Opinion: Hydrogen power a fabled energy source that’s still out of reach

The hydrogen hype being peddled by Labor governments has no more substance than it did in the 1980s, writes Matt Canavan.

In the early 1980s, then Queensland premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Peterson attended a press conference and declared that “the much-talked-of hydrogen car has arrived right here before your eyes”. The archived TV news footage of the slapstick scenes showed the Premier drinking the “fuel” from a hot chips cup to prove it was powered by water. Unfortunately, the keys for the modified Ford Fairlane were mysteriously lost, so the waiting crowd could not witness the “nuclear reactor” engine working.

Forty years later we are still being promised hydrogen as the solution to our energy woes. But just like Joh’s attempt in the 1980s, the latest hydrogen hype is simply confirming the old physics joke that “hydrogen is 20 years away”. It has always been just 20 years away!

Two weeks ago, Twiggy Forrest announced that he was scrapping his company’s target to produce 15 million tonnes of hydrogen by the end of the decade. At the same time, he announced he was sacking 700 people.

Twiggy Forrest has been a courageous and successful Australian businessman. He took on the biggest Australian companies in Rio Tinto and BHP to build his own iron ore company independent of their control. He was close to ruin many times but came through that to be one of the richest Australians.

Then Queensland premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen with inventor Stephen Horvath and his ‘hydrogen car’

He has done pioneering work helping Indigenous Australians get a start in life including as employees in his own company. I worked with him as resources minister and have great respect for him.

But I do not think we should mortgage our futures for his vision. Twiggy is a businessman, not a prophet. He got many things right in his iron ore ventures, but that is no guarantee that he will be right about hydrogen.

Twiggy has worked out that producing commercial quantities of hydrogen is many more years away than first thought. That is why we would be mad to shut down our coal industry in just 10 years when there will be no replacement for these jobs as the Labor Party has committed to doing.

There is no lack of demand for our coal. In the week that Twiggy’s announcement was made, new statistics came out showing that the world demand for coal reached record levels last year. In our region alone, there has been an extra 644 terawatt hours of coal power produced since the world signed up to net zero two years ago.

A large coal-fired power station produces around 10 terawatt hours a year, so the equivalent of 64 coal-fired power stations have been brought online in the Asia-Pacific region in just two years.

Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest in 2021 at Liddell Power Station in NSW where hydrogen power was explored

This week India has announced that it plans to build 80 gigawatts of coal-fired power in the next eight years.

Unlike demand for hydrogen, demand for coal is surging. But our Labor governments are doing nothing to meet this demand, and get more jobs and wealth for our country, because they are ideologically locked into seeing the demise of our coal industry.

Make no mistake. If we do not approve new projects and scare aware investors by constantly saying that the days of coal are over, we can shut down our coal industry. In that case, the coal mining jobs will all go to Indonesia, China and India.

When Prime Minister Albanese visited Gladstone in April he said that “we have green hydrogen that will be so important in driving clean manufacturing through in the future”. And when asked about coal-fired power he said that it doesn’t stack up.

Unfortunately, it is hydrogen that is not stacking up right now, but we have a government that has decided to gamble Australia’s economic future on it.

After Joh couldn’t find the keys at that press conference 40 years ago, they reconvened the next day when the keys were found. This time the engine started, but no one was allowed to inspect the boot of the car and the car never moved off the starting line.

The current wave of hydrogen hype is going nowhere fast. We would be mad to hitch our economic future to this stalled project.

Matt Canavan is an LNP senator for Queensland