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Iron ore billionaire Andrew Forrest is taking on Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk in his quest to promote green hydrogen as a game changer in the clean-energy transition.
Forrest, the founder of Fortescue Metals Group Ltd., doubled down this week on his criticism of Musk’s view that hydrogen cars are “mind-bogglingly stupid.” In a speech to Credit Suisse Group AG’s Asian Investment Conference on Wednesday, he said Musk had “every reason to fear them, and his description is perhaps better suited, in my view, to someone who peddles a battery technology as green when it runs on fossil fuel.”
The Australian mining magnate has made hydrogen, produced from renewable energy, the centerpiece of a plan to turn Fortescue, the world’s fourth-biggest iron ore exporter, into a major clean-energy producer. The materials that go into battery manufacturing are finite, he added, while hydrogen is “by far the most common element of the universe.”
More than half a million vehicles came off the Tesla production line last year, while hydrogen cars are still more a concept than a commercial reality
Musk, in turn, has spent years mocking the idea of using hydrogen fuel cells rather than electric batteries to power next-generation green vehicles. Earlier this month, he pushed back against views that hydrogen was the future, telling an audience in China that he instead was a big believer in solar and wind paired with stationary battery storage, and all transport being electric, with the exception of rockets.
On a highway, hydrogen is cleaner than gasoline and doesn’t require a massive battery and the precious lithium and recycling headaches that go with it. However, producing the fuel is expensive, both in carbon and dollars. Hydrogen has a long way to go before it matches the scale of Musk’s operation.
More than half a million vehicles came off the Tesla production line last year, while hydrogen cars are still more a concept than a commercial reality. The bulk of the car, bus and light-truck market was likely to favor batteries as a cheaper solution than hydrogen fuel cells, BloombergNEF said in a report last year on the hydrogen industry.
Tesla’s investor relations department didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment outside of U.S. working hours. A representative for the company in China didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Forrest remains optimistic, pointing to China’s ambition to have over a million hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles on the road by 2030 along with plans in Japan and South Korea to increase their use. On a broader level, industries would only switch to hydrogen if there was a sound business case.
“Green energies need to be available at an industrial, global scale, and at a price that competes with fossil fuels,” Forrest said. “When fossil fuel energy becomes more expensive than renewable energy, that’s when we will reach the tipping point.”
(By James Thornhill, with assistance from Chunying Zhang)
4 Comments
William Pederson
There are pro’s and cons to both green energy vehicles. I think we will need both to make the transition. Electric powered vehicles have a place and so does hydrogen. Depends on the application. miner 49er
Richard Vivian
I think Twiggy is not doing his own argument any favors by claiming electric vehicles run on fossil fuels.
He needs to be above that and stay focused. The reality is that the electricity grid is greening worldwide and electric vehicles don’t have a polluting tailpipe which causes so much pollution in cities worldwide. An electric car can be charged directly from solar panels on a garage roof, which is the ultimate in clean and efficient use of energy.
Elon Musks claims re Hydrogen are true in relation to transport because Elon has a good understanding of physics( which he studied at university). BEV’s are already cost competitive with ICE cars and the amount of investment is huge, car makers have already made the decision on which energy format will be the future of vehicles and it will be mostly BEV. The issues around lack of range( if 500km is lack of range) are solvable by battery swap for higher energy use cases, not to mention the rapid advances in battery technology underway.
The problem for Hydrogen is the fundamentals of the Hydrogen atom which make the storage and transport of Hydrogen costly particularly for small scale use cases like cars.
Hydrogen will never compete with BEV . But it doesn’t have to because Hydrogen has so many other more profitable use cases in the future.
Drew
Burning it like gasoline is not better than gasoline. Using it in a fuel cell requires a rare metal for a catalyst battery tech is not a mature tech and has considerable improves in its future. Today’s battery tech makes a very good vehicle. Investing in hydrogen tech will be risky as it may only have a small market. Battery tech only needs to improve by 50% over the next 10 years to make hydrogen non viable opin the market place. I believe that a 50% improvement in battery tech. Over 10 years is a sure bet, vs having hydrogen infrastructure in place in 10 years to challenge battery vehicles.
Shaun
Sorry to say but Elon is right. Is a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle/technology better than gas/diesel? Yes! But it was a missed opportunity that should have been deployed 50 years ago when the technology was new and viable. The use of energy in producing the hydrogen to then be used to create the electricity in the fuel cell just isn’t efficient. We have come an insanely long way in the last 15 years in terms of battery technologies that have vastly surpassed hydrogen fuel cell technology in every meaningful way. The cost now to instal hydrogen fuel cell stations, the transportation, and the overall energy consumption just doesn’t make any sense. Battery EV is the future. It’s vastly cheaper, readily available, and consumer friendly.