Twiggy Forrest’s Billionaire Bubble On Hydrogen’s Risks

Andrew Forrest, aka Twiggy Forrest, Australia’s third-favorite billionaire and inveterate promoter of the delusion of hydrogen for energy, recently provided the perfect example of a new trend: hydrogen climate harm denial. It’s something I’ve been watching grow for perhaps a year, just as I’ve been watching the increasing anger of hydrogen for energy advocates as they are confronted time and again with evidence that it’s not going to happen.

The occasion was his appearance on the Cleaning Up podcast, created by BNEF founder Michael Liebreich during the early days of COVID-19, and now featuring long-term UK climate policy driver Baroness Bryony Worthington as a co-host. It was Worthington who had the conversation with Forrest, and this exchange was part of their discussion.

Bryony Worthington: But it’s a fuel that happens to be a greenhouse gas that likes to escape and that essentially is hard to move around. 

Andrew Forrest: Why do you call it a greenhouse gas? 

Bryony Worthington: Well, it inhibits the breakdown of methane. 

Andrew Forrest: That’s rubbish. No, that is half the science that is put out by a group called EDF. Environmental Defense Fund. That is an acronym for Petro State. 

They put that rubbish out. Actually what happens is that it recrystallizes the other half of that formula which you haven’t been given. It recrystallizes back into existence. So I just want to say you’ve been fed a line here. It’s a dangerous line. It’s a half light. 

Let’s start with the basics: hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas and Forrest is completely wrong. While he has a billionaires’ PhD in marine ecology, he’s not a climate scientist and actual climate scientists are very clear on this.

The science is fairly straightforward. There are hydroxyl radicals — one oxygen and one hydrogen joined together in a highly reactive pair — in the atmosphere that the high global warming potential (GWP) gas methane, the useful part of natural gas, interacts with to cause its breakdown into carbon dioxide and water vapor. Hydrogen is also very reactive, and when it’s in the atmosphere it competes very effectively for the relatively limited supply of hydroxyl radicals. That means that there are fewer radicals left for methane to interact with, prolonging its duration in the atmosphere, and hence prolonging its impacts as a major greenhouse gas.

The science of methane’s breakdown was pretty much settled by the 1990s, and hydrogen’s interaction with the radicals and hence competition with methane was clear by 2000. The first quantification of the effect was in 2006, and it was relatively low, in the single digit multiples of carbon dioxide over 100 years. Then another study was performed leading to publication in the early 2020s with a better methodology and it found a global warming potential over 20 years (GWP20) of around 37 times that of carbon dioxide and a GWP100 of about 12 times. A study released this year with a few more variables in the mix found a GWP20 of 33 and a GWP100 of 11, so the science isn’t fully settled on exactly how bad it is, but it is agreeing that it’s bad and what range of bad it’s in.

This is normal for atmospheric sciences related to the potency of greenhouse gases. Methane has hunted up and down a bit, with the meta-analysis that is the IPCC’s regular reports most recently downgrading it a small amount. 

GWP20 is important, as methane is normally a short-lived atmospheric gas with the majority of its impacts in the couple of decades after it is emitted to the atmosphere. That’s especially important right now as the simplest thing we can do to prevent near term heating is avoid leaking methane today. Sharp eyes will have noted that it degrades into two other greenhouse gases as well, the long-lived carbon dioxide and the very short lived water vapor, so it’s not like what it turns into is all that great either.

It’s important to note that the carbon dioxide and water vapor aren’t methane, but their global warming effects are included in the GWP of the methane that they derive from as indirect effects. Nitrous oxides aren’t direct greenhouse gases either, with their GWP100 of almost 300 tied to the creation of high GWP atmospheric ozone, which is a direct greenhouse gas. Nobody disputes nitrous oxide’s global warming potential, yet they are arguing about hydrogen, which is telling.

Hydrogen’s global warming impacts are material because hydrogen leaks, and not just a little. It’s the smallest diatomic molecule in the universe and as a result it’s the least dense gas in the universe. That’s why we have to store it at pressures equivalent to 3 to 7 kilometers under the surface of the ocean, a third to a two-thirds the depth of the Mariana Trench, or at temperatures a few degrees above absolute zero, or some combination of the two, in order to have enough of it in one place to be useful. It diffuses through metals, has no odor, and burns without any color at all, so even knowing that it’s leaking is challenging.

That means keeping it inside anything is one of the more difficult engineering and maintenance challenges we face, on the scale of throwing mass into orbit without the rockets exploding or keeping nuclear reactions under control. It’s so difficult to use that the global space industry is pivoting away from the use of liquid hydrogen to liquid methane. When actual rocket scientists and engineers don’t want to use something because it’s hard to work with, that’s worth paying attention to.

For the past few years of the most recent hydrogen hype cycle, more and more attention has been paid to the leakage problem, mostly just figuring out how bad it is. A gas station in California had leakage rates of 30% to 35% and after a couple of years of remediation, it managed to get leakage down to 2% to 10%. A hydrogen electrolyzer in Europe, where they have standards for engineering and maintenance for these kinds of things, found up to 4.2% leakage. A US Department of Energy analysis found that the best case scenario for liquid hydrogen delivered to hydrogen refueling stations was 2% leakage, just from putting liquid hydrogen into the tanker truck and then into the station’s storage tanks. 

All South Korean hydrogen buses and cars were tested, and 15% of them were found to be leaking. A liquid hydrogen storage tank at TU Delft in the Netherlands was being celebrated because it was only boiling off 5.5% of the hydrogen per day, without any capture and recovery because that would have been too expensive.

Almost 6% every day. You would have to use all of the hydrogen in the tank and refill it every four hours to get down to 1% per day, and then you would have 2% per refill driving leakage up by 12%. That’s the nature of hydrogen. There’s no way around leakage except making it where it is needed as an industrial feedstock at exactly the amount that is required when it is required and shoving it directly into the reaction chamber that leads to low leakage. That’s what we do today with 85% of hydrogen and that’s what we’ll do in the future as well.

The rule of thumb I developed last year was that hydrogen leaks 1% or more from every touch point and transfer point in supply chains, and as supply chains for distributed hydrogen use cases such as transportation or building heating would have 5 to 8 steps, it would be normal to see 5% to 10% leakages in the best case scenario in a hydrogen economy.

The European HYDRA project — yes, a hydrogen initiative apparently named after the evil organization in the Marvel Universe — funded a study on hydrogen leakage by the Politecnico di Torino, the results of which were published recently in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy. It found that due to inevitable leakages in the supply chain, a hydrogen economy that saw the levels of hydrogen usage expected in scenarios from the International Energy Agency, the Hydrogen Council, and the International Renewable Energy Agency would result in 0.75 to 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide or equivalent per year.

Those levels of greenhouse gas emissions are on the scale of all aviation or maritime shipping globally. This isn’t remotely good.

One interesting point related to this is that 5% to 10% leakage of an expensive substance, the Cristal of transportation or heating, should have been noticed economically long before any hydrogen detector cottoned on. However, all non-industrial current use cases for hydrogen are so artificial and so rarely used that hydrogen leakage doesn’t enter into the economics until it gets into the 30% range, as with the California refueling station. 

Typically, as soon as a hydrogen transportation play has to pay for its own hydrogen out of its own money, it drops hydrogen. That’s certainly the case with Hype taxi — yes, that’s actually its name, which is only outdone by HYDRA and the failed Hopium hydrogen car in the annals of hilarious hydrogen branding — a Paris-based firm that managed to get around €60,000 per hydrogen car it put on the road from governmental largesse before recently dumping hydrogen cars and pivoting to battery-electric due to persistent high retail hydrogen prices. 

To return to Forrest, it’s worth analyzing what he said a bit. First, it’s denial. The peer-reviewed science provides the GWP of gases, not Andrew Forrest. The job of people like Forrest and the people who work for them is to follow the evidence, not what they want the evidence to say.

Second, it’s very much in the same pattern as climate change denial. Forrest is asserting that the scientists who are actually experts and have been studying this effect carefully and diligently, often for decades, have overlooked something which he alone has caught. The arrogance would be breathtaking if it weren’t so plebeian.

Third, it’s completely wrong. When a hydrogen molecule and a hydroxyl radical get together, they make water and a free hydrogen atom. The water doesn’t turn into another hydroxyl radical. The hydrogen atom almost always combines with a free atmospheric oxygen molecule, O2, to form a hydroperoxyl radical. That’s an important atmospheric component that breaks down nitrous oxides and combines with other hydroperoxyl radicals to make other things, none of which are hydroxyl radicals. 

And, of course, none of that is recrystallization, as crystallization, even metaphorically, is something that occurs in solids. It’s unclear where Forrest got his information from, but he’s a billionaire so he’s surrounded by people who will confirm his biases until their dying paycheck instead of correcting him.

Fourth, it has nothing to do with the Environmental Defense Fund, but his attack on them is typical of denialism. Like me, all they are doing is reporting on the work of people who actually know what they are talking about who do the research and publish their results in peer-reviewed journals. 

Defaming them as an actor of the petrostate is bizarre, but also very typical of denialism. When our confirmation bias is confronted by a piece of evidence that contradicts the bias, our brains suffer from cognitive dissonance that makes us uncomfortable. To relieve the discomfort, unless we’ve established processes that force us to lean into it, our brains explain away the evidence. One of the key ways is by deprecating the authority of whoever or whatever provided the message, in this case the EDF.

For context, the EDF is a major global environmental group known for science-driven policies and market-based solutions. Its landmark achievements include the 1972 US ban on DDT, successful advocacy for the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments that established emissions trading to reduce acid rain, and groundbreaking methane emission standards in the oil and gas industry. EDF has driven progress in renewable energy, secured international climate commitments, and set strong accountability standards for emerging technologies. In short, EDF is clearly one of the good guys. Calling it a petrostate actor is simply Forrest protecting himself with confirmation bias.

Today’s crop of billionaires are making it clear that they didn’t bother to internalize the many lessons from history about the dangers of power and wealth. King Canute’s story seems to be a lesson about lack of technology to them, rather than the danger of listening to courtiers and other sycophants. Caesar’s memento mori attendant seems to be a lesson in more about wealth’s ability to provide servants for the most inconsequential things, rather than a lesson about humility. 

We don’t even have to go back to ancient history. During the US invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein was convinced that his army was holding the Americans at the border 300 kilometers away when they were in the suburbs of Baghdad. That was because the people who surrounded him kept telling him what he wanted to hear, not what he needed to hear.

Forrest isn’t alone in his hydrogen climate harm denial, not by a long stretch. I see it regularly, hence my calling it out last year. On social media, where I stick to LinkedIn, I regularly get pushback from hydrogen for energy types about this, including engineers who should know better but have been sucked in by those paychecks I mentioned earlier.

A preeminent denier when I published was the venerated Rocky Mountain Institute (now RMI) founded by Amory Lovins. They decided a good choice for their hydrogen-focused team was an ex-Shell oil and gas hydrogen for energy guy, and as a result they descended into the hydrogen for energy pit again. As they are RMI, I did the work to assess everything they’d published on hydrogen and wrote a 14,000 word critique and strategy guide for them as a public service. They apparently didn’t follow my advice, despite all of the evidence that they were misguided, so I’ll have to repeat the process, I suspect.

They published an apologia for hydrogen’s GWP which is just more denial and is still on their website. Another hydrogen for energy advocate cited that bit of nonsense to me earlier this week.

The International Partnership for Hydrogen and Fuel Cells in the Economy (IPHE) explicitly announced at the recent World Hydrogen Summit in Rotterdam that it would not include hydrogen’s GWP in ISO standards it is responsible for, in direct conflict with the normal inclusion of GWPs including indirect ones by the ISO. Laurent Antoni, IPHE’s executive director, justified this stance by categorically and falsely stating that “hydrogen is not a greenhouse gas.” Later he challenged me on LinkedIn, defending his indefensible position. More hydrogen for energy denial.

When I published my summary of the HYDRA project results, the deniers crawled out of the woodwork. The researchers of the study defended it, claiming that 1.5 billion tons of CO2e was great because it wasn’t as bad as the fossil fuel economy, ignoring the clear alternatives of electrification. 

Another research group, this one from the USA, decided that my publication on the HYDRA study was cause to both respond with their pro-hydrogen leakage and GWP study and defend its rather difficult to defend assumptions.

Forrest, in other words, has a cornucopia of confirmation bias defenders to draw from. This isn’t helping his major source of wealth, Fortescue, stick to hydrogen, however. When it comes to actual business, economic reality rules outside of minor side bets. Forrest’s hydrogen bets keep coming up snake eyes. That’s because hydrogen’s leakage and high GWP are just additional challenges that make it a bad gamble for energy. The real problem that makes it a money loser is its high costs, which aren’t going away.

For years, Forrest and Fortescue were pushing hydrogen for all energy. Through Fortescue Future Industries, Forrest pledged billions of dollars toward developing large-scale green hydrogen projects. He envisioned Australia exporting millions of tons of hydrogen per year to markets like Europe and Asia, positioning the country as a major player in decarbonized energy trade. Initial partnerships were ambitious, including a high-profile agreement with German energy company E.ON aimed at delivering five million tons of hydrogen annually by 2030.

In parallel, Fortescue pursued hydrogen-powered vehicles and ammonia-fueled maritime vessels. In early 2024, its vessel, Green Pioneer, became the first ocean-going ship to complete a sea trial burning ammonia. The trial in Singapore consumed about three tons of ammonia, demonstrating the technical — not economic, environmental or human health safety — feasibility of ammonia as a maritime fuel. 

Ammonia-powered vessels and ammonia as an energy carrier exports haven’t materialized and won’t, due to a combination of lack of any economic rationale and the inevitability that they would kill people due to ammonia’s multiple phases of human toxicity as it progresses through its own chemical changes.

Despite Forrest’s enthusiasm, Fortescue recently and significantly scaled back its hydrogen-for-energy ambitions. In 2024 it ignored Forrest’s dreams and invested $2.8 billion in electrified mining equipment.

Major projects, including a 50 MW electrolyzer facility in Gladstone, Queensland, and an 80 MW liquid hydrogen plant in Arizona, were cancelled due to economic challenges and changing policy conditions, notably under the Trump administration in the United States. Fortescue incurred about $150 million in losses from these cancelled projects. 

At every turn, Forrest’s hydrogen for energy ambitions have dissolved. No hydrogen-powered mining equipment. No hydrogen energy exports. No ammonia as an energy carrier shipping. More and more direct electrification.

For people who aren’t billionaires, this would likely cause them to get the wobbles. But billionaires are surrounded by people whose bread is buttered by supporting confirmation biases, not popping bubbles of delusion. The reality distortion fields of successful leaders are considered as positives due to another cognitive challenge of our hunter-gatherer ape brains, the survivor bias. The biographies of successful visionaries are rarely tempered with the vastly more numerous stories of the deluded failures, and the successes of billionaires usually ignore all of the bets they got wrong along the way.

Forrest isn’t alone in being suckered by the hydrogen for energy delusion. He isn’t alone in denying hydrogen’s climate harm due to his biases. He’s just a very good and public example of the problem, his billionaire’s PhD and toadies helping him think he’s smarter and more informed than the people actually doing the research.