Essay by Eric Worrall
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Australia can save the world by manufacturing cheap goods using green hydrogen.
Irrelevant to global decarbonisation? No, Australia’s crucial to it
Peter Hartcher
Political and international editorThe Coalition spent over a decade coaching Australia into a state of learnt helplessness over any action on climate change.
One of its most effective arguments was that Australia emitted only 1 per cent of all global greenhouse gases, so even if it eliminated all of them it wouldn’t make a jot of difference. What was the point of trying?
In truth, Australia has the potential to make a cut to global emissions of 8 per cent, according to new research by the eminent economist Ross Garnaut.
…
By what magical arithmetic can Australia eliminate 8 per cent of world emissions if it churns out only 1 per cent? By functioning as a major world supplier of zero-carbon goods and services which will allow the rest of the world, and China especially, to cut its emissions.
…
One of the book’s co-authors, ANU economics professor Ligang Song, says that “using Australian renewable electricity and hydrogen produced from renewables to convert [iron ore] into iron metal and steel would reduce global emissions by around 2 per cent – almost twice as much as Australia eliminating its own emissions”.
…
Read more: https://amp.smh.com.au/politics/federal/irrelevant-to-global-decarbonisation-no-australia-s-crucial-to-it-20221003-p5bmnv.html
Nobody to my knowledge has found a way to convert hideously expensive green hydrogen into competitively priced green steel and silicon.
Although hydrogen can in theory be used in place of coal to reduce ore into iron and silicon, in practice hydrogen is a bad substitute.
In steel, hydrogen impurities in steel are a disaster, they cause hydrogen embrittlement.
Hydrogen mixed with silicon is possibly even worse than using hydrogen to reduce iron ore. Silicon and hydrogen form toxic silane, which over the years has been responsible for a significant number of fatal industrial accidents.
Why do Australians fall for such absurd green narratives?
The reason appears to be that many Australians yearn for the days when Australia was a booming manufacturing hub, before Australian manufacturing went into decline 60 years ago (see the graph at the top of the page). The green industry narrative plays into this yearning.
The reality is Australia’s manufacturing decline will not be solved by a few solar panels.
As far as I can tell, the decline in Australian manufacturing was caused by a combination of greedy government tax rises, and later, in the 90s, rising energy costs, after the Australian government became obsessed with renewables.
Expensive, government subsidised green energy will not fix these problems.
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And hydrogen is so low density, even as liquid hydrogen, a cryogenic liquid, that it is mostly useless as transportation fuel. That assumes one has already dealt with leakage and embrittlement.
Honestly, making synthetic hydrocarbons is more practical as fuel.
Honestly, making synthetic hydrocarbons is more practical as fuel.
_____________________________________________________
They’ve been doing that in South Africa for over 40 years:
Secunda CTL Wikipedia
Secunda CTL is a synthetic fuel plant owned by Sasol at Secunda,
Mpumalanga in South Africa. It uses coal liquefaction to produce
petroleum-like synthetic crude oil from coal. The process used by
Sasol is based on the Fischer–Tropsch process. It is the largest
coal liquefaction plant and the largest single emitter of greenhouse
gas in the world.
Secunda CTL consists of two production units. The Sasol II unit
was constructed in 1980 and the Sasol III unit in 1984.[1] It has
total production capacity of 160,000 barrels per day* (25,000 m3/d).
They release the most CO2 on Earth! Keeps the planet green it does!
*Bold added
Yes, why what if you start with pixie wings as raw material?
Network Rail in the UK is responsible for all railtrack and has looked at battery and hydrogen technology for trains using the tracks. Their conclusion –
“Battery and hydrogen technologies are unsuitable for long distance high speed and freight services as these have higher energy needs than battery and hydrogen technologies can provide.” *
“Electrical traction relies on fixed infrastructure to transmit electricity and this has high capital cost. Only electrification is suitable for areas where trains travel at more than 100mph or where there are lots of freight services.”
They acknowledge that because of the high capital cost of electrification battery and hydrogen “may offer better value for money where there are fewer train services.”
They put forward a plan to electrify 13,000 kms of track at a cost of £30 billion towards the end of 2021 but it was rejected by the Treasury.
*The energy density of hydrogen is one eighth of that of diesel fuel so the fuel storage tanks on the trains would need to be eight times bigger meaning it is not suitable for freight and for high speed passenger trains which can travel 1000kms a day.
The ’eminent economist Ross Garnaut’ is well aware of supply and demand so he will offer up any bs that his paymasters wish for .
One other small point: if by some miracle Australia pulled this off, China wouldn’t reduce emissions. They would simply move on to different products to manufacture. They have a lot of people to feed.
China would just go on making the inexpensive stuff they usually do, from cheap energy and forced non-union labour, and expensive, brittle, and self-destructing Australian stuff will rust on the lot or shelf.
Its amazing isn’t it. Every “green” solution to a non-existent problem ignores fundamentals. China will effectively allow Australia to slow its economic growth on the basis of China allegedly emitting less co2? Like every other crazy green thought bubble…..its not going to happen…
Yes. The “green” solutions are usually advanced by people who know next to nothing about the real world.
If someone thinks they are going to cure cancer I would say to them “How about you go and get trained as an Oncologist. Not watch a few TV programs and decide to tell everybody else how it is their duty to cure cancer by doing what you tell them.”
The reason that we export commodities instead of processing them in Australia is that our domestic wages are some of the highest in the world. No amount of green fantasies will change that, and prevent the huge additional costs of manufacturing anything onshore.
That is fixable, with productivity gains. The Japanese faced the same problem, and solved it with massive automation, so the output of each worker more than compensated for the high wages. But you need affordable taxes to make that solution fly.
That, and affordable energy.
Is that why the shelves and car lots are filled with Japanese brands made in Korea, Canada, US, China, etc?
Yes. Japan kept the hi tech components and outsourced the labour intensive parts to China. A lot of so called Japanese cars imported into Australia are made in Thailand with only a fraction of parts made in Japan
That’s also why the Nikkei stock market has been doing so well since 1990. People in the US complain about their retirement savings because of the market going down. In Japan it’s lower than 1990.
I’m pretty sure that most of that was based on asset price inflation, i.e.property market speculation. No one seems immune to it (do they, China 🙂 ), but the Japanese manufacturers largely seem to have held their own.
We need to develop “green robotics” to replace human labour. Save on payroll, compliance and union issues. But only “green lithium battery powered robots” that can create green products, in a green world…
China is way ahead with using ‘green robots’ they’re called Uyghurs…
Errol,
Only the Mining and Rural industries have seen productivity gains in Oz. The ALP, ABC ACTU would know as much about productivity gains as they know about “net zero”. That is, SFA.
The real reason Oz had a successful manufacturing sector had only a little to do with low energy costs. It was very high import duties & import quotas which allowed our expensive manufactured goods to compete with tax loaded imports, & supply expensive goods, when not enough imports to meet demand were allowed in to the country.
Probably not a bad scheme to adopt today.
I have always wondered if the dumbest people studied economics & law, but now I realise the real dumb study journalism.
Australia should start by trying to save themselves (from themselves).
I don’t know who you are, but you would make an excellent Prime Minister. The true completion for this position has zero capability (not like net zero!!!).
One of the downsides of not making stuff is that you soon lose the ability to make anything.
Ligang Song is an economist – he has NEVER made anything. Before banging on about the virtues of green hydrogen, he should have a go at making it and selling it.
I worked with a fellow deeply involved in BHP’s attempt to make steel in Port Hedland. A friend regularly visited Rio Tinto’s research steel making project in Perth. Both these projects absorbed enormous resources and produced nothing. The same will happen with green steel – absorb enormous resources and produce nothing. The only difference is that the risk will shift to the public purse rather than individual companies. Only subsidies make the experiment viable – the same as so-called “renewable” energy.
The warmunista in Australia are pretty well organized. They run ‘climate change’ community meetings in the suburbs and fill the great cranial vacuums with their BS. So, when the ‘industrialists’ and misanthropists make announcement about the climate emergency and the terrible existential threat (that they cash in on), the brainwashed masses lap it up as truth.
You only need to understand that the EROI of hydrogen is a measly ~30%, that you need a completely new, high-grade so expensive distribution infrastructure, and you understand that ‘green hydrogen’ is not economical, and only a fool would pursue it.
Humans have been trying to get hydrogen “right” since the 1970’s haven’t we??
Andrew Forrest will fix this. Just like he “””fixed””” Anaconda Nickel.
He should still be in gaol for the persistent lies he handed out to shareholders for YEARS over that fiasco.
Professor Ross Garnaut has financial interests in Green Energy companies. He should add a disclaimer before he issues these statements.
LOL, we don’t manufacture anything of strategic importance, we only dig it up!
That could be fixed with low taxes and affordable energy. Trump proved that when he briefly brought a lot of manufacturing back to the USA with his energy independence drive, before Biden messed it up with his war on affordable energy.
Exactly what manufacturing did Trump bring back to the US? Over the 4 years of his presidency the number of manufacturing jobs in the USA decreased. See
https://www.americanmanufacturing.org/blog/what-did-donald-trump-accomplish-for-american-manufacturing/
Back in 2017 your fellow travellers were trying to credit the manufacturing renaissance to Obama. Now they’re trying to deny there ever was a manufacturing renaissance.
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2017-02-07/middle-americas-manufacturing-renaissance-predates-donald-trumps-presidency
Whatever the truth, I’m sure Biden’s expensive war on energy will help energy intensive manufacturing, right?
Rubbish Izaac:
If you read that article, manufacturing jobs grew steadily until the pandemic hit:
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES3000000001?amp%253bdata_tool=XGtable&output_view=data&include_graphs=true
But during 2020, 543000 jobs disappeared during pandemic lockdowns, which had nothing to do with Trump. Indeed it was Democrat states which wanted proplonged lockdowns
100% agree Paul. Izaac lacks research skills.
I personally think he is trying to be a bullshit artist & he’s doing a real lousy job of it.
Australia could never become a major manufacturing company our wages are simply too high 🙂
“functioning as a major world supplier of zero-carbon goods and services”!?
Surely, they jest?
Did ‘Peter Hartcher‘ happen to read that other countries are all ready to chase the same scam?
Sort of similar to previously trading CO₂ credits or carbon neutral bonds… or perhaps trading alleged CO₂ offset methods, pelletized wood, plant hectares of oil palm, farm crickets instead of practice husbandry?
Consider a little deeper into the words used, “major world supplier of zero-carbon goods”?
With China the current world’s major manufacturer and supplier of “goods”;
Fantasyland – but watch the clueless politicians grab the idea and run with it…
While de-industrialisation was proceeding during the 1980’s politicians promoted “the German Model”, “the Japanese Model”, “Import Replacement” models, all to hide their lack of real ideas about a replacement for what was being shipped to low wage Asian countries…
The idea that got the most push was “The Multi-Function Polis”…It was going to be Australia’s Silicon Valley, bringing together local geniuses and digital technology…
I didnt hold my breath then, i’m not going to this time either…
Good grief!
Australia has a population of around 27 million. By comparison, Southern California has a population of about 24 million.
Everyone in Australia could disappear tomorrow and it would mean bupkiss to global CO2 levels. And by all reports, Australia is a net sink for CO, so global CO2 might actually go up.
Why everyone in Australia isn’t just going about their lives without giving the first thought about CO2 is a complete mystery to me.
I think you mean 47 mill in California.
Well Australia supplies a lot of coal , which the world would miss. But way way behind the world’s biggest coal exporter Indonesia
Duker – No, I wrote what I meant. I meant just the 10 counties of Southern California also referred to as SoCal. That’s the Los Angeles basin and extended surrounds.
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Last I read, the population of California (2021) had declined slightly to around 40 million with more people leaving CA than entering from the South or anywhere else.
–
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To your point about coal, yes, absolutely.
If Australia emptied out, the Australian coal output would be made up from somewhere else. There is a lot of coal still in the ground and someone will mine their country’s supply to meet demand.
According to the IEA in 2021 Indonesia’s exports of thermal coal amounted to 434 Million tonnes (Mt) more than twice as much as Australia’s 199 Mt.
Meanwhile worldwide coal consuption increased by almost 6% to 7947 Mt
I didn’t know that Dave, but yup, if Australia went POOF! tomorrow, it wouldn’t make a hangnail’s difference to Global ‘Caahbon’.
But you forgot the coking coal exports, a similar tonnage
Unfortunately quite intelligent people fall for the green hydrogen pitch.
Professor Ross Garnaut in his Garnaut Review (2011) maintained –
(1) That the science enunciated by the IPCC was now settled on the criminal standard ( beyond a reasonable doubt) up from the civil standard (the balance of probabilities) enunciated in his Garnaut Report (2008).
(2) Geopolitically, that ‘against all the odds’ the world was on its way to an enforceable world carbon treaty to reduce anthropogenic emissions.
This was four years before Paris.
On green hydrogen, not only Garnaut but the former Chief Scientist of Australia Dr. Alan Finkel are all in on green hydrogen, writing in “The Quarterly” in April last year that Australia has ample solar and wind and water (including sea water) for hydrolysis of the water to produce green hydrogen.
Dr.John Constable at the GWPF has a paper in rebuttal,” Hydrogen: Fuel of the Future?”
To date there is no production and export of green hydrogen at scale because by law Australia has banned nuclear and wind and solar will not do the job.
Our Climate Minister and a legion of business people are spreading the propaganda around the world that Australia will become the “Saudi Arabia” of Green Hydrogen.
Most countries can produce “brown” or “blue” hydrogen domestically and don’t need
to import Green Hydrogen at extra cost from Australia.
And.if Australia was to instantly vaporize (no greenhouse gases emitted, but the continent gone), the climate would not notice. There are many reasons for this, but the key one is that CO2 does not drive climate – climate drives Co2, which has been shown, over and over for decades.
geography does play a part. Replacing Australia with ocean would mean missing a goodly influence of some aort
my aorta fibrillate at the prospect of never losing another Ashes series.
”By what magical arithmetic can Australia eliminate 8 per cent of world emissions if it churns out only 1 per cent? By functioning as a major world supplier of zero-carbon goods and services which will allow the rest of the world, and China especially, to cut its emissions.”
Oh great all powerful god in the ever-lovin sky, save us from these half-witted imbeciles before it’s too late!
Appearances are that ship already sailed. Its is time to launch the life boats, if they can still float.
They’ll sink. Weighed down by far too much CO2.
“Nobody to my knowledge has found a way to convert hideously expensive green hydrogen into competitively priced green steel and silicon.”
There are existing commercial plants that use hydrogen (albeit derived from natural gas) to produce iron from ore. The iron so produced is the major input into steel. Elemental carbon (boo hiss) and other elements such as nickel, molybdenum, manganese, titanium, boron, cobalt, nitrogen, and vanadium, are added to the iron in its liquid phase to produce the various types and grades of steel.
One such plant is in Toledo, Ohio and is owned and run by Cleveland Cliffs Corporation. More information is available at this link.
I believe there is a similar plant in Scandinavia.
I don’t know anything about silicon production.
Yeah, can’t believe that there would be residual hydrogen at those temperatures.
Burn hydrogen and it emits a Green House Gas called “water vapor”. Much more Green House “Gasy” than CO2.
Remind me again what the excuse to go “Carbon Free” was all about?
“saving the world” certainly has become a grifter’s edenic trough of all publicly funded troughs.
I’m not sure about ‘greedy tax rises’, I know manufacturing in the ’50s and ’60s was protected by high tariff barriers and it was only around 2008 with the push to wind and solar that manufacturing stared to decline as a share of GDP.
Production from burning hydrogen and/or “renewable” sources can only refer to the heat input. If made without carbon, it isn’t steel but a poor grade of cast iron. SSAB reportedly used carbon reduced from limestone – I think calcium carbonate – to make sheet steel, but then called that product “fossil free” ignoring that the source was from once living material. In steelmaking, the traditional best sources for carbon are coked coal or petroleum. Electrical furnaces use carbon rod electrodes, often made from one or the other same two materials. Other sources for coke and electrodes are possible, but like the SSAB sheet steel, production of coke releases other carbon compounds. A heavy carbon support industry is necessary for the carbon ingredient and smelting infrastructure, regardless of where the heat comes from.
I haven’t found a reliable reference for the true carbon cost-per-unit mass of the SSAB product, or how sheet product was apparently turned into casting, tires, wiring and other non-sheet-steel components by Volvo for their entirely “fossil free” mining vehicle.
See those failed launches of Artemis because of fuel leaks? The fuel is liquid hydrogen, and with all the resources available, they can’t stop it leaking when transferring from one tank to another. That’s liquid hydrogen for you – green, blue or rainbow coloured. And the gaseous version isn’t much better.
I read somewhere that H is the lightest element in the universe? Its mass is nothing, well not quite nothing…Very hard to stop leaks… I also see its colourless, odourless, tasteless and highly combusible….So very little density, need a lot of it to power anything, such as an electric motor..
Yep it has one eighth the energy density of diesel so to replace a diesel train you would need a train with an eight times bigger fuel tank which is why Network Rail in the UK have said that hydrogen powered trains are unsuitable for freight trains and also for high speed passenger trains which can travel 1000kms or more a day
At WEF with UN climate tool “We own the science.”
Partnered with Alphabet to alter search results in both Google and Youtube.
https://youtu.be/cKoAoPi8sc0
Old news, Joel, but thanks for the reminder
I would not worry too much about this article. Not many read the SMH these days, and those who do are already dedicated disciples of this new religion. Ross Garnaut has burned through whatever credibility he had with left-wing prognostications over the years, all of them proving to be wrong.
manufacturing cheap goods in quantity worked to pull Japan out of its economic crisis after the war. Maybe it could also give Australia a good shot at becoming a first world nation.
Listen, you can already hear the sighs of relief from the Red Army.
Well all Peter Hartcher and the Silly Morning Herald and perfessor Ross Garnaut at the ANU have to do is lead the way with net zero and demonstrate it with their respective institutions. We’ll need their fossil fuel legacy buildings furniture and equipment so they can start with a clean slate and get on with it. Show us how it all works experts.
anything is possible if you don’t know what you’re talking about
I have great cutlery from Australian firm Maxwell & Williams, … made in China.
https://www.zanui.com.au/blog/maxwell-william-australian-icon/