The entrepreneur took on more established mining giants including Rio Tinto, BHP and Anglo American to make his fortune, supplying huge amounts of iron ore to China following a giant discovery in the Pilbara, Western Australia.
Today, Fortescue is the fourth-largest iron ore producer in the world and its founder is estimated to command a personal fortune of nearly $US15 billion ($23.4 billion).
I don’t talk about decarbonisation, OK? I just talk hard economics.
Andrew Forrest
Forrest has pledged to give all his riches to charity within his lifetime and runs the philanthropic Minderoo Foundation with his wife, Nicola. His Damascene conversion to the climate cause came after he nearly died in a 2016 hiking accident and spent his recovery studying marine ecology, and learning how global warming was ravaging the oceans.
By 2020, Forrest declared that Fortescue would kick its own fossil fuel habit and instead become a pioneer of solutions to the problem “through invention”.
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His overarching plan is for the company to slash costs by generating green energy and then profit by supplying the surplus to others.
His biggest bet has been on developing electrolysers that can break down water into green hydrogen or reduce iron ore to “green iron” suitable for steel making.
The plan for green metal production amounts to another bet on insatiable demand from China, while Forrest believes green hydrogen can become a “superfuel” that will replace natural gas and be burnt in power stations as a back-up for intermittent wind and solar farms everywhere.
Through his acquisition of UK-based Williams Advanced Engineering, the technology arm of the Formula 1 racing team, the billionaire is also pushing the development of high-tech batteries that will soon power Fortescue’s mining trucks and trains in the Pilbara.
And he has been lobbying European governments, including Sir Keir Starmer’s administration in Britain, to back an ambitious proposal for a series of subsea cables that would carry abundant clean power to Europe from North Africa.
Clean energy, hard economics
Yet for Forrest, all this is about his balance sheet as much as it is about the planet.
Fortescue is today valued at about $50 billion by the Australian sharemarket, with its shares having increased by about 600 per cent in the past decade. And Forrest believes switching to green energy is essential to its future.
“I don’t talk about decarbonisation, OK? I just talk hard economics,” he insists. “That’s my driving interest as chairman of a super high-performing industrial group. And I’m on very safe ground.”
He reels off statistics about the tens of millions of litres of diesel fuel the company burns through, costing it more than a billion dollars every year.
By switching to mining equipment powered by electricity from wind and solar farms, he argues he can deploy these savings more productively elsewhere.
The company is already using hydrogen-fuelled electric hybrid vehicles out in Western Australia. And Forrest recently signed a $US2.8 billion ($4.4 billion) deal with Liebherr, the German-Swiss manufacturer, to buy 360 autonomous, battery-powered trucks, along with 55 electric excavators and 60 battery-powered bulldozers.
The trucks will enter service from next year – a testament to Forrest’s stubbornness.
He says he originally approached US giant Caterpillar about a potential deal, but was told it wasn’t possible before the 2030s at the earliest.
So instead, his company partnered with Liebherr, a rival to Caterpillar, and is now providing the battery and drivetrain technology for the new trucks itself.
“We said to Caterpillar, ‘We’ve gone into industries which refuse to have us before and replaced them, so maybe don’t do that,’ ” he says. “Now, the biggest order which has ever been placed in mining history got placed with a competitor – using our drive tracks.”
I’m a global investor, so I’m only going to go where I feel I’m loved.
Andrew Forrest
Lobbying Trump
But in other parts of the world, Forrest’s plans are suffering setbacks. Many experts remain sceptical about the economics of green hydrogen, due to the large amount of energy required to produce it and the difficulty of storing and transporting the notoriously leaky gas.
In the US, Trump’s attempts to defund green energy tax credits introduced under former president Joe Biden may also spell disaster for a string of Fortescue-backed projects, from a proposed battery plant in Detroit to a hydrogen production plant in Phoenix, Arizona.
For now, Forrest says all of these are “on hold” until the situation is clarified. But he has appealed to Trump’s business acumen, arguing that scrapping the Biden-era subsidies would be disastrous for investment in American manufacturing.
Andrew Forrest with John Kerry at the premiere of Ocean with David Attenborough in London.Credit: Jenny Magee
“I’m a global investor, so I’m only going to go where I feel I’m loved,” he warns. “We’ll just press cancel. So it’s a really dangerous game. And if I was the US president, I’d be backing every single horse in the race.”
Still, outside the US, the billionaire can count on some high-profile friends for support.
Last week, friends including the King and John Kerry, Biden’s former climate envoy, joined Forrest at London’s Royal Festival Hall for a special screening of Sir David Attenborough’s latest documentary, Ocean with David Attenborough, which was half-funded by his foundation.
His support for green causes has also won him the ear of other world leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian leader Narendra Modi.
Yet, although Forrest is an advocate for green energy, he has a surprising take on net zero.
He detests corporate wheezes such as “carbon credits”, which he says will let companies carry on burning fossil fuels while patting themselves on the back. And he is equally scornful of climate activists who want the public to fly less or eat less meat.
“That is a really crap argument,” he says. “We’re not asking for sacrifice. We’re not asking for de-growth. That’s so stupid.”
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Instead, Forrest says companies such as his must stop climate change through sheer innovation.
He wants Fortescue to reach what he calls “real zero” by 2040 – where fossil fuels are no longer used because there are better alternatives.
“I believe net zero is a f—ing con,” he says. “Real zero is serious. Just stop burning fossil fuel.”
“You’ll get rid of climate change, because so much swings off that, and you’ll lower your cost of living and increase your standard of living – and by the way, every politician, that’s what they’re there for.”
Whether you agree with him or not, there’s no doubt Forrest means business.
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