COP26: Green means gold in Glasgow
On the first day of the COP26, Australian energy company Fortescue Future Industries signed one of the first major export deals for green hydrogen.
It is a parallel universe at the UN COP26 in Glasgow where world leaders are debating the terminology of whether to achieve net zero in 2050 or somewhere around the mid-century while key influential business leaders from Australia are doing significant deals.
On the first day of the COP26, Australian energy company Fortescue Future Industries (FFI) signed one of the first major export deals for green hydrogen, agreeing to supply 10 per cent of its production for the British market. FFI, a subsidiary of iron ore firm Fortescue and chaired by metals magnate Andrew Forrest, signed the multimillion-pound deal with Conservative life peer Anthony Bamford, the billionaire chairman of international construction company JCB, and his son, Jo, who chairs Ryze Hydrogen.
The billionaires’ agreement was announced just hours before 126 global leaders including Scott Morrison and other G20 leaders descended on Glasgow to try to rescue the Paris Agreement.
COP26 host British Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned “it is one minute to midnight”. Prince Charles told leaders they must adopt “a warlike footing” and embark on a “vast military-style campaign” to save the planet.
But on the sidelines of the conference, Australian business leaders are some of the most active in bypassing the “transition’’ of using fossil fuels to power hydrogen, and are actively promoting and doing deals for green hydrogen, which uses renewables – wind-solar and hydro – to make the hydrogen.
On Thursday in the book-filled room of the Science Foundation in Mayfair, central London, a former prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, told a high-powered gathering, which included Bloomberg chief executive Jon Moore, HSBC private banking chief Annabel Spring, Sun Cable boss David Griffin, ETFS Capital chief executive Graham Tuckwell and Macquarie Bank executives, anything other than green hydrogen was “a con, a dud” and he admitted to signing “millions’’ of taxpayer dollars for carbon capture storage that “has simply not worked’’.
Mr Turnbull, who heads the Green Hydrogen Organisation, said international governments were continuing to subsidise the fossil fuel sector “as a means to keep on doing what they have been doing, which is burning fossil fuels’’. He said so-called blue hydrogen – made using fossil fuels – was “bullshit’’. He said the other heavily promoted means of addressing global warming, trying to capture carbon emissions and burying them in the ground, simply did not work.
He added: “It is ... a scam, that blue hydrogen ... that’s getting a real big run in the park from the fossil fuel sector. It’s all about making hydrogen in the same old way they do now with steam and so forth, producing a lot of CO2. And then they say, ‘We’ll put it under the ground’. Well, you know, when I was John Howard’s environment minister, we put a tonne of money into carbon capture and storage. We really did, and we honestly believed it would work. Kevin Rudd did the same, Billions have been spent on it and it has simply not worked. It’s a dud ... it is not the solution.”
Scott Morrison is to host a Tuesday breakfast meeting with Australian industrialists and business leaders in Glasgow.
A consortium from the Australian Climate Leaders Coalition – comprising forward-thinking executives from Coles, Citigroup, Deloittes, BHP, CBA, Macquarie, Wesfarmers and Ramsay – is at COP26. “This is better than Davos (where the World Economic Forum takes place) because we have access to political leaders and government bureaucrats who are super-keen to do deals,’’ one told The Australian, promising an update at the end of the fortnight.
Some of the biggest green hydrogen announcements are expected in the next few days, from a successful prototype of a cargo ship powered by hydrogen to how the production of green hydrogen will skyrocket in the next year.
Australia, with its extensive solar, wind and hydro capacities, will be central to several of these announcements.
Lord Jonathan Adair Turner, a former economist and chair of the Energy Transitions Commission representing 50 of the world’s biggest companies, told The Australian achieving a net-zero green hydrogen emissions economy within the next 30 years was technically and economically feasible.
