Forrest’s green ship makes a splash in Dubai

That was all the incentive Dr Forrest needed for one of his trademark bursts of colourful fury. He wants to be green, but instead he’s seeing red.

“If it was powered by fuels which are going to destroy this planet, destroy the future of your own children – diesel, bunker sea oil – then it’s ‘come on in, the water’s fine!’,” he said. “‘Oh, no, a pollution-free ship? Stop right there, don’t come in!’”

He told a story of being at one of California’s ports and being informed by the authorities that his ship would not be welcome, prompting him to make an appeal to the governor, who knocked heads together.

“The governor said, ‘That’s not good enough – if Dr Forrest wants to bring in a pollution-free ship into the Port of Los Angeles, I want it in, I want it in straightaway’. That’s the type of pressure which will come on, when solutions are available and people don’t act.”

On the technological front, Dr Forrest and the CEO of Fortescue Future Industries, Mark Hutchinson, predict that they will launch a 300-metre, 270,000-tonne iron ore freighter fuelled by ammonia “this decade”. As Mr Hutchinson pointed out, the FMG-owned boats are a Scope 2 emission: “it’s not optional, we have to do it”.

But the International Maritime Organisation and the ports needed to play ball, Dr Forrest said. “We will start calling out ports and regulated authorities, if we don’t see really positive action within the next four months,” he vowed.

The federal government’s climate change ambassador, Kristin Tilley, was on hand to welcome the boat to Dubai, and hailed it as “demonstration and evidence of what’s possible now”.

“Fifteen years ago, it was a fantasy, it was someone else’s problem. Today we’re seeing vision and demonstration. In 15 years, that will be very clear delivery, progress, and near-achievement of what we’re aiming for,” she said.

“When I think about what government does, and the sort of meetings and discussions we sit in at the COPs, they’re in closed meeting rooms, no windows, talking about words, talking about plans. That stuff is really important, it’s what government does, but it’s nothing if we don’t actually see the evidence and the delivery, that we do here today.”

Mr Hutchinson said the prototype had cost “tens of millions of dollars” to get onto the water – a decent sum of money, but that’s partly the purpose of the $6 billion that FFI has been given to decarbonise the business.

“We did the same thing on the trucks and the trains. You build a prototype first, see if it works, doesn’t work. You try it again. This is our prototype. This is part of the capex we will spend on the decarbonisation of the ships.”

Many large shippers, such as Maersk, are punting on green methanol to get their emissions down – at least in the short to medium term. But neither Mr Hutchinson nor Dr Forrest were buying that.

With green methanol, “you’ve still got to release the CO2. So at the end of the day, even if it’s bio, you’re still releasing emissions into the atmosphere”, Mr Hutchinson said.

Dr Forrest, as always, was more forthright: “E-methanol is like sustainable aviation fuel, it’s not a solution. We need massive-scale energy for huge shipping, huge heavy industry. It’s not going to come out of competing with a food source,” he said.

“It’s not going to happen. I mean, it’ll happen for greenwashing. But it won’t happen as a real solution. Real solutions are industrial: industrial-scale ammonia production, industrial-scale consumption, zero pollution.”