The battle of the billionaires has become a news story. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has come face-to-face with Australia’s richest billionaire, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest.
Musk, a founding investor in battery-powered car giant Tesla, derided hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as “mind-bogglingly stupid.” Forrest has made a big bet on green hydrogen through his company Fortescue Future Industries. No wonder Forrest called Musk “just a businessman” rather than a “real climate avenger.”
Stush might sound like a tabloid. But at its heart is a serious debate about the future of world industry. Battery-electric cars have already proven their value, while hydrogen fuel-cell cars are still emerging. But green hydrogen is not a one-trick pony – it can replace fossil fuels in many high-emissions industrial processes, such as steel or cement.
As we accelerate into a greener future, will batteries or fuel cells power the world? The short answer is, we need both.
The battle for the future?
Mook and his company Tesla support batteries and battery-powered electric vehicles. And Musk is doing this on a grand scale, with his massive factories churning out millions of lithium-ion batteries to produce battery-electric vehicles. Other corporations like LG and Samsung are setting up their own giant factories.
In contrast, Forrest strongly supports green hydrogen. To make it a reality, he envisions vast solar arrays in Australia’s sun-thirsty north and west to encourage the electrolysis process that splits water into its components, hydrogen and oxygen. In a fuel cell car, green hydrogen is recombined with oxygen and generates electricity.
While Teslas and many other battery electric cars are appearing on roads around the world, fuel cell cars have had limited appeal to this day. They are rare in other countries, with Japan’s Toyota and South Korea’s Hyundai supporting them. Forrest believes this could change when green hydrogen becomes available in large quantities and costs decrease.
Musk has a point. He asks what is the point of generating clean energy to produce hydrogen to produce electricity to power a car? Why not just store the green electricity in batteries and use it directly?
While this reality may limit the adoption of fuel-cell vehicles in the medium term, Forrest sees green hydrogen as a miracle commodity and a long-term prospect. Speaking last year, Forrest predicted that green hydrogen could become the world’s largest industry, generating $18.5 trillion in revenue by 2050.
why? Green hydrogen is versatile. Unlike batteries, green hydrogen can replace oil, coal and gas in all their uses – including fuel in fuel cell electric vehicles. Green hydrogen can produce green steel, green cement, green glass, green plastics and green fertilizer (with green ammonia).
This is the real reason why green hydrogen is important. As I argue in my forthcoming book, it makes total fossil fuel replacement possible.
How far is total replacement?
Forrest and the Green Hydrogen company are focused on green hydrogen as a universal replacement for vehicles, not just fuel.
This changes how we look at the hydrogen-battery debate. While battery-electric technology is at the forefront of consumer cars, batteries are less efficient at powering heavy-duty vehicles like cars. That’s because they need super heavy batteries to get enough range and power. In contrast, fuel cells’ ability to store large amounts of hydrogen means they may be needed to power trucks, trains, boats and ships.
Giant industrial economies in Australia’s north, such as South Korea, Japan and China, are seeing green hydrogen as a way to cut carbon. As a fraction of the water used in electrolysis, the technique should result in significant water savings.
While these countries can generate their own green hydrogen using water, solar and wind, they are more likely to look to overseas suppliers, such as Australia, for our solar and wind resources.
But there are cost and scale challenges to overcome, particularly the cost of the electrolyser. Recent studies show that this bottleneck is significant, but can be overcome with government and industry support.
Costs should decrease rapidly over the next few years. By the end of this year, the world will have its first gigawatt of electrolysis capacity. In the year By 2030, according to a new International Energy Agency report, it could have 134 to 200 gigawatts of capacity if all planned projects proceed. From 2021, 38 gigawatts of capacity were planned in Australia. Some of these don’t last, of course. But many will be.
Green hydrogen is not a direct competitor to light battery-electric cars. It’s complementary – and opens up many new and urgently needed avenues in areas where zeroing is difficult. So Muck is wrong about hydrogen. But he’s right about batteries – we need them too.
For our part, Australia has everything to gain from accelerating the future of the green hydrogen industry. As coal, oil and gas decline, we may have a large export industry to tide over the event. And we benefit from the rich mineral reserves needed in the battery. 
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