- Australian mining magnate Andrew Forrest is attending the COP28 climate conference in the United Arab Emirates.
- He says energy bosses should have their heads “put up on spikes” for not committing to phase out fossil fuels.
- It comes as some companies, including the national oil company of the UAE, defy calls for a wind-down of fossil fuel use.
Quote with context:
And he took particular aim at the oil and gas bosses who were dismissing the calls, describing them as “selfish beyond belief”.
He said their actions were jeopardising the lives of millions of people in overwhelmingly poor countries who were at risk of “lethal humidity”, or an inability to cool themselves down. “If you can’t cool yourself you’re actually an oven burning around 100 watts all the time,” Dr Forrest said.
"If you can [sic] get rid of that heat energy, you cook.
"And when these deaths occur — and they’re occurring now, but when they occur at much larger-scale — I want these so-called people who are very smart to be held to account.
“It’s their heads which should be put up on spikes because they wilfully ignored and they didn’t care.”
You need electricity to make hydrogen. Hydrogen maybe maybe could be part of the overall energy solution someday by providing a similar portable, fluid energy store as gasoline and diesel do now. But the technological challenges (like just getting the lightest gas in existence to stay in a container, for example) make it not the thing we should be investing large sums of money in right now.
We need to fix the underlying electricity generation problem before we can really even think about hydrogen as a fuel.
It’s worth noting that hydrogen is key to a large number of industrial processes, including the majority of metal and fertilizer production. While its use in fuel cells and small vehicles is rather silly, it’s about the only contender outside nuclear for ships. The conversion loses make it impractical for anything you can directly electrify, but that’s would only be a small fraction of a large industry.
Given this hydrogen is currently produced near entirely with natural gas and with several times the emissions of diesel, the idea of replacing that production with production powered by renewables is reasonable, especially since you need to overbuild solar and wind capacity so much to ensure constant power. Useing that spare capacity to make hydrogen, which doesn’t care about when it gets made, is also responsible.
We need green and pink hydrogen, the scam is coming up with more consumers of our currently minuscule supply.
Indeed. There’s a number of huge solar farms in the development / approval phase in Western Australia.
The largest in the South East of Western Australia is the Western Green Energy Hub which could generate 50GW of wind and solar energy and use that to produce 3.5m tonnes of green hydrogen every year. It will take several more years before a final investment decision is made and another decade to construct, but that’s the nature of large scale projects.
I don’t know how real the transportation problems actually are. Australia is already exporting liquid hydrogen. The industry doesn’t seem concerned about it.