Yet despite the billions in dollars of public funding earmarked to spur the industry, commercial projects have stalled around the world due in large part to the high cost of production and lack of customers.
The transport sector plan relies not just on green hydrogen for trucks, but also on low emissions sustainable aviation fuel, produced from plant oils or renewable energy starting to replace jet fuel from 2030 onwards, even though it currently costs up to five times more.
While the transport plan contains the most detailed timeline of when low emissions technologies are expected to be deployed, it does not state how the government can assume green hydrogen will be a commercially viable at scale by 2030.
Labor quietly defunded its $80 million Hydrogen Highways program, to drive uptake of hydrogen trucks, in the May Budget. The National Hydrogen Roadmap, released last year, argued the nation could produce between 15 million tonnes and 30 million tonnes of green hydrogen a year by 2050, but Treasury modelling released with the climate target last week assumes that figure would be just 4 million tonnes.
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The agriculture sector plan notes farmers are expected to produce significant emissions reduction of around 60 million tonnes a year by 2050, but there is not yet guidance on whether farmers would need to offset their own carbon and if they decided to plant trees to do so, what the impact on food production would be.
The mining and industry sector plans do not detail any new policies that would force big polluters like coal mines or smelters to make greater emission cuts out to 2035, nor do they estimate how much emissions would be sliced from each sector.
Bowen said in 2021 that Morrison’s net zero policy “wasn’t a plan, it’s a scam”.
“I’ve seen more detail in a fortune cookie then in documents released by the government today,” Bowen said.
The same criticism could now be levelled at Bowen. That’s how the cookie crumbles.
