Andrew Forrest says he is sticking with his green energy plans despite tumult at Fortescue
Under siege iron ore billionaire Andrew Forrest says he will ‘refuse to buckle’ on his quest to build a giant green energy business despite high turnover amid his senior management ranks.
Under-siege iron ore billionaire Andrew Forrest says he will “refuse to buckle” on his quest to build a giant green-energy business despite high turnover amid his senior management ranks.
The mining mogul’s Fortescue Metals Group has laid out an ambition to be a global green player, effectively building a new business from scratch which can rival its metals business in the next decade. However, a string of executive exits has raised concern over Dr Forrest’s ability to deliver the climate-focused vision.
But Dr Forrest said he was wary of repeating the mistakes of global energy giant Shell, which in his view had walked back its green focus to concentrate on fossil fuels, referencing a move to cut back one of the world’s biggest corporate carbon offset schemes.
He said the “easy thing for an executive chair to do in those situations is to buckle and say, ‘OK, I will change the course of the company, so all you guys just calm down’, and ‘Yes, we all committed to this a year or two ago, and now it is very hard, and you don’t want to commit to it anymore.’
“But that just isn’t right,” Dr Forrest said. “It’s the Shell option. You had Shell come out and walk away from all of its commitments. That’s what happens. If Shell didn’t make that announcement the CEO would have lost a lot of staff. This green stuff is really hard and what you’re asking us to do is really hard.”
A Shell spokeswoman said carbon scheme cutbacks reflected its “robust due-diligence approach and highlights the challenges in developing nature-based projects that deliver high-quality carbon credits”.
Dr Forrest’s comments follow an explosive interview on Friday in which he told The Weekend Australian that an extraordinary wave of management departures at Fortescue was sparked after he returned from an overseas trip to find the company’s strategy had been hijacked by several of its executive team.
Chief executive Fiona Hick and chief financial officer Christine Morris quit last week while former Reserve Bank deputy governor Guy Debelle said on Friday he was resigning as director of green hydrogen subsidiary Fortescue Future Industries.
A decision last week that Fortescue’s green projects now need to compete for capital with mining was seen by some company watchers as a potential retreat from Dr Forrest’s ambition of turning the iron ore major into the world’s biggest energy company.
However, the executive chairman said he was committed to its vision. “We have evolved into the best mining company in the world with what we do,” Dr Forrest said. “And we have the same repeat of that focus now. There is a really strong lobby in oil and gas who heavily exploit anything which Fortescue ever does which seems to be negative. But it doesn’t bother us. We will stay focused.”
He said executives who had left the iron ore major had struggled to cope with the “boiler room” conditions of the company.
Dr Forrest recently split with his wife Nicola. However, the pair and their Minderoo foundation will share in about $1.1bn of dividends from the $1-per-share dividend to all FMG shareholders from the $US4.8bn net profit the company unveiled a week ago.
