Vikki Campion: Why a gigantic hydrogen tank should never be built near one of our cities
A venomous snake should never be approached, and a gigantic hydrogen tank that will be 10 times the size of the biggest on the planet should never be built on the doorstep of one of our cities, writes Vikki Campion.
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The eastern brown snake is fast-moving, ill-natured if cornered – and one of the most venomous snakes in the world. So why did mothers in Canberra push their young children towards one this week to take pictures on their iPhone but scoffed when I urged them to keep their distance, telling me: “The government wouldn’t allow it here (in a government-owned botanic garden) if it weren’t safe.”
The issue we have with a population that willingly submits itself to an authoritarian government, which rammed digital ID through the Senate without debate, and which wants bureaucrats to decide what’s true or false, is the wildly misguided idea that it is a wisened guardian angel protecting us from harm.
It is the snake who gets the Government Angel – not you or your kid. Be it the most venomous creatures on Earth, what voices you can hear on social media, or our power grid, Government Angel does not prioritise what’s “safe”.
As Australia’s biggest energy companies walk away from green hydrogen because they cannot make it viable – taking millions of taxpayer dollars in grants with them –the government is knuckling down on a hydrogen plant 24 times bigger than the world’s biggest.
While Energy Minister Chris Bowen and friends deride nuclear power as “risky reactors”, they have budgeted more than $8bn on hydrogen, which is literally rocket fuel. Australia’s version will produce 1200 tonnes of gaseous hydrogen – 800 tonnes of which will be liquified – with an ammonia plant taking the rest.
This means you need to start a process called Haber Bosch to heat it to 450C, chuck it under atmospheric pressure and pump it with nitrogen and hydrogen, which produces ammonia. That then becomes exothermic, requiring a constant feed of hydrogen, which weather-reliant wind and solar cannot produce 24/7.
Because of this, it would need a massive storage tank to hold at least enough for 10 days, which would be about 8000 tonnes of liquified hydrogen – some 10 times that of the world’s biggest storage tank.
Hydrogen is so explosive that it is used to send rockets into space, so where are they putting this massive, super-explosive supply? Right in the lap of a regional city.
But like the ectothermic eastern brown slithering near the children, our political mothers and fathers accept this plan as safe because it comes from their guardian angel – the government. It is government-sanctioned and government-funded by a government-owned corporation.
Flynn MP Colin Boyce, whose Queensland electorate has been bestowed this nightmare, can’t understand why there is no discussion of the safety risk of an enormous rocket-fuel tank containing some 8000 tonnes of liquified hydrogen, pipes and plants nestled in the nape of Gladstone.
“If it goes ‘bang’, it will blow Gladstone off the map,” the National Party member says.
More than 400 hydrogen incidents have occurred in 40 years – Fukushima and Callide were hydrogen explosions. But jet fuel’s safety is irrelevant when it is “green hydrogen” and posed as a transition fuel in our net-zero nirvana, even when it’s not net zero at all.
We are pumping water to this green hydrogen project, 130km from Rookwood Weir, with diesel generators. The whole process will rely on coal because wind and solar cannot generate a baseload power. No one has considered the cost of transporting or storing an amount 10 times the size of the Kennedy Space Centre or the sheer landmass required to build industrial intermittents.
Just as herpetologists find the eastern brown the most difficult to handle, green hydrogen is a slippery element that engineers cannot get a firm grasp on.
Australia’s biggest energy companies – Fortescue, Origin and Woodside – have all walked away from green hydrogen. It is only our government that is handing undisclosed billions to Stanwell to continue this plan.
A venomous snake should never be approached, whether in a botanic garden or a paddock. And a gigantic hydrogen tank that will be 10 times the size of the biggest on the planet should never be built on the doorstep of one of our cities.
ROCKS IN THEIR HEAD: MPS TO GET SCHOOLED ON A ‘VILLAIN’ RESOURCE
If Australia’s story is told in its rocks, coal from plants that grew in Gondwana 170 million years ago, cities built in limestone from crushed shells, minerals that have powered the world, this week Labor has opened a new chapter on uranium.
Our most energy-dense rock is dug up here, trucked through towns and exported overseas, yet still painted as the scary villain when it is a resource that could herald a new era of Australian energy independence.
A new parliamentary inquiry to be chaired by Hunter MP Dan Repacholi could finally give this rock – which could save his communities such as Singletone from being smothered in black photovoltaic glass – the makeover it deserves from real-life electricians and engineers, instead of office bureaucrats paid to propagate the policy platforms of politicians.
That some in Labor believe this will damage the Coalition’s nuclear policy on the eve of the election shows how closed they have been to the free education offered to them by Australia’s wide nuclear science and engineering expert community, including the former head of ANSTO.
Submissions to Senate energy inquiries contain clear analysis that it’s impossible to decarbonise without nuclear. Submissions to the offshore wind inquiry have given ignored experts a voice about the dangers of wind.
The inquiry report, set to come out a month before the probable May election, on a Labor-stacked committee, will undoubtedly find that the proven technology that powers most G20 economies is unachievable in Australia. However stacked the committee is, the exercise will grant national exposure to independent expert submissions, to whom Energy Minister Chris Bowen rarely grants an audience.
Mr Repacholi, fast shaping up to fill the well-worn shoes of his long-serving predecessor Joel Fitzgibbon, has taken a step in the right direction in seeking clarity for basic stuff like deployment timeframes, fuel supply and transport logistics, uranium enrichment capacity; waste management, transportation and storage; water usage and impacts on other water-dependent sectors; existing energy infrastructure capability, including transmission; legal and policy frameworks; risk management and safety, land acquisitions and cost.
It is just a pity this comprehensive examination has never been done for intermittent power plants, transmission lines, or the economic – and potentially literal – bomb of green hydrogen.
Nuclear is not the ugly duckling Labor thinks it is, but we’ve yet to get to the end of the story.
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Originally published as Vikki Campion: Why a gigantic hydrogen tank should never be built near one of our cities
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