Hydrogen Hype: Angus Taylor’s last throw of the dice for brown coal

The last hope for the ‘survival’ of Victoria’s brown coal industry is to turn this carbon intensive fuel into hydrogen and exported. The announcement that the Yallourn power station will close in 2028 foreshadows the complete shut-down of the remaining brown-coal fired electricity generators in the La Trobe Valley. Generators can simply no longer compete with electricity made from renewable energy, backed by battery storage.

Yet this grand vision of exporting liquefied hydrogen produced from brown coal is almost certain to be financially unviable because the processes involved require huge amounts of energy. Physics dictates that the amount of energy needed to compress and liquefy any particular gas is effectively fixed. This…