Given a magic wand, the CEO of mining company Fortescue would build the world’s largest solar and wind farm.
Responding to a question at the International Mining and Resources Conference, Dino Otranto said such a development would “spawn an entire new industry where we can finally take our commodities [and] turn them into downstream products” for which the global market has an “insatiable demand.”
“Particularly when we’ve got such a small population base with a huge land mass, we need to harness technological advancements,” Otranto said.
“We can harness automation [and] robotics, like we’ve pioneered in Australia, and put that to work, build that huge solar and wind farm ... with the lowest capacity of labour. But I’m not talking about fewer jobs; I’m talking about more prosperity.”
The expertise and labour would come from Australians who are currently working on such projects overseas.
What More Australia Can Do
Otranto noted that when he left Australia about 20 years ago, the country was fourth in the world in terms of productivity.
“And I thought we had a way to go. So to come back to here [and find] we were 19th, I was a little bit thrown by that, to be honest.
“I didn’t realise how much industry does collaborate in Africa or Asia or the [United] States, and here ... we’re a little bit stuck in the threat of anti-competition, or we can’t work with our rivals [because of] ego,” Otranto told the meeting.
Regaining Australia’s lost productivity will require strategic partnerships between government and industry, he said—a theme that many speakers touched on at the event.
“As you’ve seen with most industrial revolutions, it starts with the cost of energy,” he said. “You saw it in South Africa with hydro. You saw it on the east coast [of Australia] with the aluminium industry and in the southwest with coal. It all comes down to the cost of electricity
“It’s bipartisan around which political affliction you side with. We must solve that problem. The beauty is that we have manufacturing opportunities on our doorstep that allow Australia to compete internationally. And when you have the cost of electricity so low, combined with the abundant resources [and the] geographical position that we have, I just think it’s a recipe that we cannot let slip by.
“And that’s the message is, it will slip by. China, the U.S., the rest of the world are not going to wait for Australia to sit here and work this stuff out. Is it difficult? Absolutely it’s difficult, but we’ve got to do it.”
Fortescue has “changed the language from net zero to ’real zero,'” aspiring to be completely free of hydrocarbons in its industrial operations by 2030, but has also announced that it’s scaling back plans to transition to marine hydrogen.
Otranto said that did not indicate a change in strategy but simply a re-evaluation of different resources.
“It was always the intent that you had to have the green electrons first. If you have that, and you have an excess supply of green electrons, either from existing sources or the potential of sun and wind, then the opportunities for hydrogen, green ammonia, green fertilisers, more green electrons, or using the hydrogen as a chemical reductant, become very, very interesting, and that’s certainly where we are now,” he explained.
