Article by Hannah Wootton, courtesy of Financial Review
28.02.2025
Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest beams out from the cover of the latest edition of TIME magazine. Hand on hip, Canadian tuxedo, he is shown emerging from the dust at Fortescue’s Christmas Creek mine site in Western Australia: “The planet’s unlikely ally”.
TIME’s slow descent from the world’s most influential magazine to Boomers’ outdated bathroom read is complete.
As TIME was pitching Twiggy for leading the global green revolution, the hydrogen bubble he has invested billions of dollars in is suffering. Last week, Fortescue announced that it was considering halting its commissioned hydrogen projects. This included its only significant project in the space: a green hydrogen refuelling plant in Arizona into which it has sunk $US550 million of capex.
By sheer coincidence, last week was also when Nikola Motors filed for bankruptcy in the US.
Nikola had promised to be the Tesla of hydrogen-powered vehicles. At its peak in 2020, the car start-up was worth $US13 billion. It was pitching carbon-free trucks, and soon had a partnership with General Motors. Reservations were coming out of its ears.
Nikola’s hydrogen trucks (which are still relatively rare on a commercial scale) gained unwanted notoriety because of a 2018 video promo, showing one of them gliding through the desert. It was true Nikola trucks were running without carbon-spewing engines, as the promo promised, but they weren’t doing so on hydrogen. Instead, the company would admit in 2020, they were just rolling down gradual inclines.
Then CEO Trevor Milton was jailed for fraud. Nikola tried to push on with the hydrogen dream. It found a willing buyer for its Arizona hydrogen refuelling plant in Fortescue, which paid $US24 million for the facility in 2023.
But any hope that their trucks would one day exist at-scale was buried when the bankruptcy notice was signed by the hand of Nikola’s former director Andy Vesey last week. Vesey is a former CEO of AGL Energy. His current role is as the top clean energy executive in North America for Fortescue.
Hat-trick of hot-air howlers
To complete the hat-trick of hot-air howlers, European hydrogen-powered truck outfit Hyvia also went into liquidation last week. Hyvia was a joint venture by French carmaker Renault and US power company Plug Power – where Twiggy’s interests make an appearance.
Fortescue had a memorandum of understanding to buy a stake in Plug’s Texas green hydrogen project as part of its now-defunct expansion plans. The latter also planned to be partners for Fortescue’s Gladstone hydrogen electrolyser factory in Queensland. Neither deal eventuated.
You wouldn’t know from the TIME puff piece that Forrest’s hydrogen plans had all the appeal of an inert gas. Instead, readers marvel at the “climate activist–meets–zealous prosecutor” who has “rugged features”. It’s funny how these big features about Forrest are usually in the northern hemisphere media. Local journos take his claims with a bigger grain of salt.
Twiggy’s “crown jewel”, the TIME piece continues, is a $4 billion deal with German company Liebherr to turn Fortescue’s mining fleet green using battery and hydrogen-powered trucks. The first prototype of the latter arrived, naturally, at TIME’s photoshoot location in the Pilbara last year. Testing is still under way. Hopefully, there are a few hills around Christmas Creek that Forrest can push them down.
But what if it doesn’t work out? There is one telling concession in the TIME piece that Twiggy might be concerned that hydrogen is not the green money dream he envisaged. Dismissing quarterly returns as a “lazy” corporate fixation, he tells the magazine that people need to look to the medium or long term in their bets on decarbonisation. The company has separately reiterated that although the timelines of its hydrogen projects have changed, the overall ambition has not.
“And if we lose money on this in the long term, people say, ‘well, that’s philanthropy’.”
That is not a word you hear used to describe billions of dollars of shareholder investment for a listed company.
Nikola and Hyvia must be kicking themselves for not shrugging off their bankruptcies to investors using the philanthropy logic.