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Forrest poised to open battery making hub – but in the US
Hans van LeeuwenJul 11, 2023 – 8.58am, first published at 5.47am

Andrew Forrest at the WAE headquarters in Oxfordshire last month. Domenico Pugliesenone

Mr Biden’s IRA, which passed Congress last year, offers subsidies, grants and tax breaks to set up businesses in the US related to the clean-energy transition. Dr Forrest has taken the bait.

“It’s absolutely IRA-driven. If you have external shareholders that you’re responsible to, you have to develop manufacturing capability around the world, but particularly in the United States because the incentives are so significant.”

Fortescue bought the company then known as Williams Advanced Engineering in March last year. He recently installed one of his US executives to run the rapidly expanding firm, which could quadruple its British headcount by the year’s end.

Its main business as a Fortescue company is building batteries and powertrains for electric versions of US-made Liebherr mining trucks, which Dr Forrest will use to replace Fortescue Metal Group’s diesel fleet in the Pilbara.

Once WAE sets up in the US, the British operation will eventually switch focus to supplying truck makers in Europe.

Dr Forrest recently told a business gathering in London that the IRA’s generous funding to Republican states meant that it would likely survive a change of president at the 2024 election.

Apocalyptic warning
In London on Monday, Dr Forrest met Mr Biden, King Charles III and other government leaders at Windsor Castle to workshop ways of stepping up concerted action against climate change.

In recent public statements, Dr Forrest’s degree of alarm about the climate change threat has shifted a gear higher. He told the gathering that the imminent El Nino weather event could be a tipping point.

“If El Nino turns bad, we could get 1.5 degrees of global warming next year. Not just this decade, next year,” he told the Financial Review.

“I was asked after I spoke today, ‘What did I think would happen?’ I said, ‘On the scale of probability, El Nino is going to turn bad’. It is turning bad.”

Speaking to the King, Mr Biden and other delegates, he said: “Today we are on track for 3.2 degrees Celsius of warming – and our top scientists admit they have no idea what that means for humanity.”

After sketching an apocalyptic scenario of lost cities and mass deaths in the tropics, he called on the leaders of the US, China and India to create “a global green armistice ... that makes it illegal to take geopolitical considerations into account when producing and distributing the machines and technology the world needs to capture infinite zero-pollution renewable energy and distribute it around the world”.

He also said companies should be given zero-interest bridging finance, financed by a global carbon price, to “rewire to green energy”. All businesses with access to renewable resources should eliminate fossil fuel use by 2030.

Forrest’s blueprint
Dr Forrest said his empire – the mining and energy companies, the investment vehicles such as Tattarang and Squadron Energy, and his philanthropic Minderoo Foundation – was now working to a common “climate mobilisation” blueprint backed by a total of $US50 billion.

The plan is spread across seven “priority actions”. Fortescue Metals Group will spend $US6.2 billion to decarbonise its Australian iron ore operations and $US4 billion to ensure its worldwide projects are delivered without burning fossil fuels.

Fortescue Energy will build an estimated $US20 billion of renewable energy projects, with a further $US30 billion for “projects under advanced study” in Africa, Australia, Europe and Latin America. These would be “financed in the rapidly developing green structured finance global capital markets”.

Tattarang and Squadron would build $US20 billion of renewable energy projects in Australia, delivering at least 14 gigawatts of firmed power that would account for 30 per cent of Australia’s national 2030 target.

Minderoo’s $7.6 billion war chest for philanthropic activity would fund work such as bushfire detection and response, and methane reduction and sequestration projects on his properties.

Other actions included driving training and skills in green hydrogen, helping to mobilise other sources of private capital for green initiatives, and promoting battery tech and green industry in new markets and territories.

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