that Australia has a huge untapped green energy source. It could meet all the nation's energy needs for thousands of years, and it won't create greenhouse gases, because it uses naturally occurring hot rocks in the sub-surface. Cold water is pumped down and hot water is brought back up, to run a power station. As we'll see, this science seems easy when compared with the nightmare of commercialising it.

The beginning: We kick the ball off by writing a report for the Federal Government's Energy Research and Development Corporation. They praise our report and this stimulates radio and press interest in our hot rock energy project. Then we get a great opportunity. ABC TV asks us to do an item for Quantum; a whole half-hour program. Now lots of people start asking us, 'When will the power be available?' Pretty soon, we think, because we realise that the know-how already exists to make hot rock power. The problem is, the key people and their results are all in Europe, Japan and the US. It dawns on us then that getting Australia to sign an international treaty is the only way we'll get access to the crucial R&D.

So, step 1: Learn how to lobby the bureaucracy. We launch a myriad of letters, forms and proposals, and what do you know? Result! Australia signs the international agreement in Paris in 1997.

Step 2: Learn how to talk money. The government is very interested in the project, as long as it doesn't cost them. They tell us to get industry support. We're excited, but how do you get millions of dollars out of big business? After all, this is a country that's notorious for having to commercialise its innovations overseas. We quickly discover that you can't get this kind of money unless you're a company.

Step 3: Quick lessons in business law. We invite anyone in business interested in developing hot rock energy to join us in a working group. Scientists and engineers from some of Australia's largest resource companies come out of the woodwork. So do business consultants, infrastructure managers, investors and multinationals. But having open slather like this was mistake number one. The working group was a hotbed of hidden agendas and latent greed. Eventually there's agreement to form a new company. Fourteen of the participants decide they want in, and we raise $140,000 in start-up capital. It feels pretty good.

To top it off, a very attractive offer is made by some of the consultants. They'll set up a company for us, do all the paperwork, form an interim board of directors, and what's more, they'll do all of this for us for just $10,000 worth of free shares. Our second mistake; we accept their kind offer.

Step 4: Look for the big bucks. We approach the bank to see if they'd like to finance a pilot plant. They love the concept, but they tell us, 'The risk is too high. We'll tell you what; you build the first power station and we'll pay for the next ten.' Knocked back at the bank but still optimistic, we start approaching venture capital funds. But the large funds say, 'Your pilot plant is too small. We normally like to invest more than $100 million at a time.' So we go chasing the smaller funds. They're interested but ask us, 'Who owns the resource?' Good question!

Step 5: Learn to read mining legislation. We check the law that might cover energy from hot rocks across Australia. Surprise, surprise! We find it's different in every state and territory. So to test the law, we choose an ideal site in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales and we write to the Minister for Mineral Resources; 'Dear Minister, Does the Mines Act in New South Wales cover geothermal energy?' 'Yes,' comes back the reply, 'naturally occurring steam and hot water is covered.' But our sighs of relief are short-lived as we read on, 'But,' continues the Minister, 'you want to recover heat, not mine a natural substance from the ground. So the Mines Act doesn't cover what you want to do.' What a pity, it would have been so easy!

Step 6: Return to base. Two years after our first approach to the Minister, the two words, 'and artificial' are added. Now the Mines Act covers 'naturally occurring and artificial steam and hot water.' As usual though, our celebrations are short lived. Our hope that mining permission is imminent is dashed again. Now the government announces that it will call for competitive tenders for 'our' site. They explain to us that 'there's been a lot of interest in this new hot rock technology, and in particular, in the site that you've picked.' It seems that we've done our publicity job a little too well! After two years, the possibility that we might completely lose the site raises its head for the first time. Our company will have to compete for it.

Step 8: Learn to get your company's house in order. Meanwhile we keep asking our 'kind consultants' for copies of the paperwork for the new company. These requests are met with assurances that 'they'll be posted any day now.' Months drag on. Eventually, after many phone calls and much badgering, a copy of the Articles of Association finally arrives. We start peering at the legal phrasings. Slowly it begins to dawn on us that these Articles aren't the standard legal boilerplate normally used by small companies. Struth! The consultants have appointed themselves directors for life, and have handed themselves the only shares.

Step 8: Dealing with despair. 'Dear Sirs, We regret to inform you that your application for the lease has been unsuccessful.' We've lost! The company has granted the lease to one of its own power corporations. What's more, the power corporation refuses our offers of research assistance. Depression ensues. It looks like it's all over.

Step 9: Bring in the anti-depressants and take a crash course in advanced lobbying. We start discreet inquiries with state and federal politicians and discover that they think that 'perhaps the state tendering process appears less than perfect.' At the same time, the winning tenderer investigates internationally and discovers the R&D might be a bit easier said than done. To cap things off, the bosses of the power corporation suddenly pull in the financial reins. Managers are told to cut project spending. The power corporation relents. We're back in! Our earlier offer of academic assistance, including an $800,000 grant is taken up, and our company is sounded out about coming on board. But there's still one problem; there are serious reservations expressed about some of the directors.

Step 10: Learn advanced company law and business politics. Now it's really time to put our house in order. What we need is a coup d'etat. We decide to get sneaky and quietly count the numbers. Calmly we lobby shareholders who we think are on our side. We send out proxy forms to each of them, with a motion to remove the directors. Then, anxiously we spread the net wider to other shareholders who we are less certain of. Everyone's sworn to secrecy.

Nervously we wait and count the proxies as they come back in. All the time we hope that word won't leak out. Eventually we reach the magic target! Now we hold enough proxies to remove the directors, no matter how everyone else votes. Then we get really sneaky. We wait another ten days until Christmas Eve. Now the fax machine starts to run hot. We send out all the paperwork for the extraordinary general meeting and the motion to remove the directors. And then we quickly disappear on holidays.

Well, it's now five years since we set out on this road to commercialisation, and research works at the site is in full swing. The power corporation holds exclusive rights to the lease but we're actively involved in the project as academics. Our company, though, has fallen on hard times, and is being wound up. The catch-22 got us; without ownership of a lease, you can't get finance. But things have moved on too. Now another Australian state has resolved the ownership issue for geothermal resources, so we're setting up a new company. We've learned a tremendous amount from our journey between the worlds of science and business, some bad, some good.

Robyn Williams: Dr Prame Chopra in 2001. So what's happened six years on? David Fisher.

David Fisher: Getting an idea to market is a series of big hurdles, in areas often new to people who've spent their careers in academia. As we've heard, there are issues with risk management, funding, the ownership of intellectual property, licensing and patents, all intertwined with a hopefully ongoing relationship with the university. For Prame Chopra, one of the problems in getting development funds for his energy from hot rocks idea was with legislation. You could take out a lease and have exclusive ownership of land if it contained gold or coal or any other mineral you might think of, but not hot rocks. He needed legislation to be changed. We heard some of the problems for innovators six years ago, so for people with new ideas today, are the hurdles still present? Prame Chopra.

Prame Chopra: It's every bit as difficult today as it was then, I think. The same sorts of issues that cropped up then are still alive today. There have been some developments though, and I think one of the stellar things is the response that's come from the state governments. One of the necessary requirements was the need to have what's called title to the geothermal resource. Until you could actually say to a financial organisation, a bank or whatever it was that you own the resource, they're not going to be interested in giving you any money to finance it.

So the first step was really to get the governments to move heaven and earth to set up legislation, and they've done a terrific job, frankly. The first to move was NSW, South Australia was hot on their heels, and subsequently the Tasmanians, the Queenslanders, the Victorians have all moved in with legislation. South Australia is going through a new version of it now, they're updating it even further, and the Northern Territory and Western Australia are both moving as well.

David Fisher: Prame Chopra worked for many years at the Australian National University as a research scientist in geology but was forced to give up his position in March 2006. He was told to choose between his university position and his involvement in the company Geodynamics which was commercialising his energy from hot rocks idea. So why was this necessary when there was a university policy to cover this situation?

Prame Chopra: What happened was the senior management in the university decided that they actually didn't like the policy, but rather than going through the process of getting the policy changed and then causing those changes to be implemented, they set about changing that in effect without changing the policy first. So I was told, in no uncertain terms, you know, you will resign immediately from the board of Geodynamics...it was an ultimatum, basically. And when I said, well, there's a policy in place here and the policy says that I can be a director and I believe I'm following all the requirements of that policy and in fact it's been approved previously, they said, 'Well, the policy could be changed.'

David Fisher: And has it been?

Prame Chopra: No, as far as I know it hasn't. In fact there are still academics at the university...at least one I know of anyway, who is still a director of a major company. In fact he's the chairman of it. The university decided, and I think quite appropriately, that some kind of protocol, as they called it, needed to be established to make sure that in the future no conflicts would arise. And that was fair and appropriate, that's the typical response and fine. But what it meant in reality was that the protocol would effectively oversee everything that I, as an academic, could do in terms of research at the university, and because of the risk-averse nature of the administration (and it's probably typical of all universities to a degree) this protocol would effectively have become very draconian.

To put this into perspective with an example; in February of last year, just before I left the university, I was invited to be the chairman of one of the two days of the second Australian Hot Rock Energy Conference which ran in Adelaide. As part of my duties on day one of the conference, I had to invite the South Australian minister to come and open the conference and thank him appropriately, then give a keynote address to the first talk of the conference and then run the proceedings for the day. The senior administration at the university said to me that because the protocol wasn't yet in place I was allowed to go to the conference and do these things, but it was expressed to me (and this is a direct quote) that in the event that the protocol was in place, I certainly wouldn't be allowed to chair a conference like that, I probably wouldn't be allowed to give a keynote address at a conference like that, and quite possibly I wouldn't be allowed to attend a conference like that.

David Fisher: It sounds as if the universities would be just scared of the unknown and that nothing would ever get done if people are sitting around dreaming up what might happen and having people like you leave.

Prame Chopra: Well, leaving me out of it, I think you're right. There is an issue of risk aversion. Really, successful commercialisation is a fraught business, it is difficult, and really what you need to do in commercialising an idea is to recognise that there will be pluses and there will be potential minuses and you need to balance those risks rather than a blanket attempt to deny all risk because that's a completely unrealistic expectation; you're never going to be able to cancel all possible risks.

David Fisher: It sounds as if we're being deprived of a lot of development here. What needs to change?

Prame Chopra: I think different universities have tried different approaches, but they've all tried, to varying degrees, to deal with this conundrum of how to commercialise things in a responsible way. I think really what's needed is a mix of both academic skills and business skills at the cutting edge of where this is all trying to be done. To put the task of commercialisation in the hands of a few academics is not an appropriate response.

David Fisher: Sounds as if we need a whole new degree course here!

Prame Chopra: I think that's right. It would be interesting to see whether you could actually teach this or whether you have to learn it on the job. There are a lot of really good ideas that are not reaching commercialisation because of structural problems in the way in which universities try to commercialise their research.

David Fisher: Prame, Geodynamics has been drilling in South Australia but there's been a problem.

Prame Chopra: That's right. It's not a simple business, these hot rocks. The concept is very simple-cold water down, hot water up-but you rely on a lot of different technologies and lots of different contractors to make it all work. The site in question is near the little town of Innamincka in the north-eastern corner of South Australia where it pokes into Queensland and it's actually in the cso it's a very dry area and fairly remote. In that area the company has drilled two wells that go down 4,300 metres and are six-inch diameter at the bottom. The whole system has been tested and cold water was sent down and indeed steam and hot water was produced at the surface, so that was all very good.

But unfortunately the last step of the process with the production well involved the setting of a thing called a bridge plug; this is a bit of kit that's used regularly in the petroleum industry and its purpose is just to isolate the well in order to make it safe while the drilling rig is taken off and valves and control devices are put on the surface, a thing called a 'Christmas tree'. Unfortunately what happened was, with removal of this bridge plug, it wasn't done successfully by the contractors brought in and in the end it ended up falling to the bottom of the well where it has now effectively obscured most available fractures bringing fluid into the well.

David Fisher: It fell down thousands of metres?

Prame Chopra: Yes, it fell down to 4,300 metres from where it was set originally at about 1,000 metres, and it's fallen all the way down.

David Fisher: Can it be retrieved?

Prame Chopra: A great deal of effort was expended by the company and by contractors trying to get it out and in the end it wasn't successful. So the company has decided (and this is all on the public record) that it will drill a new well, Habanero #3, so it set about trying to find a drilling rig to do this. The gear that's used in this game, because it's all so deep and so difficult, is petroleum industry equipment. So we needed a petroleum rig for this job, and looking around Australia for what was available, there really didn't seem to be the kind of rig or quality required. Trying to get a rig from overseas turned out to be virtually impossible because of the incredibly buoyant situation of the petroleum industry worldwide at the moment because of the high price of oil.

So in the end Geodynamics concluded that the best approach would be to buy its own rig, and that's what the company has done. It's bought a rig and it is due to arrive in the port of Brisbane early in June and to be on site and drilling early in July.

David Fisher: That's great news. And when will electricity flow?

Prame Chopra: The intention is that a 40-megawatt power station will be build at the Habanero site called Hot Rock 40, and this is supposed to be online in 2010.

David Fisher: And where will the electricity go?

Prame Chopra: Initially there is a small market locally. Innamincka has got a population of ten, so they need some beer in the fridge to be kept cold, I guess. But more practically there's the large gas processing production facility at Moomba which is about 80 kilometres away as the crow flies. More long-term, 40 megawatts and beyond, we need a power connection to the national grid, basically, and the most likely place to put that is the closest point in the grid which is the Olympic Dam mine site in South Australia, the Roxby Downs uranium and copper mine run by BHP Billiton which is a huge energy consumer, and it's on the grid.

David Fisher: And how many megawatts might go to that site?

Prame Chopra: The site in the Cooper Basin is large enough to provide many thousands of megawatts of power to the Australian grid. Not just to Olympic Dam but beyond that into Adelaide and Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane. Ultimately there would probably be a need for high voltage DC connections, perhaps to both Brisbane and Adelaide, and perhaps even to Sydney. A million-volt or 1.5 million-volt DC connections are very low loss and could bring the power very efficiently to the grid.

Robyn Williams: Dr Prame Chopra was talking to David Fisher. Dr Chopra and Geodynamics still hope to tap that fabulous source of power down deep in South Australia.