Hydrogen is seen as an important energy carrier in a decarbonised world as it emits zero emissions when burned but there is currently fierce debate around how it should be produced. 

The two most contested forms of hydrogen are green hydrogen, derived from electrolysis powered by renewable energy to split water, and blue hydrogen, which is created using methane gas reforming, with the associative emissions captured and stored (CCS), or by emissions offsets. 

Forrest made the comments last week on a Zoom meeting, seen by Energy News, before the launch of the Green H2 Organisation, an advocacy body aiming to encourage the use of green hydrogen, arguing that promoting alternate forms of hydrogen production is part of an effort to delay the transition away from coal, oil and gas. 

"The Green Hydrogen Organisation has only come just in time," Forrest said.

During the Zoom meeting before the event launch, which has since been taken down, Forrest said he had discussions with a colleague at his own Minderoo Foundation who is also a research fellow at the University of Western Australia. Energy News has chosen not to publish their name to protect their identity. 

"Every time they've tried to put up a green hydrogen submission to study it's been knocked back and only blue hydrogen has been allowed to be on the agenda," Forrest said. 

Speaking to FFI chair and former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull among others on the call, Forrest said the research fellow had spoken to hydrogen doctorates and post-doctorates from Perth universities where research funding comes from the oil and gas sector. 

Forrest claimed Western Australian researchers were currently being asked to work on papers specifically designed to discredit a widely reported peer-reviewed study that found the associated emissions from blue hydrogen were worse than simply just burning gas and that its merits as a decarbonisation solution were invalid.

The paper, led by Cornell University's Professor Robert Howarth and Stanford University's Professor Mark Jacobson, said while CO2 from blue hydrogen may be stored, the use of gas-power to pump it there increases emissions of the more potent greenhouse gas, methane. The study put the escape rate at an average of 3.5%. 

"They're being asked to be co-contributors to papers, which are on their way, to discredit the Horwath paper and to argue that methane emissions are in fact under control," Forrest said. 

"These docs and postdoctorates are recoiling in horror saying ‘we're being asked to put our name to papers we just simply don't believe in.' 

"I found it quite shocking that here in Australia, in Western Australia, the oil and gas sector, the blue hydrogen sector was so pervasive." 

The University of Western Australia receives funding from mining and oil and gas companies in Australia and has hosted the Australian Centre for LNG Futures on its campus, funded by the Australian Research Council and nine industry partners including Chevron, Shell, ExxonMobil and others before its program concluded in April this year.  

The former director of the ACLNGF is head of UWA's Fluid Sciences and Resources Division in the School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics and Chevron chair of gas processing Professor Eric May.

In 2008 UWA was selected to join Chevron's global university partnership program and the appointment of May was part of a A$6.9 million deal between Chevron and the university.

May oversees hydrogen postdoctoral research and now heads the Future Energy Exports Cooperative Research Centre (FEE CRC).

The FEE CRC, which is a public-private cooperative by nature, features partners including state and federal governments, UWA, Curtin University and industry players including Chevron, Inpex, Beach, Origin, Mineral Resources and APPEA. 

May told Energy News he was unable to directly comment on Forrest's claims but disputed the idea that FEE CRC was blocking green hydrogen studies. 

"The CRC has funded $6.8 million of research projects with $4.15 million allocated to hydrogen projects," he said. 

"None are for blue hydrogen production, while three of those projects include "green" or "renewable" in their titles: these three are receiving a total of $2.4 million."

Energy News reached out to the UWA academic that relayed these claims to Forrest, however representatives from Minderoo and Fortescue Future Industries responded instead. 

When asked to verify the specific claims made by Forrest, a Fortescue Future Industries spokesperson told Energy News that it would "never apologise for doing all we can to tackle climate change." 

"This is the challenge of our lifetime, and we are competing with the unlimited, enormous financial resources of the oil and gas industry," she said. 

The spokesperson did not verify Forrest's claims directly but broadly criticised the role fossil fuel companies play in educational institutions. 

"The only long-term solution to climate change is elimination of fossil fuel and an accelerated transition to renewable-electricity based solutions - yet in many universities, the only source of funding into new energy technologies remains the oil and gas industry," she said.

Forrest's FFI and the companies sponsoring centres like the FEE CRC - Chevron in particular - have huge commercial stakes in what direction hydrogen and CCS development takes.

Forrest is seeking to use Fortescue Future Industries to use green hydrogen, ammonia and electricity to decarbonise the mining operations of FMG, its parent company, and for it to become a global energy player in its own right - aiming to produce 15 million tonnes of green hydrogen per year by 2030. 

This financial year FFI received around A$1 billion in funding off the back of strong iron-ore revenues from FMG.  Since starting FFI, Forrest has gone out of his way to publicly attack the oil gas industry's work around blue hydrogen and CCS, comparing it to claims of "clean coal or healthy smoking".

Chevron meanwhile operates the world's largest CCS project, the Gorgon Project in far north Western Australia, which injects reservoir gas into saline aquifers onshore Barrow Island. It has put CCS technology at the centre of its strategy to reduce emissions while still producing hydrocarbons. It wants to increase carbon capture and offsets to 25 million tonnes per year and grow hydrogen production to 150,000 tonnes per year. 

May acknowledged that his research group at UWA had considered publishing research against Howarth and Jacobson's study, saying it had been criticised by many technical experts and members of the scientific community.

"This is primarily because it relies on poor assumptions regarding fugitive emissions of methane to reach its primary conclusion," he said. 

"Members of our research group at UWA have considered publishing a comment on the Howarth and Jacobson article to point out the technical errors it contains regarding fugitive emissions and to present a more rigorous analysis of blue hydrogen's carbon-intensity," he said. 

May referred Energy News to a pre-print study, not yet peer reviewed, published in Cambridge University Press journal - ChemRxiv - which found state-of-the-art reforming with high CO2 capture rates combined with natural gas supply featuring low methane emissions could allow a substantial reduction in emissions compared to natural gas reforming and direct combustion of natural gas.  

Speaking to Energy News, Howarth said his team deliberately wrote a "very transparent and conservative analysis" riding on a small set of input parameters. 

"We went to some length to present detailed sensitivity analyses around these input parameters, testing them to a very high level of carbon dioxide capture (higher than ever observed in practice) and a very low methane emission parameter (at the very low end of what any peer-reviewed papers have suggested, and much lower than is likely)," he said. 

"Our conclusions were robust across these tests."

Howarth said he found Forrest's allegations disturbing but not surprising, saying his previous research into methane emissions from shale gas in the US was met with a similar response a decade ago. 

"The oil and gas industry has developed ties to research institutions, financially supporting those who share their views.  Institutions such as these were among the first to attack my work from 2011," he said. 

"The push back from these industry-tied groups was fast and furious." 

Commenting on the ChemRxiv study, Howarth noted it assumes carbon capture rates of 98%, which have never been observed in practice, and methane emissions close to zero, which has never been recorded, describing it as "fatally flawed". 

Meanwhile, both FFI and May argued that industry collaboration with universities was important.

May said the FEE CRC's goal was to "future-proof Australia's energy exports through industrial-scale research & development", describing it as a not-for-profit, independent public company that receives Commonwealth, state and industry funding.

FFI said it was "investing in a very significant research and development program in Australia and internationally to help researchers to thrive and to help drive government and business to take action on climate change".

Howarth said the public and policymakers needed to understand the threat posed by "excessive influence of vested interests". 

"Universities and other research bodies should work much harder to end such influence, but in the meanwhile, the public and policymakers should approach information coming from these sources with a very sceptical, discerning eye," he said. 

"One should ignore public relations efforts disguised as sciences."

 

*Updated to include additional comment from Professor Robert Howarth*