Santos “plucked figures out of the air” on the volume of the future hydrogen market on the east coast that it could capture to support an upgraded target for emissions reduction that was never credible, lawyers from an activist shareholder group have alleged.

Noel Hutley, SC, suggested to Justice Brigitte Markovic in the Federal Court that no one in Santos had done any modelling or analysis to support a range of assumptions that partly underpinned its 2040 net zero direct emissions target, set in December 2020.