Essay by Eric Worrall
A glorious vision of green steel, green cement, green fertilizer, green hydrogen and green energy export business. Prosperity revived. Shame the numbers don’t add up.
Albanese has just laid out a radical new vision for Australia in the region: an exporter of clean energy and a green producer.
John Mathews Professor Emeritus, Macquarie School of Business, Macquarie University
Elizabeth Thurbon Scientia Professor of International Relations/International Political Economy, UNSW Sydney
Hao Tan Associate Professor, Newcastle Business School, University of Newcastle
Sung-Young Kim Senior Lecturer in International Relations, Political Discipline & International Relations, Macquarie School of Social Sciences, Macquarie University
Published: July 14, 2022 6.03am AEST
Our green and clean transition is bigger than just renewable energy
Since Labor took office, we’ve heard a lot about our future as a renewable energy superpower. The often overlooked fact is that this not only means generating renewable electricity and green hydrogen at scale, but also investing in new industries and processes to capture as many opportunities as possible.
This means investing in upstream industries such as solar array manufacturing and electrolytics manufacturing, as well as downstream industries such as green steel, green cement and green fertilizer. These new green products will be produced using locally produced cheap green hydrogen and clean renewable energy supplies. Ross Garnaut outlined.
Green energy is no longer a relevant concern. Australia’s biggest companies are leading the way.
Andrew Forrest’s new subsidiary company, Fortescue’s Future Industries, has begun construction on a $1 billion project building green hydrogen production components, cabling and renewable power generation in central Queensland. This single project is expected to double global green hydrogen production capacity. It will make Queensland home to a new green hydrogen fuel and components export industry.
If our new government can solve this problem and turn the vision into reality, we can embrace a new green growth economy and start our own green industrial revolution.
Better yet, Australia can finally leverage its abundant land and renewable resources to fast-track the clean economic development of its Indo-Pacific neighbors.
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I understand why award-takers find this vision so beautiful. The world is remade, happy workers working under the sun, building a better future. A dream, a worker’s paradise. In my experience, however, authors of such scenarios rarely envision themselves strutting in the sun with other workers.
The vision is of course wrong. Numbers don’t add upand never added. S&P Large Copper Shortage. Billions of tons of matter that we don’t havea government-funded chimera, a huge waste of resources, would make us poorer.
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