Twiggy Forrest’s cautionary tale: Flailing green hydrogen project rips a hole in Labor's plan to turn Australia into a clean energy superpower
The increasingly uncertain fate of Andrew Forrest’s hapless Brisbane green hydrogen project is as clear a sign as any that Australia just isn’t the place to be building a renewable energy powerhouse.
In October 2022, Chris Bowen lobbed a lazy $13.7 million at a company that planned to build a giant hydrogen production plant in Brisbane.
The Energy Minister said building the 500MW Gibson Island electrolyser was “critical” to turning Australia into a green energy superpower, exporting clean hydrogen and ammonia to the world.
The electrolyser will be the largest built to date, feeding renewable hydrogen directly into the first fully decarbonised ammonia facility.
Eighteen months later, the Gibson Island project has fallen in a heap.
Andrew Forrest's company, Fortescue Futures, has yet to make the numbers stack up.
Fortescue cited "structurally high green electricity costs" for the delay in explaining this to shareholders late last year.
Forrest's green hydrogen dreams are far from dead, however.
Fortescue is sinking more than $800 million into a green hydrogen plant at Buckeye, which it expects to be up and running the year after next, producing 11,000 tonnes of liquid green hydrogen.
Where is Buckeye?
It is in Phoenix, Arizona, where electricity costs 13.5 US cents (20 Australian cents) a kilowatt hour.
Moreover, around 45 per cent of Arizona's power is carbon emissions-free.
Renewable generation (wind, solar and water) delivers around a third of that. The rest comes from nuclear.
