Article by Hannah Wootton, courtesy of Financial Review
04.08.2025
If there’s one thing that Andrew Forrest loves more than green hydrogen, it’s publicity. Especially when it paints him as a climate warrior. Just look at TIME magazine’s February cover, on which he appeared decked out in a Canadian cut-off tuxedo for a puff piece claiming he was “the planet’s unlikely ally”. A paid partnership between Fortescue and TIME came after.
Very curious then, that Fortescue has done away with the easiest form of free publicity for its planet-saving schemes: its own website. The company’s landing page for Our Green Energy Projects, once proudly prominent, has (poof!) disappeared.
It was only a fortnight ago, Industry Minister Tim Ayers flagged clawing back nearly $50 million in taxpayer money it gave Fortescue for its Gladstone hydrogen electrolyser, after the company canned the project.
Twiggy has agreed to return the funds “where required”. But the discarded green hydrogen, renewables projects and commitments don’t end there.
Fortescue dumped its Arizona green energy project at the same time as the Queensland one. Same for a partnership with a Texas hydrogen plant earlier this year. It stopped work on a green hydrogen project in Canada last year, and dropped its target to produce 15 million tonnes of the gas a year by 2030.
There’s also the seemingly paused ones. Twiggy announced a US$5 billion clean energy development in PNG in 2021. No plants have progressed to construction. In 2023, he announced a green hydrogen project in Brazil – also worth US$5 billion, also with no construction or update.
The company has multiple commitments in Norway for green hydrogen and ammonia plants, and across the Middle East and northern Africa for renewables and more hydrogen. Again, the state of these is unclear.
Where a shareholder may have once gone for updates is, of course, the website. If a project is delayed or cancelled and no one records it, does it still count as a failure? Did it even exist?
We’re told Fortescue intentionally removed the page to reflect these projects we’re progressing. So not just a tech glitch. Though when we looked for the old landing page, we got the following error message: “We’ve just updated our site and some links may not be working.“ Like green hydrogen isn’t working?
