The project in the vast arid-lands of Western Australia was so ambitious they were going to have to build a whole new small town on the coast, with its own desalination plant —  because rainfall is so low. “We need to have lakes” the project manager said.  Sure.

Unfortunately the same thing that makes a site perfect for solar power is exactly the reason that almost no one wants to live there, it’s baking hot, waterless, barely inhabited and thus “available” for acres of solar panels. (Everything that makes it good for solar and wind power makes it horrible for the economics of collecting all that “free” energy). Let’s just say wages need to be high. The sun is cheap in the Pilbara, but telecoms, food, water, air conditioning, houses, and lakes are not. Nor are 5,000 kilometer subsea cables, or 1,000 miles of transmission lines to major population centers.

BP abandoned the project a year ago, following in the footsteps of Vestas, Macquarie and others that had abandoned it before BP did. In January our government gave it $22 million to study how to make hydrogen projects work in the Pilbara. Pfft, went that cash.

Now the owners have downgraded the 26GW venture back to a 15GW project that was approved in 2020. Forget the big export plans, now they just hope to power, you guessed it, some miners and data-centers in Port Hedland with a small 1 GW starter. Ammonia, may or may not be produced closer to Port Hedland.

Australian Renewable Energy Hub’s $50b plan shrinks

— by Peter Milne, Boiling Cold

The size of Australia’s largest renewable energy project has been cut by nearly half, and the remote Pilbara site will no longer produce ammonia from green hydrogen.

The company spokeswoman said the project strategy subsequently evolved toward supplying renewable electricity and hydrogen to support industry in the Pilbara, including green iron, mining decarbonisation and critical minerals processing.

There is still just that small detail about needing 550 km of high voltage power lines to reach the customers:

To succeed, the project needs the Pilbara Green Link to connect AREH and the Pilbara power network with 550km of high-voltage 330kV transmission lines.

Perry Williams and Nick Evans in The Australian explain that BP abandoned it because customers just weren’t willing to pay:

Intercontinental Energy and CWP Global’s Australian Renewable Energy Hub scales back hydrogen

BP later revealed its decision to depart the Hub was sealed by the reluctance of future customers to back up their support for green power with financial commitments.

The oil major’s country president Lucy Nation said at the time its most likely customers — widely understood to include large iron ore miners operating in the Pilbara and countries such as Japan — had significantly delayed plans to commit to long-term offtake agreements.

And Chris Bowen’s Big Hydrogen plan has reached 0.2% of it’s target!

Released in 2024 by Energy Minister Chris Bowen, the National Hydrogen Strategy set out the government’s ambition to boost production of renewable-generated hydrogen at a competitive cost, setting a target of 500,000 tonnes by 2030.

However, federal bureaucrats in May confirmed that domestic production levels were currently 1100 tonnes – amounting to 0.2 per cent of the target.

This was once a giant flagship proposal that pulled in not just BP but InterContinental Energy, CWP Global, and Macquaries Green Investment Group. Scores of engineers and entrepeneurs must have tried to make the numbers work as they chased the solar-wind-hydrogen fairy hob goblin.

Yet here we are again, like an impossible Escher puzzle. The illusion of “free energy” beguiles the human brain but the cost of collecting, storing and transporting the invisible fire fools us every time. We just have to find an empty first world desert near the equator and 10 million people, and an endlessly replenishing hydroelectricity dam and it will all be perfect.

This article originally appeared at JoNova