Date: January 25, 2024Author: Editor, cairnsnews 8 Comments
By TONY MOBILIFONITIS
ANDREW “Twiggy” Forrest, the Australian iron ore billionaire, really does care for the planet and has been telling his fellow billionaire buddies so, at Davos.
Forrest, after making his fortune with his company Fortescue riding the iron ore wave over the past decade with its share price rising 700%, has now gone all green and has been at the WEF bragging about it. He’s even gained a reputation as a “climate evangelist” i.e. a delusional species of humans who think they can tweak the temperature of planet Earth like they tweak the temperature on their home airconditioning systems.
The apparently guilt-stricken Twiggy confessed at Davos that his company burns a billion litres of diesel a year, but now he’s going all out in an act of penitence by “transitioning” to green hydrogen-electric dump trucks and other equipment – at least in the not too distant future he hopes.
But all of this posturing at the WEF is just more of the predictable green claptrap based on the cemented-in narrative that “we must transition away from fossil fuels”. Anglo-American, the ultra-woke global miner based in South Africa, actually beat Twiggy to the hydrogen hype. Anglo spends multiple millions telling everyone how dedicated they are to sustainability, decarbonisation, diversity, equity and inclusivity.
John Cadogan, the naughty, nasty Aussie motoring journalist, who delights in sending up the endless claptrap peddled by “EVangelists”, quite correctly calls it The Age of Bullshit and there is a fair dose of that behind the “planet-saving” hydrogen hype. For a start there are three types of hydrogen, gray, blue and green.
As pointed out by a somewhat honest DW report, 90% of hydrogen made today is made from fossil fuels. (We hesitate to use the term “fossil” because that narrative has been questioned for some years.) Most of that gray hydrogen comes from burning natural gas.
The blue hydrogen supposedly offsets this “dirty” gray hydrogen process by including the quite demented “carbon capture and storage” process, which supposedly stops untold tonnes of the evil CO2 floating up into the atmosphere and choking the planet. Yes, people actually believe this.
But as noted by the DW reporter, there’s a big problem with blue hydrogen. It too has a big carbon footprint, which is the overarching issue in this age of enlightenment. “Blue hydrogen actually has a very, very large greenhouse gas footprint,” Robert Howarth of Cornell University, co-author of a report on this, tells DW. “Turns out that the greenhouse gas footprint of blue hydrogen is worse than if you simply burn the natural gas directly for fuel instead.”
Big oil has been in on the blue hydrogen production scheme for some time now, and Shell’s shining example is its massive Scotford plant in Alberta, Canada. Shell boasted it could capture and store up to 90% of the carbon from the plant, but environmental cops soon threw cold water on that, saying the actual figure was “only” a shameful 48%. Another problem with hydrogen is that it takes up three times as much space as your regular petrol and diesel.
Howarth says hydrogen manufacturing is basically a self-serving, virtue-signalling con job by the gas and oil industry, that governments worldwide, including Australia, have largely bought into. This is why Australia’s so-called regional hydrogen hubs are being built near existing ports.
The “solution” therefore, is green hydrogen, which is processed using, you guessed it, renewable energy in the form of solar and wind power. So what the brilliant woke folk at Anglo American and Fortescue plan to do is to build renewable energy hydrogen-production plants next to their mining projects.
This is on a similar level of insanity as the giant wood burner aka “air burner”, designed to power a steam turbine to charge up Volvo’s electric heavy vehicles on work sites. Cadogan had a field day on this one.
But not to worry, when you’re on a holy mission to save the planet, you’ll do any damned thing other than to simply fill your tank with the planet-killing diesel – regardless of how easy and convenient it is and regardless of the fact that what is emitted on a daily basis, whether from fuel, forests, volcanoes and cow butts is a mere fart from this gigantic eco-system called planet earth.
The fact of the matter is that how well this hydrogen-electric utopia plays out in the dusty confines or iron ore and other mines, has yet to be tested. Anglo got their big “green hydrogen” battery truck running in 2022, but little has been heard of since.
Fortescue rolled out their Liebherr Mining T 264 wonder truck last October, but they had to confess that it was still running on diesel because the enormous battery it required wouldn’t be arriving until 2026. The big battery is being built Williams Advanced Engineering (WAE) in the UK, which Fortescue acquired for $A310m in January 2022.
Around the same time Fortescue received the first 1.4-MWh prototype battery, which consists of eight sub packs, each containing 36 battery modules. The whole thing measures 3.6 x 1.6 x 2.4m, i.e. a helllishly heavy Tesla-style brick of batteries.
How and where this prototype battery is being used we don’t know, and how long such a brick would take to charge from sporadic wind-solar generation is also unknown. But no doubt Twiggy’s team will have their boring and reliable diesel generators on standby – the same generators that have so shamefully provided instant electricity for mining sites globally for decades.
The idea that you can run a huge ore-shifting dump truck or other vehicles without any emissions except water, has an undeniable appeal, especially to people who have to deal with diesel in confined spaces, but the economics of this hydrogen-fuelled battery hype has to be questioned.
Twiggy Forrest has said he’ll spend $500 million just to get this whole thing going, and he’s already done $300m of that on WAE in the UK. And then he’s going to put batteries in the train that carries the ore to port. If Australia’s iron-ore competitors like Brazil, China, India and Russia want to knock Australia off its No.1 spot on the world iron ore producer rankings, maybe a simple strategy will be just to stick with good ol’ dirty diesel.
Nelle's journey 