Reality for FFI:
For more than two years, Fortescue has been full throttle trying to turn Forrest’s promise of converting green hydrogen into a commercial reality within years. Instead, as the economics around surging electricity costs needed to produce green hydrogen sunk in, deadlines were pushed back and back. The mission changed, then there was a revolving door of executives.
The problem is very simply the cost of producing the “green” hydrogen, which is not remotely competitive with natural gas. Nor can anything be done to make the cost anything close to competitive. This quote is from another Australian source called Financial Review, also behind pay wall:
Matthew Rennie, a former EY partner who is now an independent adviser, said his firm’s analysis indicated that prices for power and electrolysers – which use renewable power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen – would need to be much cheaper to produce green hydrogen in Australia even at under $[AU]3 a kilogram. He said power prices would need to be less than $[AU]40 a megawatt-hour and electrolyser costs would need to more than halve to produce hydrogen at that level – still 50 per cent more expensive than the government’s ${AU]2 target for the gas to be competitive.
The $[AU]3/kg target is the equivalent of $[AU]24/MMBtu [thus about $US16] — 5 [or so] times the typical natural gas price in the U.S. of $3-4/MMBtu. And they’re saying that to achieve even that, they would need wind/solar-generated electricity prices of $[AU]40/MWh [thus about $US27/MWh] and electrolyzer prices to halve. Ms. Nova reports that the two Australian states that produce the most electricity from wind and solar are South Australia and Tasmania, and they have wholesale electricity prices of $[AU]199/MWh and $214[AU]/MWh respectively [thus about $US133 and $US138 respectively]. So in the real world the cost of this green hydrogen is going to be more like [ten to] 20 or more times the cost of natural gas, instead of the paltry 5 [or so] times higher that they were hoping for.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/07/21/the-energy-transition-aint-happening-hydrogen-in-australia/
(20min delay)