From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Kristin Amiot. It's Wednesday, March five, twenty twenty five. Prime Minister Anthony Albernizi says he's open to sending Australian troops to Ukraine to keep the peace. In a surprise statement on Tuesday, the PM said he'll consider any request by Britain to join a coalition of the willing in providing security to
the wartor nation. The coalition has pledged to overhaul indigenous heritage laws if it wins government at the next election, after an indigenous group who sunk and New South Wales coal mine were revealed as one of the most litigious groups operating within the current system. That exclusive story is live right now at the Australian dot com dot AU. Just a tiny fraction of the government's grand green hydrogen plans have seen the light of day. They're being held
up by bottlenecks and waning market demand. So should the government stay the course or spend its millions elsewhere? That's today's episode. A couple of years ago, Fortescue mining magnate Andrew twiggy Forest gave Elon Musk a very public dressing down at a conference in Morocco.
I'm saying, anyone, including Elon, who says hygien hasn't got a massive future are muppets.
Twiggy was a ways into his big pivot to something called green hydrogen at that point, and he was in town to spook Fortescue's new hydrogen hub. Green hydrogen is made by splitting oxygen into its component atoms using renewable technologies, and it can be used to power everything from vehicles to generating electricity and manufacturing.
This is hard edged ec economic choice, but it's also social and environmental rationalism, a fuel that you can make right here in Australia, clean as the day is long, and made by hard working locals, not by foreign companies controlling our standards of living at their whim buoid.
By the optimism of one of Australia's richest men, the government dived in giving green hydrogen a central role in its future Made in Australia Net zero plan and announcing a handful of hydrogen hubs around the country.
Because what potentially we have here with the hydrogen industry is some fifty billion dollars potential of benefit to our national economy, driving our GDP, driving our economy into the future.
But by the middle of last year, Twiggy Forest's green hydrogen vision was crumbling.
The most celebrated advocate for the Albanesi government's green hydrogen plan forced to slam on the brakes and back off a prized target, the iron Ore billionaire announcing seven hundred redundancies and a slow down in developing green hydrogen, and now.
The government's own green hydrogen scheme has hit the skids.
The size of the hydrogen and green hydrogen industry sort of anywhere from about one hundred billion to two hundred and fifty billion dollars in Australia, so there's a lot of hype and a lot of hope for it. What we've discovered is a lot of the projects have quietly been shelved.
Harry Williams is The Australian's chief business correspondent.
Probably about two thirds of the projects have either been paused or shelved completely, and the pipeline some sort of ninety nine percent have failed to move beyond the concept stage. Really, just a handful of projects have actually moved into formal development.
Some of the sixty one big name projects unlikely to see the light of day, were pitched by the likes of AGL and the Macquarie Group. Perry, what does it actually mean that most of these projects haven't progressed past the concept stage? And why aren't they getting there?
Do we know that? There's probably sort of three main things to look at. Really high production costs is one. It's difficult to actually get the scale to bring down the cost for green hydrogen. There's some infrastructure sort of bottlenecks or sort of hurdles which are often sort of the bane of big resources projects in Australia. And perhaps one that's been overlooked is the buyers of this hydrogen, So we're typically looking at Asian nations as the buyers.
There just hasn't really been the demand that you'd expect. Those three things all combined have just made it a really tough cell.
The government's prized green hydrogen projects have been dropping like flies.
Taxpayers will pour two point four billion dollars.
Into a plan to secure the future of the troubled wireless steelworks.
Just a todd day after the country's biggest green hydrogen project bit the dust in Queensland, BP has announced that it's six hundred million dollar green hydrogen project at Quanana south of Perth has been part.
Origin Energy is abandoning its plans to develop hydrogen at its Hunter Valley hydrogen hub, deeming the project too expensive and too risky.
So where does that leave Labour's promised hydrogen economy and export sector.
Yeah, Look, it's important to say that all is not lost without over complicating things. There's three forms of hydrogen which you might build a big industry. We're focusing in this story on moving sort of hydrogen to buyers in Asia, other ways of doing it as a feedstock in ammonia, which still has some potential, and perhaps the other really big hope which has become quite a big focus recently,
is the likes of green steel. Again, sounds great, the actual market for that is quite small at the moment. And we speak to Alan Finkel in this story, obviously the former chief scientist, and he says the other issue is whether buyers are prepared to pay more for green steel because it's going to be tough for it to match the cheaper generation of coal and iron. It's definitely a big focus for a lot of the big miners at the moment, but again it's still got a little way to go.
Do we know how much this has cost tax payers to date and does it line up with the government's calculatations.
There has been enthusiasm across the political divide for this, but the Albanezy government's really invested a lot nearly nine billion dollars outlined in last year's budget, and the really critical thing is that green hydrogen is one of their
main hopes for heading net zero targets. In terms of how much has been spent on this, there are reasonably modest numbers I think so far, but you're looking at a really substantial spend coming up in the next few years, and you're looking at a sort of potential election issue and that the coalition is going down a different path and will obviously prioritize nuclear over hydrogen. It's set to be a talking point as we get closer to the election.
Just lastly, Perry, what's the government saying about these new figures and about the deviation of its green hydrogen plans.
Look, we went to Energy Minister Chris Bowen on this. They sent us a statement the remaining committed to working alongside commercial interests to deliver on green hydrogen's potential. Probably the other thing from their side is that the incentives and subsidies that they outlined in the budget are set to start from twenty seven to twenty eight, so I guess they would say, look, there may be some teething issues at the moment, but long term there could still be a viable industry here.
Coming up should labor break up with hydrogen. Last year, Opposition leader Peter Dutton unveiled a radical new plan to establish nuclear reactors at seven locations around Australia if the Liberals win the next election.
No other country in the world can keep the lights on twenty four to seven with the renewables only policy. We need to make sure that hospitals can stay on twenty four to seven. We need to make sure that cold rooms can stay on twenty four seven. We need to make sure that our economy can function twenty four to seven, and we can only do that with a strong base low power.
When the price tag of the nuclear plan was finally revealed in December, Peter Dutton said it would cost taxpayers two hundred and sixty four billion dollars less to reach our twenty fifty net zero target. Then Labour's renewables only energy plan. The Prime Minister says that's hogwash.
It is bizarre that you're looking at the most expensive form of new energy, So a six hundred billion dollar taxpayer funded program for an industry that doesn't exist. It's a fantasy.
But as we've just heard, the government's own hydrogen plans aren't faring much better. Here's The Australian's Environment editor Graham Lloyd.
Well, there's a couple of things to say here, and I think that the most important is that when politicians talk about the energy industry in general, they often don't understand the facts of what they're talking about. I think there's been an ideological hope that the hydrogen industry would succeed.
There's been a lot of money put into it, but it's been obvious for some time now that a lot of that initial hope was misplaced, that the economics and the science of it as a substitute for natural gas really isn't going to be as feasible as people were hoping. I think you can say the same thing about the nuclear debate. The Albanese government is very critical of it and they're sort of putting it out there as less perspective,
if you like, than hydrogen. But the difference is that the nuclear industry is a mature industry that's well established in many parts of the world. But again it's a matter of cost as much as anything else. But the real nuclear industry is around big base load operations that deliver emissions free power. The good thing really from the hydrogen experience is that the private sector has shown that
it's not interested in throwing good money after bad. It's found it's more expensive and more difficult to do and the global market that is supposed to finance it just isn't there and willing at this stage, which leaves the government money. The government should really take a leaf out of industry's book and know when to cover its losses.
With the cost of living top of mind for most Australian voters as we head into an election, the question is should we expect them to know or care about the difference.
Well, I think it's a big ask to expect ordinary voters to really understand the complexities of the energy market and what the supplies of cheap energy actually mean for the cost of living. This is an issue that responsible governments have to manage and the best thing they can do is manage it in such a way that it's not in the headlines. And the starting point for that is to do a proper cost benefit analysis of what you get out of the public funds that are applied.
Take a lead from the private sector in pursuing things that are worthwhile and don't distort the market with unreasonable rules and regulations.
Graham Lloyd is The Australian's Environment editor and Perry Williams is our chief business correspondent. You can read that story right now at the Australian dot com dot a.
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