First Gladstone and now Fortescue has mothballed a newly-opened plant in Delaware

What now for the green dreams of billionaire Andrew Forrest? Picture: Getty Images

Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue has shut down another newly opened manufacturing plant – this time in the US, as part of its broader retreat from green hydrogen.

And of course there’s a government grant involved.

Fortescue’s FFI Ionix subsidiary only moved into the new $US12m ($18.7m) laboratory facility in Delaware 15 months ago, after promised grants of up to $2.7m from authorities in the state.

Margin Call is told the plant recently started production of membranes needed for Fortescue’s electrolyser plant in Gladstone, Queensland which was also mothballed this week.

The company’s retreat from the technology has cost another 20 jobs in the US, on top of the 90 lost in Perth and Gladstone, as the company quits its electrolyser manufacturing ambitions.

Donald Trump’s arrival in the White House halted the hydrogen dream.

Fortescue mining boss Dino Otranto.

That’s it for now, the company assures us. It’s not entirely clear how many people are left in the old Fortescue Hydrogen Systems business unit within Fortescue, but we’re told numbers are starting to get pretty thin.

Any staff still at Fortescue’s US operations might be starting to get a bit worried. Plans to build a hydrogen production centre in Arizona have been on hold since President Donald Trump took office. A proposal to repurpose old coal plants for hydrogen in Washington State went by the wayside last year and it seems the only legacy of the company’s grand North American hopes left standing is a battery manufacturing centre in Detroit, run by UK-headquartered Fortescue Zero.

Fortescue chief of energy transition projects Andy Vesey is still in the US but we don’t know what he’s doing. Picture: Joe Del Nero

And yet the company still has a high-priced CEO in the US in former AGL boss Andy Vesey. It’s also got a room full of well-paid bankers in Fortescue Capital, under the leadership of Robert Tichio who was hired in 2023 to bring in outside capital to fund Fortescue’s green energy ambitions.

So far the banking team has been given exactly zero energy projects for which to find funding, but presumably they’ve been finding other ways to occupy their time and justify their wages.

The sun has set on Fortescue’s Gladstone electrolyser facility.

Fortescue bought US company Xergy Inc in 2021 for its hydrogen technology platform, renaming it FFI Ionix shortly after. It moved into new facilities in Delaware last February, after a hunt across states for the best offer of government assistance for the move; in this case about $2.7m.

That’s something that might sound familiar to Queensland taxpayers, who stumped up about $15m in assistance to Fortescue to help build the Gladstone manufacturing plant.

But that wasn’t the only help given, Margin Call hears.

We’re told Labor’s then Queensland government, led by premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, also granted the company the land on which it is built – potentially worth something north of $50m – in order to help kickstart hi-tech manufacturing in the Gladstone industrial estate.

The Gladstone electrolyser facility some shiny new robotics sitting idle.

Fortescue boss Dino Otranto told Margin Call this week the company hasn’t decided what to do with the facility now the company has abandoned its hydrogen plans.

But the state government land grant might well complicate rumoured plans by the company to try to sell off the facility which has been kitted out with a robotic assembly line, labs and other assorted facilities.

Whether that is a problem will come down to how tightly the government’s negotiators locked down the contract with the mining major.

But, with Queensland parliament set to return next week for the first time since Fortescue shuttered the Gladstone facility, we’re pretty confident new Premier David Crisafulli will be more than happy to drive a few more nails in the coffin of Labor’s hydrogen ambitions for the state.