Sun sets over cotton farm.
US president Donald Trump has already done much to revive the global electric vehicle market, and it turns out he’s also helping resuscitate hopes for the green hydrogen sector, and given Australian farmers cause to reassess their dependence on global supply chains.
As has been well documented, Trump’s war on Iran and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz has prompted a surge in petrol and diesel prices. What is less well known is the impact it has had on the global market for fertilisers, and on Australian regions.
It’s caused Australian farmers to think more deeply about their own green energy options – not just the opportunities to host wind and solar farms, but to make home-grown green hydrogen for fertiliser products and diesel replacement, and to reduce their increasingly costly and fraught dependence on international markets.
And that has started to change the conversation about wind and solar projects and what they can do for the community. Rather than just hosting facilities whose product is exported to the big cities and other load centres, farmers are now looking at how they can be used in and benefit regional areas.
It was one of the major themes of the Australian Renewables in Agriculture Conference in Orange last week, attended by more than 400 delegates, that put the other side to some of the nonsense spread in mainstream and social media about the rural push back against the transition to renewables.
As Peter Hannam wrote in his series of articles emerging from his visit to the New England region last week – here and here – many farmers see the transition to renewables, and the opportunity to host wind, solar and battery facilities as a lifeline for their increasingly climate-affected properties.
And in another piece, Hannam quotes the mayor of Armidale, in the centre of the contested new England renewable energy zone, as saying 80 per cent of locals supported the energy transition. And he wished renewable energy companies would do more to combat the misinformation.
What struck home in Orange was the discussion about how farmers are thinking about hosting those wind and solar farms, and helping build local industries that can provide real benefits to the broader farming community and the region as a whole. And the promises of green hydrogen and green ammonia featured prominently.
“We’ve had Ukraine. We’ve now had Iran,” Monica Morona, a farmer from the Hay Plains in south-west New South Wales, told the conference last week.
“Obviously, this is not going to go away. And these price shocks and supply chain shocks are continuing to cause problems.”
The move to add value from the wind and solar facilities has begun with the Good Earth Green Hydrogen and Ammonia (GEGHA) pilot project at Sundown Pastoral near Moree in the Gwydir Valley, which aims to produce around 4,500 tonnes of low carbon NH3, a chemical formula for anhydrous ammonia.
Morona aims to take the next step and help create the country’s first commercial scale plant, called Riverina Renewable Hydrogen, with the aim of producing some 40,000 tonnes of NH3 a year.
She is working with Australian and New Zealand hydrogen production specialists Hiringa, run by former energy industry executives who have even bigger plans for a network of such plants across the country that could replace one quarter of the nation’s imported fertiliser needs.
Morona’s family owns a farm on the Hay Plains with summer and winter irrigation cropping and sheep grazing, and has agreed to host wind turbines that will be part of the Pottinger Energy Park being developed by Someva Renewables and AGL Energy.
The Pottinger project has grid approval for around 830 MW of wind capacity in the south-west renewable energy zone, including battery storage, but with planning approval to go to 2,000 MW.
“It’s perfect for wind farms. It’s flat. It’s all fine for construction. So we’re actually really lucky,” Morona says.
There has also been less resistance to renewables in the South West REZ, which Morona attributes to “local councils who are really, really committed to the community benefits side and really pushing that leadership piece, and that’s been so important.”
Morona is looking to tap behind the meter from the wind turbines from the south-west REZ to power an electrolyser facility – potentially up to 60 MW – to produce anhourous ammonia and urea ammonium nitrate (UAN), to supply fertiliser product for growers in the Riverina.
It will reduce freight costs, improve reliability of supply and strengthen regional resilience.
“In the last decade, diesel prices have doubled and they are not sustainable,” she says. “This (technology) allows us to not just solve our own problem, but also for the whole region.
“We all depend on fertiliser solution shipped from the other side of the world, and our commodity prices not rising in line with cost of inputs. This is way for us to take control back.”
A Hiringa presentation outlines the potential of creating a network that supplies up to 488,000 tonnes of low carbon urea equivalent per year by the late 2030s. This will result in a 95 per cent cut in emissions for one of the agriculture’s highest emission inputs, the document says.
Hiringa says this would reduces freight exposure, support more stable fertiliser prices, and improve outcomes for growers, as well as generating jobs, strengthening local economies, and create a platform for broader green hydrogen use in transport and on-farm energy.
They are also demonstrating that hydrogen can also be used for dual fuel irrigation pumps, mobile farming gear, and even long distance trucking and road trains.
The Sundown pastoral pilot plant at Moree is using solar, backed by battery storage, as its renewable inputs, and Morona expects to add behind the meter solar and storage to the Riverina facility, even with the input from the wind turbines.
“This is where the journey turns,” Morona says. “It means we can do something a bit more ambitious than just, you know, decarbonising our fuel use.
“It’s a fairly ambitious project, but the upside is that (Hiringa and Sundown Pastoral) have a pilot scale, commercial pilot scale up in Moree at the moment, and that’s under construction.
“The best part for me in all of this is that it is renewables. We only need 200 megalitres of water to produce that amount, which, for those irrigation farmers in the room, you know that is very, very little.
“So this, in my mind, is a fantastic equation, and starts to give us some real opportunities to actually do something that takes that energy produced in the south-west REZ and get a benefit for the REZ.
“For me personally, as well as our community, that is the game changer … to use energy to give something back to the local community, that is where it is important for us – just seeing energy exported is the missing part of the equation.
“I think this is one of those instances where between councils, developers, existing businesses, we are starting to show the way.”
And, she says, the Iran situation is making the technology more affordable. And the more it is deployed, the less it will cost. “What was more expensive is now likely to look like a top end price,” she says.
“Farmers are thinking about climate change. We don’t have a choice.”
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