‘What a flop’ - Chris Bowen’s green dreams squashed 🔌

0:00You're listening to the Ben Fordham Podcast and now Ben Fordham comments. We are fed so much spin and so many lies when it comes to Australia's energy transition, we have to jump in regularly with a fact check and that's what we're doing right now. Otherwise people may think that what they were sold is what they actually ended up getting and that's often far from the truth. For example, it wasn't that long ago that we were told Australia was going to become a green hydrogen superpower. Remember, even Chris Bowen told us so. And when the writing was on the wall that he was wrong in mid 2024, the energy minister insisted, reports of the death of the green hydrogen industry are greatly exaggerated. He pointed to more than 200 billion worth of green hydrogen projects in the pipeline. When he said Australia will become a green hydrogen superpower. So how's all of that going?

1:00The government's 2030 target was at least 500,000 tons of renewable hydrogen a year. So keep that in mind, 500,000 tons, current production, about 1,100. That's around 0.2% of the target. And 1,100 tons might sound like a decent amount, but it isn't. If you converted Australia's annual renewable hydrogen production into electricity, it wouldn't even power double. So much for being a green hydrogen superpower. And one of the biggest projects behind that dream has just dumped the giant hydrogen plan at its heart. This is the Australian renewable energy hub in Western Australia in the Pilbra. It was supposed to be a 50 billion dollar mega project, one of the biggest renewable energy and green hydrogen projects in the world. But now the giant hydrogen and ammonia proposal has been pulled. BP has walked away. Macquarie has walked away.

2:01CWP global has walked away. Instead of charging head with this enormous hydrogen project, the developer is now having a reality check. They're now talking about starting off with just one gigawatt of renewable power. The plan was for 26 gigawatts of wind and solar. This thing was promising nearly nine erarring coal-fired power plants worth of installed generation. There were going to be 1,750 wind turbines, solar panels for as far as the eyes can see. And the project would cover more than 660,000 hectares of the Pilbra, which is about 10 times the size of Singapore. And what were they going to do with all of that power? D-salonate seawater, use the water to make green hydrogen, turn that hydrogen into ammonia, and then put it on ships and sail it around the world. That was the dream. Except there was one pretty important problem. You need someone to buy the stuff. And BP's admitted that's where it ran into trouble.

3:04BP bought a 40% stake in the project and took over his operator. Then they walked away in 2025. The BP Australia boss Lucy Nation later admitted, we went faster than many of our customers were ready for. She's also acknowledged that when it came to green hydrogen imports, there had been, quote, a lot of hype. End quote. There it is. A lot of hype. That's why we do these regular fact checks because the spin never matches up with reality. When Twiggy Forest started scaling back on green hydrogen, Chris Bowen was still preaching and pressing ahead. What did he say in June of 2024? Reports of the death of the green hydrogen industry are greatly exaggerated. Well, two years on, the funeral notice has been printed, the eulogy has been written, and the church bells are ringing. By the way, it wasn't just Chris Bowen drinking the cool aid. Plenty of people were saying they were interested too. But when it came to signing long-term contracts and actually paying,

4:08different story. As the boss of BP said, there was a lot of hype. If only hype kept the lights on.