At last year’s Federal election, Twiggy Forrest arrived in Gladstone bearing gifts. He promised to build a new hydrogen electrolyser, that the Federal Government claimed would deliver 1000s of jobs. Twiggy might not be Greek but the saying still applies with some modification. Beware of Greenies bearing gifts.
Despite the Federal Government committing $45 million to the project there is now a cloud hanging over it. Twiggy’s American based joint venture partner, Plug Power, recently withdrew from the deal stating that “we decided we didn’t want to build a factory with them because we saw the economics; we could do better.”
This is just one of a string of hiccups to have afflicted the hydrogen industry in recent months. The Dalrymple Bay coal terminal has declared North Queensland is too hot to store hydrogen – it must be kept at minus 253 degrees Celsius. The Chief Scientist of Rewiring Australia, Saul Griffith, has called hydrogen “kool-aid” and says it needs electricity to cost just 2 cents a kilowatt hour to work. That cost is a tenth of what most Australian customers pay today and electricity prices have not been falling in Australia.
It has increasingly become clear that the promise of hydrogen is being used as a smokescreen to shut down the coal industry. I support looking into hydrogen. As Resources Minister I developed Australia’s first national hydrogen strategy. But some self-interested politicians are selling hydrogen harder than a cryptocurrency in a desperate attempt to hide their plans to choke coal jobs.
Hydrogen has lots of challenges to overcome. It is highly flammable, costly to produce and difficult to transport. Hydrogen will not play a major role in the global energy mix for decades at the earliest. And even then it is more likely to just be part of the answer – for say fertiliser production – rather than the only answer for all our energy needs.
It is also not clear that hydrogen is best suited for production in Australia. The “green” hydrogen we most often hear about is made from water. That is, the chemical composition of water is H2O, two hydrogen and one oxygen atom. Green hydrogen is made by heating up the water using an electrolyser, splitting water into its component atoms and then capturing the separated hydrogen.
It is useful to describe this process in plain English. The idea of an Australian hydrogen industry involves the burning of water from the most arid continent in the world and exporting the resulting product to other comparably more wet countries. Why would we take our most scarce, most precious resource of water, burn it, and then export it to other countries? Shouldn’t we use Australian water in Australia?
Exporting our water to other countries seems to be the plan of the Queensland Government. Last week they approved a pipeline to be built from the new Rookwood Weir to Gladstone and they trumpeted the fact that this could help build a hydrogen export industry.
The LNP began the funding of Rookwood Weir to provide water security to Rockhampton and to double farming capacity in the Fitzroy basin. Now the Labor party plans to use it to export our fresh water to Japan, Korea and God knows where else.
This is the craziest business plan since investment banks thought it would be a good idea to lend people without jobs unlimited money to buy houses.
When the Trojans opened the huge hollow horse that had been gifted to them by the Greeks, they discovered a secret Greek army inside. We might not even get that. Instead we might find that this hydrogen gift horse is completely hollow but it will be too late after our coal industry is shut down.
