Aussie Mining Billionaire Will Generate 15 Million Tons Of H By 2030 Somethingsomething Technology!
As the leader of one of the world’s biggest and most invasive iron ore mining operations, Andrew Forrest has done more to propel global warming than some small countries. The Australian billionaire expresses few regrets about his company and its partners having pumped millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, or the bitter legal conflicts with Aboriginal officials over ecological destruction allegedly committed by his firm, Fortescue Metals Group. He prefers the label “heavy industrialist.” Don’t call him a “greenie.”
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Forrest says he will make 15 million tons by 2030, a scale and pace others doubt. The billionaire boasts he will erase fossil fuels from Fortescue’s operations and supply huge quantities of the new fuel to others. “Some are arguing that the technology we need to beat global warming is not with us yet,” Forrest said as a black SUV zipped him from his penthouse suite at the Denver Ritz-Carlton earlier this fall to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is collaborating with him. “I say that is completely false. The most optimal technologies aren’t with us yet, but we’ve got enough now to make huge heavy-industry companies green.”
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“This is, after all, a man who has produced zero green hydrogen so far,” said Rachel Fakhry, a hydrogen expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The signals he is sending are positive, but we are missing some key pieces to make a judgment on how good this ambition is. We need to make sure what he makes is actually green.” The outlook for how exactly green hydrogen would be used is murky. The amount of wind and solar power it takes to produce, and the tremendous cost involved with storing and shipping the final product, probably make it impractical for fueling passenger cars, for example.
California heavily subsidized a “hydrogen highway” experiment, but it has largely proved a disappointment. There are fewer than 10,000 of the cars on the road in the state, almost entirely burning hydrogen made with fossil fuels. “Every generation since the 1970s has had this idea that the next generation will be driving hydrogen cars,” said Martin Tengler, lead hydrogen analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “We tell people: You don’t drive a hydrogen car and neither will your children.” But his organization is bullish on the use of hydrogen for other machinery, and it and other groups, including the think tank Carbon Tracker, predict the clean variety Forrest is chasing will dominate a hydrogen economy that could grow to $3 trillion by 2050.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/11/24/twiggy-forrest-green-hydrogen/
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