How has that sort of message changed?

Well, I think there's a range of journalistic voices in the sector.

And I think there's always been a sort of probably more than healthy skepticism, you know, always been a skeptical cohort.

Yeah.

Some of it's been overdone.

Some of it was justified, perhaps.

When I first started covering it, you know, 10 or 12 years ago, solar was still, there were no batteries.

How has the story on green hydrogen, green steel changing in Australia now?

Am I, uh, alone here in thinking this is a bit odd that, that the world's biggest gas exporter importing gas, some of it gas it's, uh, prepared to put on ships?

Well, you're certainly not alone, Peter, because the optics of that are extremely odd.

When these plans were formulated, the proponents were all arguing that because there was a coming global oversupply in the LNG market, they could regasify and supply LNG as gas into the domestic market at a competitive price.

That has kind of blown up with the conflict in Iran and the impact of that on exports of LNG through the Straits of Hormuz.

Um, but even before that, the customers had seen these proponents coming and were not signing contracts, so it was kind of a case of all dressed up with no customers.

And Squadron Energy actually sublet its floating storage and regasification unit, which is basically a ship that turns, you know, frozen LNG into gas molecules for consumption, to, uh, an Egyptian company called EGAS, and they now can't retrieve that floating facility until 2027.

But now that the Iran war has happened and the resolution of the Straits of Hormuz impasse, you know, doesn't look clear at the moment, there may be no, uh, LNG oversupply anyway, and therefore the prices may be against the LNG importers.

Do you think the public could actually cope with that sort of idea, with continuing to wait, continuing for a while longer to get low returns for the gas, knowing that it'll come good?

We've got a Labor government, that it's doing what it should.

Well, Peter, that's because, uh, we have official projections and, uh, historical records from the, uh, Department of, uh, Climate Change, Energy, and Water...

Environment and Water.

Those official projections say that, uh, we are currently, we have reduced our emissions from the, uh, twen- two thousand and five benchmark of six hundred and twelve million tons by twenty-nine percent as of twenty twenty-five, and that we are within a whisker of being officially on track to achieve forty-three percent reductions by twenty thirty.

But the problem with those projections, and the reason why they are widely, uh, distrusted, [chuckles] uh, or criticized, is that the largest piece of the reduction, it, it derives from, uh, a turnaround in what's called land use, land use change in forestry, which is... really goes to stopping clearing new land, although we still do that, but doing it, uh, doing less of it, uh, revegetating or reforesting, uh, already cleared land, um, and accounting for that.

They buried and cremated for a while.

That's right, yeah, but it did, um...

A- and in fact, it was, uh, uh, it was only five years after, um, the Hewson, uh, led, uh, opposition was, um, destroyed by a campaign against a proposal for GST.

If the rest of the world doesn't want to buy things from Australia, the- the Saudi Arabia of the, uh, second half of the 21st century, uh, the vision's in trouble, right?

Uh, well, it's a challenge, Peter, and- and you're, uh, very correct to say that free markets are not the zeitgeist in the era of China-US great power rivalry.

And, uh, Hugh Mackay, um, is an economist at ANU and a former market analyst at BHP for a long period, I think eight years, and he points out...

And I have to stress, he doesn't want to be the naysayer on the, y- uh, green energy superpower vision, but he does point out that China, which is the world's largest steel and aluminum producer, and therefore a key market for Australia's green iron and other commodities should we, um, go down that path, has invested very heavily in traditional blast furnace, basic oxygen furnace steelmaking in the last 20 years.

That's how it became the largest steelmaker.

And Hugh's point is that they're not going to want to abandon those investments too soon or, you know, before their economic lifetime is up, and therefore, they will pursue green iron technology options that tend to preserve as much of those assets as they can.

Uh, they've also got very large aluminium investments.

Ben, as someone who used to write for The Financial Review, does this set off alarm bells in your mind, handing out grants to people who have good ideas and want to develop something?