Alumni-WA-Event

So thanks Claire. Thanks for the invitation to come and speak and thanks for the crowd for turning up tonight. It's not an infrequent occurrence having been to quite a few meetings on hydrogen over the past year or two. It always manages as a topic to fill a room, and that I think says a lot about the interest both from industry, from government and from research in this area and particularly people trying to understand the opportunity for Australia. So, what I'm gonna do in my 20 minute slot is to give you a bit of an overview of what the opportunity for Australia is. That's directed at people who are sort of trying to understand for basics and there'll be quite a few people who've seen some of this before or the various other events we've spoken about. I'm gonna talk a little bit about some of the technologies and some of the challenges in developing a hydrogen industry for Australia and that'll touch on the CSIRO roadmap that Claire's mentioned. And then I'll hand over to Mike Dolan who'll talk about Fortescue and Luke Cox will talk about Hazer Group. So let's start at the beginning. I think it's always good to ask the questions in a fairly straight forward and simple way, and this is a question as I say, a lot of people with a lot of interest in hydrogen as an energy carrier at the moment. So you may ask the question, well, why? Why is this of interest? And particularly I guess why is it interesting now? For those people who've been around the energy sector for a number of years, it is not the first time you will have heard of hydrogen energy systems as a fantastic emerging new technology. What I hope to do is show you that this time it's a little bit different, and that perhaps this time it really is gonna kick off in a big way the way people are seeing it happening before. So let's look at our energy system, and our energy system really is dominated by three areas. By electricity, so that's the generation of power, for our electricity networks. The powering of our transport systems be they light vehicles, heavy vehicles, ships and planes. And by heat. By heat I mean other uses of energy in industry and domestic application. So things like natural gas used in industrial heating and in domestic heating of course. So if you look at those three energy areas, you can see the transport there on the right hand side. Transport and electricity are by far the biggest single, or the biggest two contributors to energy consumption in Australia. So, trying to do something about decarbonizing those sectors will have or can have a very large impact on the omissions reduction aspirations that many of us have. And so where does hydrogen play a role? Well, the first thing you can do with hydrogen is burn it. So, that's a hydrogen flame. That is the Chief Scientist of Australia, Alan Finkel in front of a hydrogen barbecue which is being made here in Australia by a company called Heatlie. So you can burn it and you can in fact cook sausages with hydrogen, but of course you can use it for burning in industrial processes too. So, simple combustion of hydrogen works and generates a lotta heat. If you wanna work with electricity, in let's say stationary power generation or stationary power applications, you can take hydrogen and put it into a fuel cell and a fuel cell is a device that simply turns the chemical energy of hydrogen into electricity, and that electricity can be simply just put in in our grid the way we use it and we carry on with essentially a decarbonized fuel source. You can also put fuel cells in vehicles and there are many companies around the world putting fuel cells into cars. Most notably in Australia, Toyota and Hyundai are essentially selling cars with hydrogen fuel cells in them. Heavy vehicles applications are emerging primarily overseas but lots of opportunities for Australia for things like long distance haulage and trucks using larger fuel cells and even trains. So there companies and research going on all over the world looking at how we can integrate some of the hydrogen energy systems into all of these applications. So you can see that using hydrogen in the energy sector, is quite a big opportunity 'cause we have solutions to most of the energy requirements that we have. So, the really important thing here and I'll just reiterate this is the chemistry of hydrogen is very important. So, when we take hydrogen and burn it, or we put it into a fuel cell it's a very simple chemical reaction. We take hydrogen, we react it with oxygen in a flame or in a fuel cell as I say and we produce energy and water. So water is the only product of those chemical reactions. So there's no carbon dioxide admitted from any of those reactions and that's why people are really fascinated by the opportunity of using this to decarbonize a lot of the energy sector. It's all about the products being essentially non-greenhouse gases and hydrogen therefore being an energy vector or an energy carrier that can start to be used for decarbonizing our energy sector. That's not the whole story. The rest of the story is that hydrogen is already used and can be used more and increasingly in the industrial sector. So many, there is already a very large hydrogen industry globally that uses hydrogen for things like petrochemical processing and for production of ammonia and ammonia in case you're not aware is probably the chemical that's the basis of our society because it's the basis of fertiliser and agriculture, depends heavily on the production of ammonia using hydrogen. So it's already a big market, but it's primarily produced by fossil means as I'll talk about in a moment. But the opportunities for increasing the use of low admissions hydrogen in the industrial sector is also huge. So what you can see is the take home message is hydrogen can be used to eliminate CO2 emissions from both energy and industrial feed stock value chains. So that sounds great, that's good. Everybody's happy, easy. How hard can it be right? I've shown you how it's done. So, it almost sounds too good to be true. Well, the answer is of course that there are challenges. The first problem is that hydrogen has a very low occurrence in nature as hydrogen. So, in molecular hydrogen, H2 is only really found in very sparing quantities in the atmosphere and most of the hydrogen in the world is tied chemically to other atoms like water, H2O, in carbon compounds like natural gas, methane, and a lot of it's in biological molecules and things like proteins and lipids that make up life as we know it. So, there's a lot of molecules, there's a lot of hydrogen. It's the most abundant element in the universe, but most of it on Earth is tied up in other chemicals. Separating hydrogen from all of these molecules costs. So it costs energy. We have to break chemical bonds to liberate hydrogen from those molecules. For instance here I've shown you the rough energetics of splitting water and you can see that if we wanna split water we need to expend about 4.4 kilowatt hours per litre to split the water to yield 111 grammes of hydrogen and so there's an energy penalty associated with that. So, there is an energy cost which effectively is a financial cost to producing hydrogen from water and any of those other energy carriers that, or any of those other hydrogen carriers that I spoke about a minute ago. The key challenge really is that the cheapest way of making hydrogen at the moment results in CO2 admissions and that's because making hydrogen from fossil fuels is both cheap and efficient and therefore industry has gone that way because when industry was being developed for producing hydrogen, the focus on emissions and CO2 was not so great. So, basically almost all of the world, well, 95% of the world's hydrogen currently is produced from fossil fuels. The most common of those is a process called steam methane reforming, which takes natural gas that we extract. Here in the west of course a very big part of the economy. And essentially reduces, reacts it with steam to produce hydrogen and CO2. So if you want to reduce the admissions from that process you've gotta do something about that CO2. That's the key challenge for the fossil fuel pathways, and that's why people are looking very extensively at using processes like carbon capture utilisation storage to mitigate those CO2 admissions to essentially remove the CO2 from the production systems. So, just a little I guess segue into some of the technologies that are being developed. So, all of these energy systems now are the subject, and have been the subject for many years in many ways. Subjects of intense research to try and increase efficiencies, reduce costs, scale up hydrogen production systems. And this is perhaps one of the most important technologies that are really currently being deployed industrially. So this is electrolysis. And so in electrolysis what you do is you actually do the reverse of what a fuel cell does. You take electrical energy which you can produce from renewable energy be it wind or solar or hydro electric electricity, and you use that electrical power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen travels across the membrane, the membrane in the centre there, the yellow block, and can be separated and stored and the oxygen likewise can be extracted and stored but in most cases, the oxygen is kinda a secondary product that people don't use. It's a very exotic piece of electric chemistry if you will. It's exotic but simple, but it is quite expensive to do. So, the cost of producing hydrogen by electrolysis is relatively speaking high but it is coming down and I'll talk to you about some of the projections we have around that cost trajectory in a moment. We in CSIRO of course, we work on all these wonderful processes. So we've developed our own electrolysis systems and fuel cell systems for that matter. So quite well experienced in the science of hydrogen, hydrogen production and utilisation. And I guess, yes. So let's just point out there, the key components there or the reason that it's expensive is unique precious metal catalysts. It's quite a complex piece of equipment to assemble. The manufacturing process is quite laborious because it's still fairly small scale, and so largely hand built. And so again reducing the cost of electrolysis systems by through cheaper materials and manufacturing efficiencies is a big focus of R&D. The second area really I wanted to touch on in terms of hydrogen technology development is another big challenge. It's around hydrogen storage and distribution. And it's quite difficult to get your head 'round this in some ways I suppose but the real challenge is that hydrogen, the energy density of hydrogen, that's the amount of energy you can put in to a hydrogen molecule is both high and low. That sounds like a contradiction but it actually isn't. The energy density of hydrogen by weight is very, very high. So the amount of energy per kilo is very, very high because it's a very light molecule. The problem is because it's a very light molecule and it's low density, the amount of hydrogen energy you get per litre of hydrogen is very low. So, what that tells you is that the there are places you're going to want to use hydrogen and store and distribute hydrogen which if they're depending on volume, you're gonna need to be able to do something clever. If all you care about is weight you're in business straight away. And that volume issue is probably the key issue that people are looking at and I'll just give you a bit of a simple comparison of some of those points. So let's take a fuel tank. Let's take a petrol tank, standard petrol tank in a current car. 'Round about a 50 litre tank. So it's a 50 litre tank. Petrol is a fantastically volumetric and high volumetric energy density material. Lots of energy per litre. Big tip for the green line there. It's weight is relatively high. So, a fuel tank typically, a fuel tank full of petrol's gonna weight about 37 kilos. So, you're carrying quite a lotta weight but it's all crammed into quite a small volume. The energy you get in that fuel tank, if you look at the energy from the fuel, it's about 1.7 gigajoules per tank of fuel. That sounds like a big number, right? I was quite surprised by that. And the range you get from a tank of petrol is around about 500 kilometres. Let's do the same for hydrogen, and these are hydrogen fuel tanks that are used in current vehicles. They're polymer composite hydrogen fuel tanks. Very high tanks, high pressure tanks that you can cram 70 megapixels of hydrogen into, and so if you take a typical hydrogen fuel tank in let's say a Toyota Mirai or a Hyundai Nexo, you typically can cram about five kilos into a volume of 125 litres. So, compare the volumes you can see the volume difference there. 37 kilos of fuel whereas we only have five kilos of hydrogen, but the volume is 125 litres versus 50 litres first. Essentially the same range of fuel. So, you need quite a lotta fuel tanks in a hydrogen vehicle but they are very light, the fuel is very light. So again, and those two systems roughly will give you around about 500 kilometres of range for the two vehicles. The eagle eyed amongst you may look at the energy content of those tanks and say, okay, so the energy of the hydrogen tank is around about 710 megajoules. The energy, yeah. The energy from a petrol tank is about 1.7 gigajoules. That's a big difference. What's that about? Well, it's to do with the efficiency of conversion of the hydrogen energy into electrical energy that drives the car. So, petrol tanks, petrol engines are quite a lot less efficient in terms of converting the energy and the fossil fuel to motion. What does this mean? Well, it means that there's been a big effort over quite a few years now to look at ways of moving hydrogen around in a smaller volume. So, things like compressing hydrogen to 70 mega pascals. That's quite a high pressure. Require new material solutions, so the tanks that are used in vehicles are these incredible pieces of material, engineering that can, they're plastic tanks that can handle this extremely high pressure of hydrogen in them. 70 mega pascals. But there are other ways. And so the other ways you can do that is to actually use chemistry as your carrier system. So you can start looking at molecules that you can cram hydrogen into and ideally extract hydrogen out of, that you can start to densify hydrogen to cram more hydrogen into a small volume and there are various molecules that do that. Methane is an interesting one. Methane is actually a really, really effective hydrogen carrier. But of course it's got carbon in it and if you wanna extract the carbon from the methane, you're gonna emit CO2. Same for methanol. Methanol is again, has quite a high hydrogen density but if you're using fossil fuels to produce it, you have a challenge. Ammonia is an interesting one and ammonia is something CSIRO and Michael actually in particular has done a lotta work with over many years. Ammonia is NH3 so it has a high hydrogen density and there's no carbon in it. So, you can basically cram a lot of hydrogen into ammonia and then when you split the ammonia you produce only nitrogen and hydrogen. So, no greenhouse gases. So that's why that's a particularly interesting one. And there are some more exotic carriers, things like aromatic hydro carbons that people are looking at as well where you recycle the carbon containing species and just extract the hydrogen at each end. So, a lotta work and still a lot of opportunity in these carrier systems to improve that densification of hydrogen. So a lot of research going on in that space, fundamentally to bring costs down and scale up. Okay. So, I've told you a little bit about the technologies and some of the challenges. Now let's talk about Australia. So, I've given you the global sell if you will for hydrogen. But Australia, why does this bother us? Well, it's pretty straightforward. The potential for making hydrogen from renewable energy is very large. This is a piece of work that was published very recently by Geo Science Australia that looks at the potential across the country for producing hydrogen usable renewable resources. The dark green means highly suitable, and you can see that very large parts of our country are in fact highly suitable for producing hydrogen from renewable sources. The same is true for hydrogen from fossil fuels, coupled with carbon capture and storage. So if you couple those two things together, you can get a low emissions hydrogen and not surprisingly the green areas are centred around our major energy basins in Australia. So, lots of opportunity there. So, fundamentally Australia's a great place to make hydrogen. That's one of the big reasons why people in Australia are looking at this opportunity with great interest. So the good news and this is very much work that comes out of our national roadmap which I'll talk about in some more detail in a moment, the good news is that the technology is moving fast. The hydrogen industry here and overseas in particular is moving fast and it's underpinned by either mature or maturing technologies. So, there is a lot of scale up activity going on around the world that looks at things like electrolyzers and storage and all the various aspects of hydrogen value chains to develop. A key factor for the renewable production of hydrogen is very simple. The price of renewable energy globally is plummeting. Plummeting to a level now where renewable electricity's is quite competitive with fossil forms of electricity and so you have, if your major feed stock for making hydrogen is electricity and water and the cost of electricity drops down through the floor, your cost of producing hydrogen is starting to drop. It's still not quite there yet, but it's coming down fast. So that is a huge driver of this industry. The third major component is that there are countries now around the world and Japan and Korea are probably the most notable examples at the moment that have said that they are open for business for importing hydrogen. So, Japan has decided that hydrogen is a big part of its future and in order to satisfy Japan's energy needs which are huge with a very populous country, they are recognising that they have the potential to import hydrogen into the country and so that is a market that Australia if it decides to move forward and develop a large scale industry can service. And so all of those factors lead us to the key conclusion if you will from the roadmap, our roadmap, the work that we did which is that the hydrogen industry narrative is not so much about R&D which in some ways is a little disappointing for an R&D organisation but there's still plenty to do, but it's shifted away from that. We're not into technology development, we're into market activation. So really, the key to this now is how do we build the value chains, how do we build the markets that will allow this industry to grow? And so in Australia there's been a lot of work done at state and federal government levels and organisations like ourselves in recent months. This is the journey so far in the last couple of years. So, you have state governments, CSIRO roadmap there in August. Basically looking at this opportunity, highlighting the opportunity and now actually starting to put real investment on the table. So there is a round open now for the Western Australian hydrogen fund. South Australia has an action plan that's been investing in hydrogen projects, Queensland likewise. So there is real impetus now growing behind this industry development based on the sorts of work that was done to highlight the opportunity at state and federal government level by many including ourselves. A key milestone that'll happen towards the end of this month is that a national hydrogen strategy which has been developed by state and federal governments will be tabled at the coag energy counsel and that hopefully will chart a path forward for hydrogen and industry development in Australia. Was that the timer was it for me to get off?

Yeah.

- Okay, right. I'll try and speed up a bit then, sorry. Okay. So, I'll just talk CSIRO, our role in this. So I've given you a little bit of a flavour for CSIRO's role. So we're really about doing the work that helps people inform decisions. So our national, whoops, our national hydrogen roadmap. We're currently working on and we'll deliver towards the end of this month, early next month, a report that looks at the RD&D. The research development and demonstration opportunities for Australia. We are developing new technologies which I suspect Michael might talk about a bit, around ammonia in particular but right across hydrogen value chains. And we're developing industry partnerships with organisations like Michael's as well. So, our role spans those three main areas. I might just jump through the roadmap, because I'm running out of time but I'll just say basically the idea here was to really try and put some numbers around what the hydrogen industry could look like for Australia across all the sectors where hydrogen can play a key role. That's in electricity, direct combustion I mentioned, transport, export and the industrial feed stock opportunities that I spoke about. This is the core of the roadmap. I'm not gonna try and explain how it works. It is not a cost curve. It is a cost competitiveness curve which means that anything at the top of this, any applications that appear at the top of this graph are more favourable then the ones that are lower down. And so what you find when you do your analysis and you do your numbers, and you compare that to the solid line there as what we project the cost of electrolysis production of hydrogen to be over the next 10 years, and anything above that is essentially economic from a hydrogen supply perspective only and that's key. There are many other factors that need to be in play. So things like vehicles which are a big focus over the industry globally are ready to roll now because they'll, we are starting to compete, hydrogen is starting to compete already, with fuels in those systems. And so we work down the chain, down the cost competitiveness curve into other applications like remote area power systems. Again, close to being economic. An area where Australia can lead the way given our particularly remote communities and remote industries and so on down the curve. And so those applications below the curve are still challenged on a hydrogen supply cost basis but that's not to say they're not, they're gonna be realised because all that has to happen is the cost of hydrogen has to be lower and they come into play. I've mentioned export partnerships between Japan and Korea and Australia as opportunities in our region. So we have the resources, we have the proximity, we have trade relationships, we have a resource trade, and we have the skilled workforce that can make this happen. I'm not even gonna talk about our research and development report which is coming out. Sorry Vivic . And I guess I'll just towards the end I'll just say basically there's a lot going on in Australia. This is a map of the projects that are actually going on right across Australia as we speak. Some plans, some actually being built and some completed. But in every state there are basically hydrogen projects that are being put in place. Mostly demonstration scale at this stage but clear intention to go to the next industrial scale as we move forward. In CSIRO just our future science platforms, so CSIRO is getting behind the hydrogen story by investing in R&D in hydrogen and establish the future science platform in late 2017. That's really looking at developing the next generation of hydrogen technologies that will help to realise this industry beyond the current technologies which are starting to appear. And to demonstrate some of those technologies in particular. I think, I'll just mention very briefly, something that sort of struck me, there's a lot of interest in space at the moment in Australia and in many other parts of the world as a business opportunity and the focus on Mars as a destination for our resources industries largely is being focused. Really key point of our hydrogen is if you've got water and we know we've got water on Mars, and you've got sunlight which Mars has, and you take the electrolysis process I spoke about, you have the makings of hydrogen which is energy and oxygen which is air. So, an opportunity there for hydrogen industries in space. I will leave that there. I'd just like to point out one of the pioneers of hydrogen, Jules Vern. Extremely prophetic words back in 1874. I might just read it out for you if you can't read it at the back. "Yes, my friends. "I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel. "That hydrogen and oxygen which constituted "used singularly or together will furnish "an inexhaustible source of heat and light "of an intensity of which coal is not capable." So, he wrote that in 1874 which is pretty amazing. Thank you.

- Thanks for the invitation to talk here and Patrick is always a tough act to follow. I was CSIRO for a long time, 14 years in fact. 14 years, two months, three weeks, four days and not that I was counting. But now I'm over at Fortescue. I joined there in January. I was Fortescue's first employee in their new hydrogen business. We're now developing in our small team putting some projects together which I'll elude to in this talk. CSIRO can be pretty proud of the role it's played in bringing hydrogen back to prominence in this country with the roadmap with some key R&D activities since 2016 and 2017, CSIRO's really led the way. And although Alan Finkel's really taken the baton as the head cheerleader for hydrogen a lot of that momentum came from CSIRO initially. So, as current employees or former employees we can all be proud of the role that CSIRO has played. Okay, so I wanna give the Fortescue perspective on hydrogen. Fortescue's been in the last 12 months or so, there's been a lot about Fortescue in the press around the opportunity for hydrogen. Even in our OAGM last week hydrogen seems to get more attention then the coal, iron, ore business in the questions during that event. So, I'll give a bit of an overview about what we see the opportunity's being, what kind of initiates we have underway now and where we think things will go over the next five to 10 years. Okay, I gotta state with a forward looking statement. This just says please do not make any investment decisions based on what I'm gonna talk about today. You've been warned. Okay. So first of all I just wanna introduce Fortescue as a company and the reason that this is important is that as we've been trying to develop the relationships and build the market over the last 12 months one of the questions we've often got is why is Fortescue interested in hydrogen and fair enough. We've made our name as an iron, ore company. But I think there's a lot of skills and capabilities that Fortescue has that will translate across to this new hydrogen business. So, first of all let's just give an overview of where it all started. Fortescue's first mines were in the Chichester Hub. The company was founded in 2003. We got first ore on ship in 2008. So, during that period we built mines, rail and port and power stations in a very, very short period of time. Since then we've opened the Solomon Hub, the rail has been extended and we currently have five billion dollars worth of new projects in Eliwana, Iron Bridge and also in the Solomon Hub as well. So, we can grow quickly. We can also mobilise a lot of capital to get things under way quickly as well which should stand us in good stead when it comes to starting a new business. Just a couple of weeks ago we announced a major renewable energy project. So, there's gonna be 60 megawatts of PV generated capacity going into the Chichester Hub that's big enough to supply all the day time power requirements for those two mines. That is also connected through to the Newman Power Station that we're switching off our diesel generation capacity in that hub and we will then, then building an electrical interconnecting network between all of our operations so it can eliminate diesel, get more renewables in at various places throughout our operations and also have a cleaner, natural gas power backup. So, we're doing a lot of work already to reduce our emissions but this infrastructure activity is gonna stand us in good stead to start getting more renewables in and being able to generate, use some of that surplus power to generate hydrogen as well. So, Fortescue's a very vertically integrated company. So, we go all the way from the mine, the power, our own rail, our own port, even our own ships. We also have obviously a very strong sales and marketing capability to be able to build the relationships with customers in Asia where we're looking to sell hydrogen, and also a great ability to differentiate what seems like a homogenous product or iron, ore, into a number of categories to maximise the prophet, tailor solutions for customers, all things which'll translate into an energy business as well. So, although we're not an energy company now, there's really nothing stopping us because really, there are no big scale hydrogen companies yet. They're all energy companies that may do a little bit of hydrogen. So we're really as well placed as anyone we believe. Okay, so let's take a look at what we see the opportunity being and look, like most companies with ambitions in hydrogen, we see feeding into this potential export market as being the big opportunity. So, we spend a lot of time in Japan and Korea and Singapore in the last 12 months building the relationships, trying to form the consortia we need to build those supply chains. So, unlike iron, ore where we are very vertically integrated and can do most things ourselves, hydrogen may evolve a bit differently and may be more like the natural gas model where you have upstream investment for a number of companies. So we're building those relationships right now. So in terms of a potential project, obviously we wanna be exploiting low carbon hydrogen or a suitable hydrogen carrier into these particular countries. So that's gonna mean not only producing hydrogen but conversion into a liquid form carrier like ammonia, liquid hydrogen or MCH. We're fairly agnostic around which one we will focus on. Maybe we focus on multiple ones and that's really gonna depend upon what the customer wants. Some customers may be happy with ammonia to feed into power generation for example. Other carriers may make more sense for mobility or industrial processes. So, we're certainly not narrowing anything down at this stage. And the potential scale is obviously pretty big. 2025 is probably when we see the first opportunity for Fortescue to get hydrogen on a ship and send it away. So, there's a number of projects already underway really focused on the 2020 Olympics. They were all started five to 10 years ago. As soon as they are done, then focus shifts to the next scale which is gonna be perhaps 10 times bigger, and that's really the opportunity we think for Fortescue but those relationships and projects need to get underway pretty soon. By 2030 that may increase by a factor of three or thereabouts and then 2040 by another factor of three or thereabouts and these numbers are taken from the ARENA report that was released last year. Now these are the most optimistic figures in terms of the opportunity for Australia. So, we may as well be optimistic while we're in the early days. So to put that in context though, I mean how much renewables do you need for 8,700 tonnes per days? It's gonna be something like 100 gigabytes give or take, which is pretty big when you consider in Australia right now there's probably around 20 gigawatts of renewable generation capacity in the country. There's about 12 gigawatts of solar and about eight of wind. So we need to have a pretty big roll out of the renewable generation capacity if renewable hydrogen is your end product. Now, I should probably also mention, given Fortescue doesn't have an energy business already, our default position is really to focus on a renewable product to the extent that is feasible and practical and cost effective, but really to think of hydrogen or green hydrogen as an absolute product is probably a bit naive. There's gonna be a spectrum, a CO2 intensity versus price and ultimately the market will decide where we land on that. In the early days it may have a higher CO2 intensity, and get greener over time as the technology improves and as costs drop down. Now of course getting to that scale in one step is a bit hard. Even getting to 950 tonnes a day is pushing multiple gigawatts of renewable generation capacity. So, even that is probably a step too far in a single step. So, fortunately for us we have a ready made customer for hydrogen that is ourselves. We currently use many hundreds of thousands of litres of diesel fuel a year. Across Pilbara in total there's probably, sorry, I should say hundreds of millions, across Pilbara in total there's billions of litres of diesel used. So, potentially in our own operations we can absorb a lot of hydrogen capacity to de-carbonize our operations, build that capability as well. In particular the mobile fleet, that is the haul trucks, the excavators, our rail network. That constitutes about two thirds of our emissions. So, there's a big opportunity if we can develop the appropriate vehicles and get the refuelling hardware in place, and another big opportunity for us as an iron, ore company is in all processing. That could be something as simple as a cal ironing or centering process in our operations using hydrogen as a heat source all the way up to a replacing coke and coal with hydrogen as a reductant perhaps evaluating in the country. I imagine that the WA state government will probably be really supportive of a project like that, bringing industry back to the state. So, that's something we're looking at actively but it's still fairly early days with that. A lot will depend of course on the customers as well. So, the potential scale of that is around 150 tonnes a day to decarbonize our own operations and then anything we do around iron, ore processing would be on top of that. And then of course let's not ignore the domestic industry. It seems to get over looked a bit. People see the export industry, export market as the Gold Rush and domestic applications seem to get ignored a little bit. But certainly we see that as an important stepping stone as well. That could be something like a mobility project, which would be something around 50 kilogrammes a day for a small re-fueling system, all the way up to pipeline injection. There's a big interest around pipeline injection on the east coast where gas prices are higher. It's a bit of a harder sell on the west coast where we have a reservation policy and gas is much cheaper. It means that the hydrogen you make has to be a lot cheaper in order for the economics to make sense. But certainly that's on our radar as well. But of course underpinning or over pinning these three themes is technology. Fortescue's is a very forward thinking company. We're happy to take risks on technology, a case in point, we were really the first to roll out autonomous mining vehicles. We now have the world's largest autonomous haul truck fleet. So, we've done it in mining. We're happy to apply similar forward thinking around investing in technologies to forward our goals around hydrogen. And of course one of the first ones there is the CSIRO partnership which I'll come back to in a sec. But first of all, let's just come back to that question why Fortescue? What does it have? So it's got the logistics and the sales and marketing capability but also the area in which we operate is obviously very favourable for renewable power which then of course means it's favourable for renewable hydrogen. Now, Patrick stole my thunder a bit earlier by putting up a slide that showed the renewable hydrogen potential, but we need to break that down a bit 'cause in Pilbara, obviously you're all from WA, you know where Pilbara is. I don't need to point at. We obviously have very good solar, everyone knows that. That's great. Capacity factor's typically low 30 percents in Pilbara for solar PV projects. We also have quite good wind particularly in the coastal regions. And the area around Shark Bay in Western Australia is one of the best in the country. So, Fortescue has current access to a lot of land in the Pilbara and also in coastal areas based on mining releases and past releases. So, we're currently evaluating a number of potential sights and the goal of course is to get solar and wind to complement each other. There's no good having wind blowing in a day, and the sun shining in the day and have everything switched off at five p.m. That means your electolyzers are sitting unused for 16 hours a day. That's gonna mean expensive hydrogen. So, we're trying to identify the appropriate sights where we have sun in the day and then wind in a complimentary period of time, perhaps starting in the evening and going later. And fortunately there are a number of sights in Pilbara where that is the case. But it's a very complex optimization, not only the renewables but also what you do with the hydrogen thereafter. And these are some of the things we're working through right now. And of course the other thing that the Pilbara has is a lot of good ports. We operate out of Port Headland but there's a lotta good stuff around Karratha, iron, ore ports and natural gas ports around the northwest shelf and also down to Onslow as well. And the geographic proximity to the key markets is pretty good. 3,500 nautical miles from Port Headland into Kobe which is one of the potential early ports for hydrogen in Japan. Compare that to Gladstone which is something around 4,000 I think. Hastings in Melbourne is another thousand on top of that and Whyalla in South Australia is another 500 on top of that. So in Australian context, the Pilbara is a pretty good place the export hydrogen from. But of course we can't be parochial. Although I love my adopted state and I want WA to be the best, but really the competition's gonna come from other countries. So, we need to consider what's happening in places like Norway, Saudi Arabia, Canada for example. So, Norway to Japan is somethin' like 12,000 nautical miles, so they've gotta go through a canal to get there. So we've got a bit of an advantage in terms of shipping distances, but some of those other countries have advantages in terms of their renewable resource, particularly the available of hydro which doesn't have those diurnal cycles that we need to worry about with solar and wind. So Pilbara of course is a very good location. So, and finally to wrap up here, back to the CSIRO partnership, Patrick eluded to that earlier, it was almost 12 months ago to the day this photo was taken but there was a long, hard negotiation for a couple of years before that during which time another of other companies announced that they were interested in hydrogen. Fortescue waited until this deal was signed as a great way to announce itself in hydrogen and hit the ground running. So, this partnership is a five year R&D partnership. So Fortescue will invest a minimum spend, that's a very significant minimum spend in hydrogen specific R&D. There's one project already underway which is around this membrane technology here, that Fortescue's funding the final scale up and commercialization of. By Christmas we hope to have another four, perhaps five projects underway, and get that portfolio so we in a couple of years time we had this pipeline of technologies that kind of get to high TRL, come out and then Fortescue can help transition those into commercial impact. We're obviously focusing on technologies that support our goals, particularly around hydrogen export and the big R&D challenge there is around the conversion to a liquid carrier and potentially conversion back to hydrogen at the point of use or direct utilisation for some of those carriers as well. So, a lot of the projects we're looking at or have underway are aligned with those particular goals. Okay. So, I'm gonna leave it there. Thank you very much for your attention. I'm very happy to be here in WA. It's a great state. I should've made the move earlier. Thank you.

- First of all, thank you. Patrick Hartley, thank you for being inclusive. I feel a bit like the odd one out after those two speakers. I think I'm the only speaker without a PhD. I did go to university, I do have a post graduate degree as well. I don't personally have a PhD but I brought one. So I've actually got the inventor of the Hazer Process here with us tonight. So Andrew, if you wouldn't mind standing up and making yourself known. This is unprompted. He loves this. Thank you. Jokes aside, Andrew is the co-founder of Hazer. He started the research that led to the technology here at UWA. So very much a WA story. Like Michael I am relatively new to WA, relatively new to Australia. I'm originally from Holland. I'm very parochial to WA. So I'm very pleased that we have this technology here in WA in Australia. Something to be really proud of. So, well done to Andrew. I'm excited to be part of the company. What I'll hope to share with you tonight is another alternative technology. We've heard a lot about the potential technologies. Import, export. Hazer is a different technology. Might actually start off by pointing out that Hazer, the name actually stands for hydrogen and zero emissions research. It stems back from the times at UWA. It was a place holder, Andrew always reminds me but it's stuck and I think it's a nice start anyway. Patrick and Michael already have given you some introductions of why. I'll fast forward a bit into our technology. What I would like to point out though is that battery electric vehicles as you're probably aware, the likes of Tesla and fuel cell electric vehicles at the end of the day are all electric vehicles. They just get their charge from a different source, from a battery or from hydrogen gas which we're talkin' about today. Again, some of the pictures you've already seen. Hydrogen mobility is a big thing. Especially also like to emphasise when it becomes an application that is beyond passenger vehicles, when you go to what we call heavy duty applications, the battery if you were to do it with a battery elected vehicle, just simply gets too big and too heavy to drag around. And then there's recharging time which especially for commercial vehicles are a disadvantage. So that's where it's almost uniformly accepted that hydrogen has a very strong potential. Heavy duty applications, long distances, heavy loads. You've seen the picture before, there's trains running around in Europe, buses many parts of the world, passenger vehicles, rubbish vehicles also. Again, some of this has been touched on already. Japan, Korea, countries that have very limited energy resources within their own countries are currently relying on fossil fuel imports. They're looking to decarbonize. They think hydrogen is, has a potential big role to play. That's why they're interested in getting the hydrogen from places potentially like Australia, Middle East, elsewhere. California, Europe also very strong on hydrogen. Mainly, main driver is de carbonization. National strategies as Patrick already mentioned. We've got one coming following all the various state's initiatives. Our national strategy's about to be released in a couple of weeks time. So, to do the production technologies and this is where it gets a bit different as I eluded to before. As Patrick introduced already in the first presentation, hydrogen is currently being used quite commonly as an industrial feed stock, as an industrial chemical. The majority of that hydrogen is produced through a process called steam methane reforming which Patrick also explained. Very economical, very robust, widely applied. It also comes with significant amounts of CO2 emissions. So not so great if you're looking to decarbonize society. The other alternative you've heard about is electrolysis. Works great. Still challenging in terms of the cutbacks for the technology itself and it requires a lot of energy and it has to be 100% renewable to reap the entire benefits of making it totally green hydrogen at the end. And this is where we think as Hazer we have a very different--

- [Man] up please?

- Oh, sorry, sorry.

- A bit louder.

- Thank you. Thanks for pointing it out. It was starting to wander. This is where Hazer comes in. Hazer starts with methane molecules like steam methane reforming. The process is based on a technology or a process called thermo catalatic methane decomposition which is a fancy way of saying methane cracking but not as you know it. Not like SMR. We start methane molecules, we crack it into hydrogen which is what we're after, and the carbon, the C of the methane gets captured in solid graphite in a solid material. The process itself doesn't have any CO2 emissions. So, one process, two products, we use an iron, ore catalyst. Not significant amounts. It can be done with relatively low quality iron, ore. So that's not a thing to get too excited about. Here in WA we think, oh, we've got plenty of iron, ore. People overseas and in Japan, in Korea say well, it's great for you guys but we don't have that resource. We don't have that iron, ore. Don't worry about. It's very small quantities. We can send over a container. It'll last you a long time. So, don't over think that role of the iron, ore in the Hazer aspects. So we start with methane as I mentioned. Methane is a fossil fuel, natural gas. However, methane can also be found in a renewable form, bio gas. And this is where it gets really interesting from a carbon perspective. If we use renewable methane bio gas from landfills or waste water treatment plants, we use that as the feed stock for the Hazer process, we still extract the carbon as graphite. The process becomes carbon negative. Carbon negative. So not just zero emissions. No, we go better. The technical term is carbon abatement. But negative emissions captures the imagination a bit better I think. What I've got here on the slide is I guess I good example of a circular economy. People, us here in the room, we all produce waste. That gets processed, has to go somewhere. Solid form ends up frequently in landfills which are caps where you can capture bio gas, the methane. Waste water treatment plant not too dissimilar. Have organics in them. A process called anerobic digestion is a way of reducing the amount of organics that are leaving that sight and as a side effect of doing that process, bio gas is produced. So, both sources of bio gas is very suitable for the Hazer process which produces graphite and hydrogen. Hydrogen can be used for public transport, for passenger vehicles which transport the population that produces the waste so there's your circular economy. The carbon abatement potential was on here. The carbon abatement potential is actually quite significant. It's 150 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per tonne of hydrogen produced. So that's 150 for one. That's quite a big number if you go to large capacities of hydrogen production. In jurisdictions not being Australia, at this point in time where there is a carbon tax, that could be a very interesting proposition. Comparing the Hazer process to other forms of hydrogen production in terms of CO2 intensity, that's what you see in this graph here, the scale doesn't quite do it justice. I guess it makes it look quite dramatic but it's what it is. Steam methane reforming as mentioned before has significant amounts of CO2. About 10 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per tonne of hydrogen. If you use electrolysis and you connect it to a grid, it literally goes through the roof. It's around 40. If you do electrolysis on 100% renewables it's about one. That's because of the embedded carbon in the manufacturing of all the components in that supply chain. If we run the Hazer process on bio gas, negative 150. Quite a big number. The other product we produce with the same process is graphite. And as you may be aware, graphite is not too dissimilar to hydrogen is a commonly applied industrial commodity as well. Carbon black, activated carbon, lubricant, and at the top of the value chain is also battery grade graphite. Lithium iron batteries that go into those battery electric vehicles have a significant amount of graphite in them. So, the other side of the Hazer process produces graphite. Back to the technology and then where we are at in terms of our commercialization. We've done a lot of research. It started obviously in the lab of UWA that progressed to pilot testing 2017, 2018. We did a lot of pilot testing. Then last year decided it was time to scale up. We needed to make the next step in development. Pilot testing exceeded the goals, the targets, the dreams maybe we had. And it was required to make a next step to scale up. So we've done, some of you might be familiar if I say front and engineering design is a common term for engineering projects for what we call a commercial demonstration project. That's the first full scale application of the Hazer process. In parallel we've also done concept level details of a commercial scale plants of larger capacities to get a feel for what they look like in terms of cost, what it takes to build one of those. The key focus now is on that next step. The commercial demonstration plant. I'll go into that a little bit more on the next slides but we're currently doing as well as I mentioned we've got the ideas of what a commercial scale plant would like beyond this first full scale. That's the commercial applications. We're currently already working quite hard on developing the partnerships to apply the technology at that scale. So, the next frontier if you want after the commercial demonstration plant. For the graphite side of things we have an existing partnership with a mining company called Mineral Resources who was an early investor in Hazer saw us as an opportunity to produce competitively synthetic graphite that can compete with naturally occurring graphite indeed for possible applications in the battery supply chain. So, to here and now and what is most important for us? The commercial demonstration plant as I mentioned. The first full scale. We're very pleased to share that earlier this year we agreed a memorandum of understanding with Water Corporation to collocate our first plant in Woodman Point, waste water treatment plant here in the metropolitan Perth area. Like I said before I am parochial enough to be very pleased that that's the outcome of quite a long process that we can actually have the technology here. It makes sense for us in terms of operations. Our office is here so having the plant close by makes a lotta sense. Very pleased also with the collaboration and the support I should say with, that we've been receiving from the Water Corporation. Very grateful to have that partnership to enable us to take the next step. The plant is planned to start operations in early 2021. So, Q one 2021 in terms of hydrogen production and it'll operate for at least three years. We are in serious conversations with the Water Corporation to see what life after those three years could mean. It could mean we turn it into a commercial operation, if the market, especially the demand for hydrogen supports such a development. What I'm particularly pleased to share with you tonight is that we've been successful recently in an application with ARENA. ARENA for those who may not be familiar with the name is the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. So, we launched an application a couple of months ago through a rigorous process was deemed successful to the tune of 9.4 million dollars which'll go towards the construction and the operation of our commercial demonstration plant. As I mentioned the initial commercial project is something we're also working quite hard on already 'cause those projects don't just happen over night. There's a lot of partnerships to be developed. A lot of information to be exchanged before they can actually be put on the ground. To give you an idea, I'll skip to that bit actually. So the CDP will have a production capacity of 300 kilos a day or hydrogen, about 100 tonnes per annum. And to give you an idea that's enough fuel to power eight to 10 buses. So a small fleet of buses. So it's not an insignificant amount of hydrogen. The capital cost to produce that kind of fuel, that amount is around 50.8 million dollars, for 100 tonnes per annum. We've done some numbers for commercial scale plants and we've seen an interesting scale, economy of scale there. We think we can produce 25 times the amount in production capacity for about three times the investment in CapEx. So there's the scale. 25 for three times as much investment. Those applications would be sufficient in terms of size to power about 200 buses or 6,000 passenger vehicles. So that's becoming significant. The appetite is there, I can assure you. We're a small team. We are regularly stretched to handle everything that's coming our way without us pushing too much. It's exciting times in hydrogen, and yeah, I can't wait for the next steps to be able to share those and it's, I guess coming back towards the end. One thing I didn't mention at the beginning, but I'll do it at the end, we are listed on the ASX. So, don't take this at investment advice. Be forewarned like Michael said, but your support would obviously be appreciated if you're considering investment in hydrogen, Hazer is a way to go. What I might do if I still have time?

- [Woman] Yeah.

- I might play a short video to rap this up. Thank you.

- [Narrator] Hazer, and innovative, disruptive, low cost, hydrogen and graphite production process that can go beyond carbon neutral. Reducing CO2 emissions is one of the key challenges facing the world today. Many companies now seek alternative methods of production with lower carbon footprints to meet industry emission targets. Approximately 65% of global greenhouse emissions are produced by burning fossil fuels to create energy for transportation, power generation or heat. The use of these fossil fuels results in a net increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Reversal of the effects of carbon emission requires new ideas and the development of new technologies. Existing renewable energy solutions such as solar, hydro or wind generation provides zero emission alternatives. While bio energy sources maintain the carbon balance in the form of the carbon cycle by releasing the carbon previously acquired through photosynthesis. There is an accelerating transition towards cleaner, sustainable energy and transport systems. Hydrogen is expected to play a key role in this over the next 20 years. Hazer offers a low cost, low emission way of producing the hydrogen needed to fuel this transition. The Hazer process creates hydrogen from any form of methane gas and sequesters the carbon that would normally be released into the atmosphere by capturing and permanently storing it as synthetic graphite. The hydrogen can then be used as a form of energy for the mobility, power or heat sectors releasing only water vapour into the atmosphere. The graphite has potential applications and lithium ion batteries, electrodes, lubrication or carbon additives such as into concrete or composite materials. This creates and extra revenue stream which can offset the cost of the hydrogen production. This graphite also has the potential to produce emission further by displacing existing graphite production with high carbon footprints. The Hazer process has the additional advantage of being able to go beyond carbon neutral and become a carbon sink by switching the reactor energy feed stock to renewable gas sources such as bio methane. The Hazer process can eliminate the need for fossil fuel extraction to produce energy and moves beyond carbon neutral to carbon negative. In this scenario, CO2 from the atmosphere is removed from the carbon cycle and stored as graphite. Hazer therefore provides a potential low emission, low cost transition towards a renewable energy system as well as the means for reversing past emissions. Hazer, a disruptive force in hydrogen.

- All right, fantastic. Can we give our three speakers a big round of applause please and make your way to your pressure point. What one, oh yep. Jump over here. Just, your name?

- [Fabian] Hello, my name's Fabian Goddard. I'm from AMIRA International. Thank you for the talk. To probably all three of you's really, I'm interested in the sector coupling and FMG's work that you're doing. If it's been in the Pilbara we have Woodside, a few big players, Rio, BHP. Is there any idea or collaborative efforts being put into the work that's happening or you envision that to be the next steps or? Interested in your thoughts.

- Look, it would probably be nice if it ends up that way. It's probably a bit early. We still don't know exactly what is the best thing for us. We're still in that initial evaluation phase, optimization phase. So, if it works out that it becomes a collaborative effort then I think that'd be great. But once again it's, we don't wanna force collaboration for the sake of it. It's gotta make sense for everyone involved. So, ask us in a couple of years.

- [Woman] Patrick, Luke, anything else to add? No?

- Sorry

- [Woman] Anything else to add or you're--

- Yeah, I mean I guess I'll add, I mean, I think it's probably, it's kinda where the industry's at at the moment. It's a lot of early stage projects, demonstration projects that are getting going. People are feeling their way and it'll be probably a classic industry, nice industry development. The collaboration comes in when the scale really gets up there.

- We have some more, yep. I'll jump through the middle here. You're next, Sir.

- [Boyd] Hello, my name's Boyd Milligan from Curtin University's Sustainability Policy Institute. A million questions but I'll only ask one tonight, and that is when is the projected timeframe where hydrogen from renewables cost will cross over with that from fossil fuels such as methane.

- Yes, so the roadmap work that we did says that export market comes in around 2025 to 2030, and that's based on that electrolysis, that curve I showed is actually what we project the cost of electrolytic hydrogen to be, dropping down to $2.50 a kilo.

- [Boyd] And how does that cross with fossil .

- It's comparable on that point basically, yeah.

- [Boyd] And 2025 is your answer?

- 2025 to 2030, yeah.

- [Boyd] Thank you.

- [Woman] You have it?

- Maybe just to add to that response. If you look at hydrogen mobility, there are already places in the world where running buses on renewable hydrogen is on parody with diesel. I'm not saying that would be the case today in Australia and that's because of one thing and I'll just call it out early. It's carbon tax. If there is a fair price on carbon, so to your question where's the price parody? It also comes down to apples for apples. I think we agree hopefully in this room that as a society we need to decarbonize. That's gonna come, that has to come from somewhere. You can't expect a different outcome if you keep doing the same thing in terms of our energy needs and satisfying those needs. But price parody is there today already. That's an important take away.

- And that the key thing from the roadmap is that the price of hydrogen is different depending on, or the competitiveness of hydrogen is different depending on the application, because it depends on what fuel you're trying to displace. So, for high value fuels like petrol, that's why vehicles are ready to go now, but for when you're displacing gas from pipelines for combustion it's a different price point.

- [Ian] Ian Porter from Sustainable Energy Now and a new startup called Carbon 280. My question's to Patrick. Patrick, you showed on the slide with the metrics of comparative differences between gasoline and hydrogen fueling. What wasn't mentioned was the weight of containment being 65 times the mass of the product. So five kilos that takes you 500 kilometres has 325 kilos of containment. And this highlights a problem they've got in the United States which is, if we wanna look at any supply chains of liquified hydrogen is occurring, it's the United States. They've been doing it for 70 years and predominantly 99% of it is used to launch rockets into space and ICBMs. So, we are trying to do something that the Americans haven't been able to do for 70 years. What lessons learned are we gonna get through that hydrogen does not transport well over a distance? It's got to be produced locally and one of the biggest problems you've got in producing it locally is you don't have economies of scale.

- That's a lot of things in that one. I guess just talking about the fuel tanks. So, you're right. I didn't factor in the weight of the fuel tanks. The key thing there though is that they scale much more effectively. So the weight of fuel tank becomes less important as you get to larger fuel tanks. So, that's where you start to win. So, the, I mean there's a lot to unpack in your question--

- [Ian] Well, if I can just add, if you buy hydrogen at the refinery gate in Houston, you can get it for $1.50. If you take it in St. Louis, after it's been transported across the Great Plains, it's $10 to $12 a kilo.

- Yeah. So I think these are all major challenges and that's why the things like the different carriers and different ways of transporting hydrogen and liquefaction technologies that are cheaper, these are all probably the most perspective research areas I think for technology improvements because you're right. Storage and distribution has to become much more economic for these value chains to work.

- [Ian] Thank you.

- Hi, my name's Dave Thomas at Hydrogen Neophyte. My question for the, sorry, I can't remember your name, the FMG guy, aside from the global supply bit which was pretty specific to hydrogen, the rest of that seemed like it could be solar panels and batteries. So, I guess my question is how come hydrogen is it because it's a battery or do you really want to be a energy supplier where you're gonna sell hydrogen globally is it?

- As I mentioned, participation in the global supply chains is the big economic opportunity for us and so hydrogen is a great way of moving renewable energy across the ocean. It's really the only way at this stage until such time is an electrical inner connect to Tokyo which is probably while away. So, that's where hydrogen plays a key role. With respect to our internal operations, we've got 1,500 pieces of mobile fleet that we can't connect physically to a supplier. So we need something that can be stored onboard. We need to also have a fuel that doesn't compromise the way in which we use the vehicles. So, we need to, for example our mining trucks, we refuel them once a day. They run for the rest of the time without a driver. So, we need a storage solution. So hydrogen is effectively the storage. So we need a storage solution that can allow us to operate those vehicles without compromising the way in which they were operated but with having zero emissions. So, hydrogen is one of the ways we can do that. It's not the only way. We're still evaluating, potentially batteries may improve over time and offer a solution. There's still some technical challenges around using hydrogen at that scale, being able to store enough onboard a truck, being able to refuel quickly enough. So, current re-fueling is around a kilogramme a minute for a car. If you have 500 kilogrammes aboard a truck, that then doesn't work. So, there needs to be advances in refuelling technology for example. So, it's still early days. There's a number of potential solutions and the solution that works for Fortescue may not be the solution that works for the other company down the road. It all depends on the way they use the truck as well. So, it's gonna be very bespoke solutions for individual companies when it comes to mining.

- [Dave] Thank you.

- [Michael] I'm Michael Martin. Hey from EPC Technologies. You touched on the processing of iron, ore and the potential in value adding through hydrogen and the displacement of coke and coal. Is that a bigger opportunity for, to decarbonize the steel making industry is to focus on that versus transportation? What are your thoughts and what is the timeframe for that sort of innovation?

- It's enormous opportunity. And it's very geographically specific as well. In China for example, there's less attention on emissions, more on urban air quality, but there's projects underway in Japan, in the U.S., in Europe around using hydrogen as a reductant for steel making. So, we're still evaluating what the opportunity is there. There's still some technological limitations around that. There's some significant advantages to evaluating here in Australia. You leave more of the money here. If you're reducing here in Australia to a direct reduced iron for example, you have to ship less mass. So you're shipping becomes more efficient. But then you need to consider the entire supply chain and see what the opportunity is but it's certainly one that we're well aware of. There's serious initiatives underway in a lotta countries right now. We need to understand what our customers want who are in a number of countries and identify what the opportunities for us there. So it could be evaluating in Australia. It could be selling a ship full of hydrogen to a steel mill in Korea or China so they can use it as a reductant. Or anywhere in between.

- [Paul] Hello, Paul Slatter from Sheridan College. Are there any serious OH and S issues when we switch over to using hydrogen on a very wide scale?

- Yes . I mean, it is a highly combustible gas, very fast moving gas. So, safety is absolutely a very key part of the story when it comes to industry scale up. I guess my argument probably would be they're not insurmountable but it is gonna need a lotta work and a lot of regulatory work and a lot of what we talk about cross cutting research in terms of those sorts of areas, safety, social acceptance, et cetera, to make sure that the industry scales and environment for that matter too, to make sure that the industry scales responsibly.

- Expected, not feared. There's always, there's engineering solutions to the safety issues but obviously it needs to be done properly.

- [Woman] Oh! Back this way.

- [Boyd] Boyd Milligan from Curtin again. I said I had a lotta questions, but this is to you Luke. I'm actually more excited about your graphene production then anything else because if you're aware of the battery industry, graphene is now mooted to be something that will multiply the energy capacity of a battery by a factor of over five to what it is today. One would suggest that this is directing competition to hydrogen when you're talking about up to 5,000 kilometres per car on batteries. What do we have to say about that as very competitive technology?

- Yeah. Is that a, the first bit is more a statement which I agree with. The potential for graphene is enormous. The market for graphene is about zero today. graphene is made from graphite, so yeah. Happy to talk further. I think Andrew would love to discuss that with you in a bit more detail. Andrew is currently focusing on what we call R&D functionalization of the graphite. So what can we do with that graphite in various applications? graphene is a question we get asked a lot. The potential is huge. The market today is zero. If it becomes a competitor with hydrogen, the value proposition could also be quite interesting. So, happy to have that problem.

- [Man] Hi guys, thank you for your presentations. I have two parts a question. This one is about the 100% renewable energy mine where you got automation, it's fully electric and the second one is the 100% renewable energy farm using ammonia produced in this way from hydrogen produced in this way. I'm just wondering your guys thoughts on these two, the currently ideas that people are proposing and people are discussing and refer especially to Canada. They were talking about 100% renewable energy mine two years ago.

- I guess that's for me. So, sorry, are you, don't think I quite caught your whole question but you're asking about the possibilities of a 100% renewable mine?

- [Man] Using hydrogen.

- Using hydrogen, yeah. Look, hydrogen will play a role. Hydrogen's not the entire solution for everything. It's a great way of storing large amounts of energy when coupled with other things like solar and wind power for example. There are some activities underway around 100% renewable mines based around hydrogen in other countries in Canada for example. I believe there's a De Beers mine in northern Canada that's part of the Arctic Circle and is running on hydrogen generated renewably. So, it's certainly a precedent there. Fortescue's iron, ore mines and now other iron, ore mines in Pilbara are of a whole different order of magnitude in terms of their power requirements. So, it's simply a matter of scaling over a period of time in which the economics start to make sense. So, at the moment we're going through a process of replacing our most expensive power generation which is diesel with a less expensive solar and natural gas. The next transition beyond that will be what is the opportunity to put more renewables in is hydrogen as a storage medium? It may well be a transition where we have natural gas hydrogen blending into turbines as a transition all the way up to 100% hydrogen in the future but it's gonna take a little while, and the economics are probably gonna dictate the speed at which that happens.

- [Sylvia] Sylvia Black from Chem Centre. My question is about the economics in relation to, maybe Hazer can answer this question, you need to utilise energy to create energy. So, for your crack in system. So, what's the economics of having to rely on an energy source to create a new energy of hydrogen and the second question is what's the source of energy you use initially for your cracking?

- Yeah, so absolutely. We do need energy to crack the bonds like Patrick explained. In our process, obviously we believe this is an economical case there. So, we could either import energy from the grid or generate our own renewable for, to provide the heat into the system that we need. We can also produce our own from what we call the tail gas. So gas methane that's been past through the reactor once. Not all of that methane gas converted to hydrogen. So, we have a mixture of methane and hydrogen coming out of our reactor. We could run that through a turbine and that was generate the electricity that we need for heating purposes. Does that answer your question? Sorry? Economics? The economics have to stack up, otherwise we have no business. So, yeah. They stack up.

- [Klaus] Yeah, this is Klaus Otto from Curtin. A question for maybe Patrick and Mike. So, you talked about we have lots of wind and solar. Now, Australia doesn't have enough water. Now to generate green hydrogen, you need water. Has any study been done how much more water will be needed to transition to a hydrogen economy and Fortescue, how are you gonna deal with that problem? Because you don't have enough either in Pilbara.

- Okay, Fortescue actually has no shortage of water. Most of our mining is below the water table. So, we have one of the world's largest ground water management operations. So we can take it out,

- So you use it for mining?

- and we put it back in. That's in varying quality. It goes from fresh all the way to hyper saline. So, and it varies without reasonably short distances. When it comes to electrolytic water or electrolysis, that water needs to be very high purity. So it does need to be a deceleration and RO process at the start. It's not as expensive as you'd think. Maybe it's five to 10% additional energy panel to the overall process. Compared to the energy required to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, the energy required for desalinization is relatively small. Now of course, then there's environmental issues about the discharge of saline brine, et cetera. There are precedents around the world where that is done. That would need to be part of our environmental assessment for whatever projects go ahead if it's put back in the ocean.

- So, I'll add a bit as well Klaus. So, the theoretical water consumption per kilo of hydrogen is nine kilos of water. Nine litres of water. So that sounds like a lot. It's actually not that huge. So, we've done some fairly back of the envelope calculations and I was actually reading a lifestyle assessment from DOE about this on the plane this morning. So, it's fresh, front of mind. If you do the numbers, you're talking about a few desalinization plants for a very large industry. The scale of the current LNG industry for instance for energy basis. So, it sounds like a lot, nine kilos but it's not that big and it's certainly in the same scope as what the minerals industry uses now. And I think reinforcing what Michael said, I think we actually get sort of confounded by water 'cause it's very cheap, the cost of water for us now is very cheap. So, we sort of think of it as something that has to be even cheaper and it really doesn't. So, it's, yeah. It's a small contribution to the cost of hydrogen production.

- [Woman] Now we probably have time for one more question before drinks are calling. We've got one over in the front here.

- [John] Thank you. John Simmons, Consultant. Both hydrogen production from electrolysis and the fuel cells both use platinum dominant catalysts. We've seen in the bullish projections from the lithium battery sector that there is a disconnect between lithium supply and some of those projections. So, a double question is do the numbers hang up in terms of platinum supply and what is the work on alternatives if that is a constraint?

- Yeah, so most of the, I guess the R&D effort is around either minimising the amount of platinum or finding platinum alternatives. At this stage platinum is still the dominant material. No one's found a commercially viable low cost alternative although there's a lot of work on nickel based materials. But that platinum isn't lost. It's essentially recycled. So, the platinum is deposited onto a polymer substrate. They can recycle that and use almost no platinum. So it becomes a closed loop. So, most fuel cell manufactures would take a spent fuel cell back, burn off the polymer, recover the platinum and redeposit it. So, obviously as the market grows, you'll need to fill that demand, but it's not lost to the, from that economic cycle.

- So, that's an interesting question and I'm not aware of it if there, I mean someone who has done the numbers for supply and potential demand. I haven't seen that study. But it's a good question.

- I haven't seen the numbers either and platinum is a rare metal. There hasn't been an economic discovery in the last 47 years and it's something that needs to be faced up to.

- There's a lot of platinum used in catalytic converters already in vehicles. So as internal combustion vehicles phase out, all of a sudden there's a big supply of platinum and the platinum in current catalytic converters, I would imagine that not much of that is actually recovered, as opposed to in fuel cells where I think the recycling will be much more controlled by the original manufactures.

- [John] Except in ICE units then, out of petrol cars it's a palladium catalyst, not platinum.

- Suffice to say some of the platinum producers are quite interested in the hydrogen market .

- All right, well I think the rest of our conversations can happen over beverages as all good conversation should be had. We have a number of CSIRO staff in the room here tonight who are here to handle some questions if you got some. Danielle has set up a stand out the back, thank you Danielle, for people who want to have a chat about other things that are happening across CSIRO. I'm here myself. Patrick's obviously here and our other speakers. Can we please give them another round of applause?