The future is upgrading iron ore near the mine with green hydrogen, or more directly with electricity, not shipping bulks of coal and iron ore thousands of kilometers where they are combined in massive furnaces to make iron and then steel. The future is massively more local-ish generation of power, and shipping the remaining electrons for energy, not molecules. Presumably Cannon-Brookes will be involved, but it’s unlikely Forrest will be.Īs I’ve said a few times, HVDC is the new pipeline (and oil tanker and LNG ship). That led to Sun Cable going into receivership temporarily, but there’s a tremendous amount of interest from numerous parties about picking up the pieces, assembling a better organization with less conflict around it, and getting it laying wire. He was in partnership with another Australian billionaire, Mike Cannon-Brookes, and unsurprisingly, two huge personalities in the same room meant the room was too small for the both of them, especially when one of them is under the illusion that molecules for energy are going to continue to be a big deal. He’s all over the US IRA’s hydrogen funding too, with projects initiated in the USA.įor a while, Forrest was making some sense about energy, getting into the excellent Sun Cable project which would run an HVDC cable past Indonesia to Singapore, feeding gigawatts of Australian solar into the high-energy economy of the Little Red Dot when they needed it, as well as linking into the obvious ASEAN hub. Nothing like having billions already to make wanting lots more billions an absolute necessity, it seems. Forrest spun up Fortescue Future Industries with a billion dollar war chest to manufacture green hydrogen for export, clearly being close to the middle of the Australian hydrogen hopium bubble with billions or trillions of dollar signs blinding him to reality. They made no bones a few years ago that heavy mining trucks would be running on green hydrogen. Other countries proclaiming loudly that they were going to be importing green hydrogen and green ammonia for energy has been part of the hydrogen hopium bubble that’s been a global decarbonization problem for the last few years, and it was obviously present in Australia as well.Ĭlearly, Finkel didn’t do the science and math work himself, but let some underlings do the heavy intellectual lifting, with predictable results that either no underlings did, or they were ignored.Īnd then there’s Australia’s Fortescue Mining Group and its billionaire boss Andrew Forrest. Obviously politics, economic terror, naked greed at the thought of being an energy superpower, and fossil fuel lobbying interfered with the basics of science and economics. Why did Finkel and the team he led get the hydrogen strategy so wrong? He built a Silicon Valley biotech firm, sold it, founded Cosmos magazine, went on to be CTO of an electric car charging firm, had accolades heaped upon him, and generally advised everyone all the time on everything scientific. While he’s a neuroscientist, his first degree was in electrical engineering. Finkel is no intellectual or STEM slouch. The response in the 2019 hydrogen strategy, led by then-chief scientist Alan Finkel, was to focus on hydrogen for transportation, gas networks, heating, electricity systems, and export, along with a much smaller group of actually sensible use cases like green ammonia and green steel. And that’s ten times the cost of liquid natural gas, already the most expensive form of imported energy at two to three times the cost of imported coal, as I noted in my piece on the cultural factors that lead to Japan over focusing on the slippery molecule. Their big hope is that other countries like Japan will bankrupt their economies with ten times the cost for energy instead of building lots of renewables and HVDC interconnectors, which is pretty much the definition of a terrible basis for a strategy or economic plan. The Net Zero plan’s strategy was mostly to double energy exports, but with green hydrogen instead of coal and gas. As such, the world’s move away from fossil fuels is an existential crisis for a country that wants to grow its economy, not shrink it. 5-7% of its GDP is directly or indirectly related to fossil fuel extraction and mostly exports. Australian Net Zero Projected export primary energy (Exajoules / year)Īs I noted in my assessment of Australia’s 2023 Net Zero plan, which was heavy on hopium and light on reality, Australia currently exports four times as much primary energy as its entire economy consumes.
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