Singapore wealth fund buys into Australian green hydrogen mega projects

Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund has bought a key strategic stake in InterContinental Energy, one of the key players in some of the biggest and most ambitious green hydrogen projects in Australia and around the world.

InterContinental, along with CWP Global, are behind the 50GW Western Green Energy Hub and the 26GW Asian Renewable Energy Hub projects in Western Australia, but Intercontintal has a total of 200GW of green hydrogen project around the world, including in Oman and Saudi Arabia.

Its focus on exploiting wind and solar resources in coastal desert regions at massive scale to create green hydrogen and green ammonia has attracted the attention of GIC, the wealth fund of Singapore which is expected to be a key consumer of these new green fuels.

“This is a strategic investment to position GIC early for the emerging hydrogen economy,” Ang Eng Seng, the chief investment officer of Infrastructure at GIC said in a statement.

“We believe that in time, hydrogen will play a crucial role in decarbonisation globally and that InterContinental Energy will be a key player in this transformation.”

To give an idea of the scale of the InterContinental portfolio, the 200GW of upstream wind and solar capacity will enable production of around 14 million tonnes of green hydrogen a year, or about 80 million tonnes of green ammonia.

That’s around the same scale of green hydrogen production that Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest, although he is yet to identify exactly where he will source the renewables needed to meet his goal of 15 million tonnes a year of green hydrogen.

InterContinental sees its key markets for green hydrogen and green ammonia to be marine fuels, co-firing in power generation (such as Japanese coal plants), industrial processes, and heavy transport.

It says its portfolio, assuming it is delivered at such a scale, will likely offset over 200 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per annum and create over 100,000 direct and indirect high-quality jobs.

InterContinental says the investment by GIC is “testament” to its support for the vision of developing green fuels at scale to help reduce emissions in hard to abate sectors.

The investment is subject to approval by the Australian Foreign Investment Review Board, likely because two of the big projects are located in Australia. The size of the investment – in terms of dollars or percentage stake – was not revealed.