GREEN HYDROGEN

[Bruce Tuncks]

I read about complaints against Forrest's green hydrogen plans where it was asked about the level of taxpayer funding.

Compared with the taxpayer support for wars, I reckon the funding is tiny.

This got me wondering about how much wars really cost....  I reckon the first world war still costs the taxpayer millions a week for pensions. But ww1 costs are hopefully coming to an end, but I wonder how much the total was. Forrest's ventures would be nothing in comparison is my guess, and if a war was avoided because of green hydrogen, the taxpayer would be way better off.

[onetrack]

I don't believe anyone could really calculate a total cost of Wars, the figures would be astronomical. As to WW1 for Australia .....

 

"The cost of the war was £377 million, of which 70% was borrowed and the rest came from taxes. Overall, the war had a significantly negative impact on the Australia economy. Real aggregate Gross Domestic Product (GDP) declined by 9.5 percent over the period 1914 to 1920, while the mobilization of personnel resulted in a 6 percent decline in civilian employment. Meanwhile, although population growth continued during the war years, it was only half that of the prewar rate. Per capita incomes also declined sharply, failing by 16 percent."

 

I believe the financial cost of WW1 for us was still being paid off when WW2 started. The cost of WW2 was horrendous to us, but the Australian Govt made a large windfall gain in selling off U.S. military surplus that was left in our region.

The Disposals Commissions sales and auctions brought in multiple hundreds of millions of pounds for the Govt between 1946 and 1950 - after the Americans agreed to sell all the remaining military surplus in our region to Australia for around 5% of its original manufacturing cost. There was a lot of surplus equipment hauled back to Australia from the Pacific Islands and sold here - mainly construction equipment which was sorely needed.

 

I understand that the financial cost of WW2 has long been paid off, but it's hard to track down because the War costs were amalgamated with a lot of other Govt expenditure - and the Govt and Australians in general got a lot of benefit from infrastructure installed during WW2 that reduced our costs after the War.

 

I think the gripes about Forrests Green Hydrogen project are based around the fact that Forrest has plenty of his own money to invest in these projects, and many people feel a bit miffed that their tax money is being thrown at billionaires pet projects.

But the Govt is always throwing subsidy money at businesses in an attempt to develop new industries, or to try and make Australia a world leader in technology.

 

I personally have my doubts about Forrests Green Hydrogen, the theory is good - but the practicalities of developing it as a full-blown energy source capable of totally replacing coal and oil, is taking it to a whole new level that I don't consider is attainable.

One has to keep in mind that Twiggy Forrest is full of huge ideas, plenty of sales and marketing BS, and he's pretty good at spending investors money while he protects his own fortune.

 

His initial large mining project at Murrin Murrin in the late 1990's was a financial disaster for his Minara Resources, on a scale rarely seen anywhere.

Forrest believed that they could produce cheap nickel and cobalt from Murrin Murrin by building and using large pressurised autoclaves to treat the ore.

 

It was a whole new treatment idea - and costly and slow to operate - and the cost overruns and poor performance of the autoclave treatment system - plus a fall in the nickel price, sent Minara to the wall, in a big way.

A large number of American investors lost billions investing in Minara, all based on Twiggys BS-ing to them that they'd make huge returns on Murrin Murrin.

 

Glencore eventually took over Minara, and I think this was because Glencore and its funders were the biggest investors in the project, and they had to try and salvage something from the wreckage.

Glencore finally got the autoclave system to perform after about 10 years, and along with a payout from the plant builders (because the plant wouldn't perform to the constructors specs) - plus a substantially increased nickel price, saw Minara finally turn profitable eventually.

 

I can see the rush to "environmentally-friendly" energy sources is going to burn a lot of arses before we eventually get any new energy and power systems bedded down.

But there's still a lot of development groundwork and technological advances needed, before we get to the point of self-sufficient projects, that aren't perpetual money pits.

 

Edited July 8, 2022 by onetrack

[Yenn]

I read somewhere that Twiggy is going to produce clean electricity in the NT and supply Darwin and Singapore. Singapore is going to have an undersea cable from Darwin. That cable is supposedly going to be built in Gladstone. I wonder where. There is only a refinery producing alumina from Bauxite and an aluminium smelter in the area. The aluminium is produced in the form of bars about 200mm in dia. and 2.5metres long. It is going to take a lot to transform them into an undersea cable, which I assume has several conductors and a load of insulation. A new factory needed, but at least there is plenty of room for such an endevour as the government bought up all the best agricultural ground in the area and called it industrial land and it has been producing very little for the last 25 years.

[pmccarthy]

They have already given up on the undersea cable idea.