‘Diggy’ Forrest’s grand green hydrogen plan makes sense

It is an extremely uncomfortable feeling, something akin to having lobsters in your underwear or leeches in your ears, to find yourself agreeing, even slightly, with Andrew “Diggy” Forrest.

Now look, clearly the man has some very good spin doctors in his employ – convincing everyone to think of him as something harmless and green-sounding like “Twiggy” was a masterstroke for a start. I’ve also interviewed him, and he’s very convincing when he wants to be.

But he’s also a billionaire who’s made his money out of resources that should theoretically belong to all of us, fought like hell against a mining tax that would have seen us get some of that money, and last year attempted to engage in propaganda during a disastrous press conference where he tried to ambush Health Minister Greg Hunt and the government in general.

Perhaps a better way to explain why it’s uncomfortable to share common ground with him – ground he’d dig out from under your feet given half a chance – is to think of him as being WA’s answer to Clive Palmer. And you’d hate to find yourself agreeing with him, clearly.

Anyway, Diggy, sorry, Forrest recently delivered this year’s Boyer Lecture on the ABC and while he spoke about making “green steel”, which sounds suspiciously like “clean coal”, “unobtanium” or “total bullshit”, he also spoke about hydrogen. A lot.

And he took a swipe at oil companies, who, apparently unlike mining ones, are very bad.

Forrest predicted that oil companies would make a terrible last stand against the rise of green energy – his new passion – by using “fossil fuels to create blue hydrogen, storing the emissions somewhere – underground? – and peddling it as clean energy”.“But it’s not,” he added.

Blue hydrogen? Green steel? I know, it’s like Dr Seuss sometimes, but stick with us, because Forrest is into the clean hydrogen, not made from petroleum, which he believes will power the cars of future, and thus ruin the life of someone else he clearly doesn’t like, Elon Musk:

“Elon Musk recently called hydrogen fuel cell cars mind-bogglingly stupid,” Forrest said.

“He has every reason to fear them. His description is perhaps better suited to someone who peddles a battery technology as green when it runs on fossil fuel.

“I think the real climate change challenger could well be Fortescue.”

Yes, Fortescue Metals, his own humble operation, which has pledged to reach net zero emissions by 2040 (which means somehow countering the two million tonnes of CO2 that Fortescue currently emits every year). Surely this means he’s going to stop digging ore out of the ground, then?

Hell and no. He’s just going to power his mining trucks using hydrogen and create iron-ore trains and ships that run on “green ammonia” (yes, it does sound like he’s taking the piss – green piss).

Still, in his lecture, catchily titled: “Oil vs Water: Confessions of a Carbon Emitter” by pointing out that his company alone emits more every year than the entire nation of Bhutan. Unfortunately, however, he can’t stop mining because it “is critical to the production of steel and to humanity”.

And the overall solution to this is… “hydrogen”.

From mid-2021 Forrest plans to kick it off with 10 Hyzon-branded hydrogen-fuelled buses (see image at the top of this story) to be used at Forestecue’s Christmas Creek mine in Western Australia (the WA government is tipping in $2 million of the $32 million overall outlay).

Now hydrogen cars – and trucks, trains, etc – are a very good idea, in theory, and I remember being very excited about them the first time I drove one, a Toyota Mirai, in Japan, about seven years ago. Hydrogen cars have a fuel tank, you put hydrogen in it and it then gets used in an onboard power station that creates electricity to power the motors to turn the wheels and produces nothing but water vapour at the tail pipe. It is clean in a way that electric vehicles, which are often powered by hydro or solar power, but more often – in Australia at least – by burning dirty old coal, is not.

There is plenty of research that suggests hydrogen cars are the way of the future – especially for heavy haulage, towing, etc – and that EVs are merely the bridge that will carry us away from internal combustion on the way to a hydrogen future. Hyundai has a hydrogen vehicle, or FCEV (Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle) of its own, the very excellent Nexo. It also has a hydrogen filling station at its HQ in Sydney. Unfortunately, until recently it represented close to 100 percent of the filling stations in Australia, although a handful of others are opening.

The problem with hydrogen is infrastructure and production, and sadly it seems to be just as large a problem as it was when the Mirai hit the market, back in 2014 (Toyota has now bitten the bullet and is bringing a handful of Mirais to Australia early this year).

Forrest, of course, is all over the hydrogen problem. “Right now, we don’t use it for energy, it’s just an ingredient used in industrial processes, and we make it from fossil fuels – quaintly calling it grey hydrogen, to hide the fact that it’s a pollutant,” he explained.

“Green hydrogen – the good stuff – is virtually ignored by the economic world. We’re missing a colossal opportunity.”

If Australia gets on board with his hydrogen plans for creating a green hydrogen industry we could be generating revenues of “at the very least US$12 trillion ($15.5 trillion) a year by 2050, bigger than any industry we have”.

Can you hear a man with a plan to get even richer?

I certainly can, but I have to say that investing in hydrogen is definitely not the worst idea old Diggy has ever had.