Last month, FFI announced plans to invest $US130 million ($200 million) with Tree Energy Solutions, known as TES, to become a partner in a gas import terminal and planned green energy hub in Germany.

Debelle says there is a huge opportunity for Australia to export green energy into Europe with the German government, in particular, pushing hard for green energy choices to reduce its reliance on Russian gas.

The issue is how to get the production of a nascent technology, such as green hydrogen, up to the production scale needed to bring it further down the cost curve, according to Debelle.

Generous US incentives, legislated under the Emissions Reduction Act, has ensured the manufacture of green hydrogen there will be below current cost of fossil fuels in the US, according to Debelle.

“It makes green hydrogen, in particular, absolutely competitive today.”

He later told Bloomberg TV that FFI would announce its first major clean energy project within the next nine months without specifying where it would be.

“We’ve got a couple of projects which are getting very close to first investment decision, and so we’re looking to do that certainly over the next nine months or so to have those announcements out there,” Debelle said.

Not everyone is a big fan of green hydrogen.

Rewiring Australia chief scientist Saul Griffith - who advised the Biden administration on the Inflation Reduction Act - told The Australian Financial Review’s energy and climate summit this week that the enthusiasm for green hydrogen needed a reality check.

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“We should temper our enthusiasm for hydrogen solving any domestic economy problems. We are still being dragged into it by Germany, Japan, [and] other nations that have had hydrogen as a national security strategy more so than really an energy strategy,” he said.

“They’re signing these sorts of fake contracts that aren’t real contracts that ‘if you produce it, we will come’. That’s not real. So, we’re trying to solve someone else’s emissions, we’re over-investing in that as a nation.”

Debelle admitted that shipping green hydrogen to Europe was not viable at the moment, so it would need to be done in another form, such as ammonia. This is what FFI is proposing for the project announced last week at Incitec Pivot’s Gibson Island ammonia facility.

Debelle is more comfortable with the lack of a carbon price in Australia, saying there are alternatives that would not face the same political issues.

“There are a number of other mechanisms which don’t have the political baggage of being called a carbon tax, or carbon price, which can achieve very similar outcomes,” he said.

This includes the recently legislated emissions reduction target, which effectively forces the emitters to price the carbon they generate.

“That starts to get a much stronger alignment of investment decisions, effectively pricing the carbon impact.”

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