Fortescue’s Julie Shuttleworth running down a hydrogen-powered green energy dream
Julie Shuttleworth’s mining career has taken her from chopping up gold bars in a Chinese bank with a hacksaw to driving Fortescue’s dream of green hydrogen power.
When Western Australian-born metallurgist Julie Shuttleworth was working at Sino Gold’s operations in a remote area of central China in the late 1990s, she was faced with a unique challenge.
When she arrived with a load of 15kg gold bars from the mine to sell to the bank, a two and a half hour drive from the mine, she found its weighing machines could only handle 5kg bars, the usual size from the much smaller mines in the area.
Determined to get the cash she needed for the mine, which she had just commissioned, she dispatched a worker to get a saw and cut the gold bars up into three on a desk in the bank, with customers coming in and out.
“It’s one of my favourite stories,” says Shuttleworth from her Perth office where she now holds the dual roles of deputy chief executive of Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue Metals Group (FMG) and chief executive of new subsidiary Fortescue Future Industries (FFI).
“We were the first Western-owned gold mine in China, and we made bigger bars than anyone else.”
“We went to put them on the scales, but our bars weighed 15kg each. I couldn’t go back the mine without the money because we needed it.
“I sent the driver to the hardware store to get a hacksaw.
“I chopped the gold bars into thirds, we swept up the gold filings and did the transaction.
“People were coming in and out of the bank as if it were normal. They ignored us, although we were at a table in the bank cutting up gold bars.”
These days Shuttleworth is facing much larger challenges as Andrew Forrest’s right hand executive in charge of his ambitious strategy to turn iron ore giant Fortescue into a green hydrogen powerhouse.
While Forrest’s trips to almost 50 countries to sign hydrogen deals hit the headlines last year, an exercise which saw him medivacked to a hospital in Switzerland when he got Covid from an interpreter, Shuttleworth has been the executive quietly running the business in the background.
Shuttleworth, whose career in mining has seen her working in China, Africa, the Western Australian gold fields and running two of Forrest’s iron ore mines in the Pilbara, now has two main objectives.
“We are planning to make green hydrogen the most globally traded seaborne energy commodity in the world and we are supporting the Fortescue operations to lead by example, reduce emissions and become carbon-neutral by 2030,” she says.
FFI was set up last year as a subsidiary of Fortescue as part of Forrest’s new green energy push, an environmental passion which was spurred on by his PhD in marine science which he was awarded by the University of Western Australia in 2019.
While FMG has been riding the iron ore boom, with prices smashing through $US200 a tonne and almost all its product going to China, Forrest is critically aware that he has a few years’ grace to diversify the company into new ventures, recycling some of its iron ore billions into green energy.
Forrest, FMG’s chairman, outlined his vision for the company in his Boyer Lectures on the ABC in January.
In one speech, titled Confessions of a Carbon Emitter, Forrest says that FMG, the company he founded 18 years ago, generates over two million tonnes of greenhouse gas every year.
He outlined his vision for green hydrogen, “the purest source of energy in the world”, to help replace up to three-quarters of global emissions, a market he optimistically predicts could generate revenues of $US12 trillion by 2050.
While the idea of green hydrogen is simple – “You just run electricity through water,” Forrest says – developing it to scale in an economic way is a big challenge.
Transporting it is another.
Forrest’s strategy is twofold: doing green hydrogen deals with countries around the world to help develop the green hydrogen market and using Fortescue as a test case for using green hydrogen as part of its goal to become carbon-neutral in nine years’ time.
Fortescue told its shareholders earlier this year that it would be allocating 10 per cent of its net profit ($US4.7 billion in the year to June 2020 and $US4.1 million in the six months to December 2020) to FFI.
It said FFI would also have the ability to borrow in its own right for its projects without recourse to FMG, raising a picture of a potentially more independent future for FFI.
Shuttleworth was part of the teams of Fortescue staff who travelled around the world last year for several months doing green hydrogen deals with countries in Africa and Asia and talking to potential offtake buyers in Europe.
“I went to 30 countries on the last trip,” she recalls.
“Between us we went to 47 countries, meeting presidents and prime ministers.
“It is important to talk to the head of a country if you want to do investments there.”
Countries visited include the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia and Kenya.
“We were negotiating the agreements to develop renewable energy in those countries and securing the assets,” she said.
“We were also getting approvals and permits for the construction of the pilot projects.”
Forrest told a forum hosted by Credit Suisse in March this year that FFI had signed deals giving it access to more than 300GW of renewable energy sources as a result of the trip, most of those involving hydro-electric power.
He predicted that his second round of visits this year would sign up more than 500GW of renewable energy with additional focus on solar and wind deals.
FFI, he said, was aiming to “produce or help produce more than 1000GW of zero-emission energy”.
While Forrest has headed out on another world trip promoting his idea of green hydrogen, Shuttleworth has remained in Perth working out the details of how it will all work.
She estimates that FFI will end up having green hydrogen deals with more than 10 countries.
“We are still in the early stage of the studies for the projects themselves,” she says
“We expect it will be a major source of revenue growth for FMG.”
While many think that “green” hydrogen and the idea of “green steel” which Forrest is also pitching are uneconomic pipedreams, Shuttleworth is not fazed by the challenge.
She was born in Pemberton, a small country town near the southwest tip of Australia, west of Albany.
Her father ran the local service station.
“I got to work on cars and tractors as a kid,” she recalls.
She had a passion for science from an early age.
“I loved everything to do with science, but I didn’t want to be just a chemist,” she says.
“I liked chemistry, but I also liked rocks and geology and big trucks.”
Shuttleworth did a double major in chemistry and minerals processing at Murdoch University in Perth.
She worked for Newcrest Mining at the Telfer gold mine in the Pilbara, then Australia’s largest gold mine.
After receiving a scholarship-funded trip to the US, she “got the travel bug” and applied for a job working for Australian-owned Sino Gold in China, moving to a remote town in Shaanxi province in the winter of December 1998.
“I was living in an old farmer’s hut made of mud brick with straw on the roof where snow would come in during the winter,” she says.
“I was the only blond Western lady in the area. I would cause traffic accidents in the street as people would stare at me and fall off their pushbikes.
“There would be a domino effect of pushbikes which had all crashed into each other.”
It was there she learned the technique of cutting up gold bars with a hacksaw.
After a trip back to WA to work in the Telfer mine again, she went to Africa in October 2000 with Barrick Gold where she moved up the mining management chain from metallurgist to senior metallurgist to process plant manager.
She was made a process plant manager at Barrick’s Bulyanhulu mine in Tanzania at the age of 30, overseeing a staff of some 350 people.
“A lot of people asked me how I got the job, particularly with the culture in Tanzania where everyone respects older men,” she says.
“But I had been there for several years training everyone up and being on the tools with them, and they had built up a lot of respect for me as they had already worked for me.”
She moved on to help develop another mine for Barrick from scratch to production, Buzwagi, taking over as general manager at the age of 35.
She returned to Australia in 2010, running Barrick’s Granny Smith in the WA goldfields, the first time she had managed an underground mine.
A few years later, after 19 years working in the gold and copper industry, she was approached by FMG to run its Cloudbreak mine in the Pilbara.
“Everyone was surprised I made the move because they saw me as being in the gold and copper industry,” she says.
“But you take your leadership skills with you to these new roles and you get to learn on the job about a new commodity.”
Joining Fortescue in 2013, Shuttleworth got to ride the iron ore boom with Australia’s third-largest iron ore company.
In 2015, she moved to become general manager of Fortescue’s Solomon Mine, also in the Pilbara, her second general manager job at FMG and her fourth role as general manager of a mine.
A week after she started she realised she was pregnant.
She had met her husband, Brett Thompson, a mill trainer, working in Africa.
She started running Solomon, relocating to Perth for the last few weeks of her pregnancy.
She took eight months off after her son, Jett, was born before going back up to the Pilbara, running the mine on a fly in, fly out basis with her husband running his own business from home.
In January 2018 her life changed again, when she was made deputy chief executive of Fortescue in the head office in Perth, working with chief executive Elizabeth Gaines who had just taken over as Fortescue’s first female chief executive, succeeding Nev Power.
Shuttleworth admits that the shift from working at mine sites, where she had spent most of her working life, to head office took a bit of getting used to.
“I had spent 25 years in operations in hard hats and steel-capped boots and high-vis jackets and all of a sudden I am in the corporate office. It did take some adjustment,” she admits.
In that role she was in charge of looking at Fortescue’s new businesses, including copper in South America.
As the company began to focus on renewable energy and green hydrogen, it was decided she should spend all of her time on this area with the establishment of Fortescue Future Industries as a subsidiary.
Her current role also involves looking at ways to make Fortescue carbon-neutral.
It includes decarbonising the FMG fleet, looking at using green fuels for locomotives, ships and other equipment including drill rigs.
The company plans to have 10 of its passenger transport coaches at Christmas Creek in the Pilbara running on green hydrogen by early next year, replacing its existing fleet of diesel coaches.
They will be supported by a refuelling station using renewable energy from the Chichester Solar Gas Hybrid project which will generate renewable hydrogen on site.
She sees the work being done in using green hydrogen at Fortescue as paving the way for it to be used on a much bigger scale.
“Its challenging in these early days but green hydrogen will definitely replace fossil fuels in the future,” she says.
“The more support that gets behind it, the quicker it will happen.
“We have a target to produce over 15 million tonnes of green hydrogen by 2030 and ramp it up from there.
“There is a lot of potential in the area. There’s a huge opportunity.”
One of the highest-paid women in the Fortescue group, Shuttleworth has collected a host of accolades during her career including 2011 Australian Mine Manager of the Year and 2012 WA Telstra Business Woman of the Year. She is a potential future CEO of Fortescue itself if Gaines were to step down.
Andrew Forrest revealed his ambitions for FFI in his Boyer lectures, where he recalled that each time his plane took off on its trip around the world last year, they played Tom Petty’s song Runnin’ Down a Dream.
“He’s chasing a dream that won’t happen unless he pursues it, wherever it leads,” Forrest said.
“It’s a song that makes you feel like anything is possible.”
Forrest is depending on Shuttleworth, a relentless optimist with decades of practical skill in the mining industry around the world, to make it happen.
“It’s a huge challenge and I am enjoying it,” she says.