Oz Mining Billionaire Slams Net Zero: "Real Zero" Now His Preferred Climate Buzzword/PR Plan/Greenwash
About $45tn of global business revenue is covered by corporate “net zero emissions” pledges but the iron ore billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest thinks the whole net zero thing is “fantasy”. “Now is the time to walk away from net zero 2050, that hasn’t been anything really but a con to maintain fossil fuels,” Forrest said last week.
What was needed instead, Forrest said, was “real zero”, and he was confident his Fortescue iron ore business would stop using fossil fuels by the end of this decade while shunning the use of carbon offsets or carbon capture and storage. So what is “real zero” and could Fortescue really decarbonise a business that’s part of a global steelmaking industry responsible for about 9% of global CO2 emissions?
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Fortescue’s latest climate transition plan, published last month, reflects Forrest’s disdain for carbon offsets. Offsets and carbon capture are not part of Fortescue’s plans. Fortescue says its annual emissions that it has direct control over were at 2.72m tonnes of CO2-equivalent last year. Most of that comes from the diesel burned by haulage trucks, trains and ships, and the gas burned for power generation at its mining sites. By 2030 Fortescue aims to have eliminated all those fossil fuels with a combination of green fuels (such as ammonia for shipping and clean hydrogen for power generation) and battery electric vehicles charged with renewables.
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Fortescue’s (and the climate’s) much bigger problem comes when its iron ore goes to overseas steelmakers that use combinations of coal, gas and fossil-fuel powered electricity to turn the ore into iron, and the iron into steel. The indirect emissions (called scope 3) from the shipment and use of Fortescue’s iron ore last year were 100 times the company’s direct emissions: about 262 Mt CO2-e (for comparison, Australia’s entire annual emissions are now at 440 Mt). About 97% of that is emitted in the steelmaking process. But Fortescue has a target for “net zero scope 3 emissions by 2040” – an odd choice of the “net zero” phrase given Forrest’s dislike of it. But could it be done?
Most of Fortescue’s iron ore is low-grade and not suitable for a process known as Direct Reduced Iron, where the ore is turned into iron metal using gas. But this DRI process could be emissions free, Nicholas said, if the gas were replaced by clean hydrogen. The original concept of “net zero” was for global economies to end almost all fossil fuel use and then use technologies, many not proven at scale, to directly cut atmospheric CO2.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/09/andrew-forrest-says-net-zero-is-fantasy-so-his-goal-is-real-zero-what-does-he-mean-and-can-he-achieve-it
If, if if. Technology, technology, technology. 2030 2040 2025 2075. Blah Blah Blah.