“As the sun set over the hills of the first mine that set him [Andrew Forrest] on a path to enormous wealth, he explained that Fortescue, the Australian company he founded, would no longer just extract and ship 180 million tons of iron ore, the raw material for steel. It would zero out its own carbon emissions and become a renewable energy powerhouse.”

When your last name is Forrest, it’s only a matter of time, right? I mean, look what happened to Isabella Tree.

Mr Forrest’s company is called Fortescue:

“Fortescue made $10.3 billion in profit last year by extracting iron ore and selling it mostly to Chinese steel makers. Along the way, the company burned through 700 million liters of diesel and released 2.2 million tons of greenhouse gases — more than some small countries.”

Yikes.

Fortescue plans to decarbonise by 2030, which is the kind of crazy deadline Elon Musk likes to set.

The Iron and Steel world emits around 7% of our emissions, more than cars.

As mentioned above, Fortescue ships the raw materials mostly to China, where they are likely turned into steel using electricity from burning coal. Which is bad. So…

“The most groundbreaking developments have come from a small room at the University of Western Australia, Dr. Forrest’s alma mater, where the company’s electrochemists have found a new route to what’s known as green iron and steel.
“Nearly 90 percent of the carbon released by the steel-making process comes from reducing it to “pig iron” in a blast furnace or smelter powered by fossil fuels. Fortescue’s engineers have built a miniature mill that they said could do the same thing with electrodes and a pressurized brew of metals and other materials. Sitting on a counter, it resembled a water heater crossed with an espresso machine.”

Sounds a bit out there, but Bill Gates is backing a competitor trying to do the same thing, so it’s probably legit.

Just be careful of the microchips in the steel.

I digress.

Fortescue is also on the way to running their mine trucks on hydrogen fuel. Check out the ladder on the truck that you need to climb just to get over the front wheel!

David Dare Parker for The New York Times.

Sounds like they’re still a way off getting a day’s worth of (explosive) hydrogen in there, but it’s a good challenge.

“Dr. Forrest is aware of the pressure and the doubt. When I asked whom he needed to convince to make sure his dream became reality, he answered quickly: “Everyone.”
“Miners, it turned out, were the easiest ones to persuade. At the sites I visited with Dr. Forrest, I interviewed dozens of workers and contractors. Nearly all expressed relief: Finally, they said, they could participate in a solution to climate change, getting past tired culture war politics.”

That’s definitely a positive.

Check out the full article, it’s pretty good!