NY Times: Inside the Global Race to Turn Water Into Fuel [View all]

[Caribbeans]

Inside the Global Race to Turn Water Into Fuel

Hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested in a high-tech gamble to make hydrogen clean, cheap and widely available. In Australia’s Outback, that starts with 10 million new solar panels.

New Your Times | Max Bearak | March 11, 2023

For eons this has been a quiet, unremarkable place. Thousands of square miles of flat land covered in shrubs and red dirt. The sun is withering and the wind blows hard.

It is exactly those features that qualify this remote parcel of the Australian Outback for an imminent transformation. A consortium of energy companies led by BP plans to cover an expanse of land eight times as large as New York City with as many as 1,743 wind turbines, each nearly as tall as the Empire State Building, along with 10 million or so solar panels and more than a thousand miles of access roads to connect them all.

But none of the 26 gigawatts of energy the site expects to produce, equivalent to a third of what Australia’s grid currently requires, will go toward public use. Instead, it will be used to manufacture a novel kind of industrial fuel: green hydrogen...

...For Fortescue, the math is simple. Every year, each of its mines in the Pilbara expands outward at least a couple miles. While the company is developing 15-ton batteries to replace the diesel engines on some of its ore haulers, the mine at Christmas Creek, for instance, is already too sprawling for total reliance on batteries: New, battery-powered haulers just won’t have the range for the mines’ farthest reaches...more
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/11/climate/green-hydrogen-energy.html

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