Talk about a tale of two signals. While Anthony Albanese talked a lot about green steel with Xi Jinping in his visit to China – that made with hydrogen and not coal – at the same time, Fortescue Metals (ASX:FMG) appears to be quietly killing its hydrogen hopes.
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That’s noteworthy because there was no company that touted hydrogen, whether green or otherwise, as loudly as FMG during the plague years when the alternative gas first came to mainstream attention.
As I once wrote for HotCopper, quasi-celebrity-chief Andrew Forrest was seemingly possessed by the spirit of green hydrogen for a good while. Up until he rolled Fortescue Future Industries (FFI), a hydrogen breakaway from Fortescue proper, back into FMG.
On Thursday, the market got an indication that those hydrogen aspirations are further dissipating like hot air.
While the company wrote “its Green Energy project pipeline continues to be progressed,” it added that the “Arizona Hydrogen and the PEM50 Project will not proceed.”
Arizona Hydrogen was to be a U.S.-based green hydrogen project spearheaded under the formerly extant FFI which now 404s when you try to look up the project webpage. PEM50, meanwhile, was a similar project set for Gladstone in Queensland. It, too, has been wiped from the company’s website.
The cost of culling both projects is gonna send FMG back US$150 million, it declared on Thursday, that was hardly enough to stir investors into worry. Especially given recent iron ore strength.
It’s an interesting time for hydrogen. While Anthony Albanese, or the Federal Labor party broadly appear to be unwilling to abandon ambitious promises of years past, private industry is moving on. FMG is just the latest example.
It also doesn’t help that the ACCC is taking AGN to court over its claims that renewable gas like hydrogen could be used to light household stoves in around the next forty years. That, the watchdog says, is fantasy.
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