‘Cold fusion’ was such a spectacular scientific fraud that it earned a whole chapter to itself in Walter Gratzer’s essential The Undergrowth of Science. In 1989, two scientists claimed to have achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature. Despite the decidedly, ahem, ‘questionable’ nature of the claim, a great many people were bamboozled by it.
The state of Utah invested $4.5 million to create the National Cold Fusion Institute. Toyota blew another $40 million in cold-fusion research. Even as late as 2019, Google wasted another $10 million on the long-debunked claim.
There’s always another sucker waiting in line, though. This time, the scam is ‘green hydrogen’.
True, unlike ‘cold fusion’, ‘green hydrogen’ is a real thing: hydrogen produced by the electrolysis of water, using renewable electricity. Note that: using electricity. The stumbling block with green hydrogen as a viable ‘clean’ energy source is immediately obvious.
Not obvious enough, though, to stop suckers blowing billions on it.
In May 2024, Fortescue launched its first US green hydrogen production project. It represented a $550 million investment in a facility to produce up to 11,000 tons of liquid green hydrogen annually. They renamed their green hydrogen facility in Buckeye, Arizona, to Arizona Hydrogen.
You’ll never guess what happened next!
However, recent developments have forced them to scale back their green hydrogen plans.
The same is true for Woodside, citing a lack of renewable electricity, and similarly for Origin Energy, when it realised that it is uneconomical. Each company withdrew from the market for the same reason – the lack of cheap electricity – which ‘renewables’ cannot provide. You need hydrocarbon (coal, petroleum, or natural gas) fired electricity generation for that.
Piling irony onto the corporate stupidity, Fortescue blamed high electricity prices as a major factor in shuttering their pipe dream factory.
High electricity prices that have resulted from massive government (read ‘taxpayer’) subsidies to the green electricity sector are the reason companies cannot produce cheap enough hydrogen gas from electrolysis. As I explained in “Hydrogen Gas: Another Climate Cult Myth Busted”, the problem is basic physics.
And the dream of finding a pure source of hydrogen from a gas well is just that, more mythological than pink unicorns.
Fortescue chief Andrew Forrest is surely not a complete moron, though?
On October 2, 2024, Forrest said that it’s time to walk away from the ‘proven fantasy’ of Net Zero.
Or is he?
Australian mining tycoon Andrew Forrest, founder and executive chairman of Fortescue, says it is time for the world to walk away from the ‘proven fantasy’ of Net Zero emissions by 2050 and to embrace ‘Real Zero’ by 2040 instead.
That’s the thing about cults: they will never critically examine their own dogmas.
His company is retreating from green hydrogen because it is not economically feasible to produce hydrogen by electrolysis. Neither is it by the two methods that do it well – steam reforming and methane pyrolysis. All these methods are energy-intensive.
Currently, 95 per cent of hydrogen fuel is ‘grey hydrogen’ made from natural gas via the steam reformation process, but that method produces more carbon dioxide than burning an equivalent amount of petrol.
And by our current understanding of physics the Climate Cult dream of mythical hydrogen gas mined straight out of the ground is just that. More mythology! It is a pain when you come up against the laws of physics and chemistry.
No amount of religious cries like, ‘We can, we must, let’s do it!’ can change the laws of physics.
Nonsense! As every cultist knows, when the cult’s dreams are shattered by reality, it’s reality that must be at fault.
Just keep screeching ‘How dare you!’ at the sky, cultists.
