Thanks Mr P. I can’t make up my mind on Twiggy Forrest. Sometimes I can’t stand him and sometimes he acts like a visionary.
When private industry is forced to adapt to survive most generally do, although sometimes they need a gentle shove.
Yeah I think sometimes he does some strange things (the Covid masks for example), but the focus of FFI could be huge and why I'm happy to buy more FMG. They are investing 10% of after tax profits every year directly into FFI which last year was around US$1bn. The one thing these developing industries have struggled with in the past is financing and IMO green hydrogen could be huge for the transport sector for example. FFI are already working with Rolls Royce on prototype hydrogen powered engines for their mining machinery but this could expand out to ships / aircraft etc.
I know many people when talking renewables, talk about wind and solar power which are important, but there are other fossil fuel areas of the economy that will struggle to utilise either. I'm not sure on electric cars right now, theres the issue around infrastructure and the time required to charge vs the time taken to fill with fuel that needs to be considered, obviously longer life batteries should help here, but that assumes vehicles will need to be stationary and charging for a period of time, it may work for cars / motorbikes etc, but many heavy goods vehicles just change crews and on they go, so there is significant downtime created from the use of electric vehicles, which is where I see green hydrogen coming in.
I do like rooftop solar, but we do need to be careful around large scale solar plants and where they are situated. I know there was a study done on a large scale solar plant in the Sahara desert, which in principle sounds like an amazing idea, however when they ran it through their models, they calculated an increase in heat being absorbed into our atmosphere actually having a heat island effect, due to covering light coloured sand (which reflects sunlight and their rays out of the atmosphere) to one that has dark coloured solar panels which acts to absorb more heat into the atmosphere. I'm not sure whether a light coloured solar farm could work, clearly wouldn't be as efficient as dark panels but it may still generate enough power due to the long daylight hours in deserts such as the Sahara.
I would love for companies to invest in technologies that create circular plastic economies, the tech exists but isn't being used due to price, but it needs manufacturing volume to drive the price down. I did invest in a company (it wasn't a great investment) that was to do this, but that turned into a bit of a scam IMO, constant misinformation spread by the company, led them to being delisted from the ASX, plenty of cowboys out there.
I think the shove as you speak about is happening from finance companies. Many people now wanting to invest in the ESG sector, and you can see that with industries such as coal finding it very difficult to borrow against their assets.