Andrew Forrest, an Australian iron ore millionaire, met with US President Joe Biden and Democrat Joe Manchin to debate the future of hydrogen.
Australia’s richest man spent an hour at the White House with Vice President Joe Biden in a working discussion with the commander-in-chief and senior officials to discuss his ongoing strategy to sell green energy to the United States.
Forrest told Sky News, “I can tell that you’ve got President eager to get the job done.” “He’s a doer, and he sees actual action in us.” He views green hydrogen as a solution to global warming, one that may boost jobs, investment, and reduce global warming.”
Climate change has been proclaimed a top priority for the Biden administration, with the president of the United States issuing an executive order in December 2021 to achieve net-zero emissions by 2045, with a 50% decrease in construction emissions by 2032.
The White House meeting came just days after Forrest announced a $50 billion green hydrogen deal with German energy company E.ON, which included the production of 15 million tonnes of green hydrogen by 2030 and renewable hydrogen exports from Australia.
It was also reported that the Western Australian mining billionaire recently persuaded prominent US Senator Joe Manchin to invest in green hydrogen, as well as his intentions to replace coal-fired power plants in the US with hydrogen hubs.
“In a place like Ohio, West Virginia, it’s sad.” Hundreds, if not thousands, of people are losing their employment. “Their talent is that they can move from coal-fired power plants to coal mining, and there’s nowhere for the impoverished people to go,” he told Sky News.
“Actually, you have everything you need for greenfinch,” we say. You have pipelines and a strong industrial foundation. “We merely generated green electrons,” he explained, adding that the technology will be available in three to four years.
“Senator Manchin truly gets it, like it’s a revelation.”
“The only way to fully compete with Russia is not to acquire LNG (liquid natural gas) at all,” the billionaire claimed, arguing that investing in hydrogen will lessen reliance on Russian resources.
“My message throughout Europe is don’t compete with them; instead, replace the product with a fuel that will not, cannot, and will safeguard the environment,” he stated.
However, Peter Newman, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s lead author for transportation and a Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University, cautioned that the technology was still in its infancy.
This is because, due to the high pressures required, hydrogen as a gas cannot be utilized aboard airplanes in its natural state, and converting hydrogen to liquid form has its own set of issues.
In March 2022, Newman told The Epoch Times, “Hydrogen is too hard to compress and freeze—[and] requires temperatures of – 253 degrees Celsius.”
Newman said that while manufacturing hydrogen was getting more reasonable owing to lower-cost solar panels and electrolyzers (thanks in part to FFI’s work), the transition from hydrogen to a useable fuel was still unproven commercially.
“Unless hydrogen is transformed into synthetic jet fuel, it will not operate in planes,” Newman added.
“It’s not difficult to create hydrogen; it’s just incredibly costly.” Solar panels are inexpensive, and hydrolyzers are becoming more affordable, but the stages from hydrogen to synthetic jet fuel are costly… “We need significant breakthroughs.”
Meanwhile, the Australian Human Rights Commission issued a study on Dec. 7, 2021, highlighting alarming claims of solar, wind, and battery technology including slave labor in countries like as China and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Millions of ethnic Uyghur, Kyrgyz, and Kazakh nationals have been identified to be involved in the solar supply chain in China, the world’s largest producer of solar panels.
China is also the leading solar panel supplier in Australia, supplying 90% of the country’s solar panels, including the majority of the panels in the country’s largest solar farms.
