Carbon Commentary newsletter

August 30th 2026

1, Fortescue produces first green iron at Green Metal.

The Australian metals company Fortescue was one of the early backers of renewable hydrogen. That support has diminished in the last years and the company has withdrawn from many of its proposed developments. One exception is an iron manufacturing plant in the ore mining area of Pilbara on Australia’s western coast. Here, cheap electricity and abundant ore makes iron-making using hydrogen at least possibly competitive with the use of coal. In mid-August Fortestcue announced that the plant had produced its first green iron partly from the low grade local ore using electricity and hydrogen. It also stressed that it was investigating several other potential routes to low emissions metal production. Large scale production here of green steel made is still some years away but the logic of making iron in Australia rather than shipping huge quantities of ore is undeniable.

2, Green fertiliser and conflicts over electricity availability.

Producing green fertiliser competitively requires low electricity costs to make the hydrogen. UK developer ATOME wants to build a large plant in Paraguay and was promised a fixed cost of $30/MWh from the huge Itaipu hydro plant, a fraction of what it might pay in Europe. But the country decided to back away from this price in June, after the state electricity company complained that $30/MWh would mean that costs for other users would need to rise. In the background large numbers of prospective data centres appear also to be bidding for Itaipu power, and are probably willing to pay more. This is a pattern that we will see globally; green transition projects needing cheap power will be fighting data centres that are also gravitating to low electricity price regions and are often able to pay more. In this case ATOME now proposes to build a large solar plant adjacent to its factory to supply electricity. In Chile, Austrian developers obtained regional approval this month for a plant making about 1% of global nitrogen fertiliser production. It will avoid straining local supplies by building a new 194 turbine wind farm.

3, Problems recycling/composting plastics.

Riverford, the UK’s largest supplier of home-delivered organic vegetables, said that it was rethinking its use of home-compostable plastic packaging. It reported that only 11% of the amount supplied to customers is properly composted at home. Some is returned to Riverford but the company believes three quarters of the packaging probably ends up in general waste where it will not break down and cannot be recycled. It is thus adding to the plastics problem, not reducing it. And since the company once said that the home compostable version is three times the price of conventional plastics, there’s a strong reason to abandon it.

4, ..But recycling car components is getting easier.

Better news from BMW, which wrote that its research had found ways to fully recycle over half the material in its cars so that it could be immediately reused for new parts for vehicles. This number compares to only 6% currently. Today, even the steel waste in a car is contaminated with copper, meaning it cannot be reused for making new vehicles. But the BMW project found ways to increase direct steel reuse from 1% at the moment to 81% using improved sorting and processing.

5, China EV sales cutting petrol use.

In countries such as the UK the impact of EV sales on transport fuel use is still difficult to discern. For example, first quarter 2026 UK fuel use was up 1% on the previous year. But growing EV sales in China, now 65% of the total market including plug-in hybrids, are rapidly denting petrol and diesel fuel volumes, down 8% and 12% respectively in the first half of the year. (Of course, price increases resulting from the Iran war will also have affected fuel sales).

6, Offsetting aviation emissions with equivalent geological storage.

It may be cheaper and easier to burn fossil kerosene for aviation and then capture and store the same amount of CO2 than it is to make carbon neutral fuel from hydrogen and carbon molecules (‘eSAF’). A team led by Myles Allen, the leading Oxford climate researcher, has proposed this approach in a new paper funded by VietAir. The paper argues that pulling CO2 from the air and using green hydrogen to make kerosene will be more expensive than simply capturing and storing enough CO2 to neutralise aviation emissions. But both routes still have higher costs in 2050 than typical fossil aviation kerosene prices. (See note 9)

7, Nuclear fusion construction is about to start.

Pacific Fusion broke ground on its full-scale experimental facility in New Mexico, aiming to demonstrate a net energy surplus by 2030. This means that the electricity used by the entire plant will be more than matched by energy generated by nuclear fusion. This doesn’t equate to a net electricity output since the fusion energy will need to be converted into electricity, probably via a conventional turbine, with the associated losses. The large number of start-ups in the fusion space use a variety of different technologies; Pacific Fusion directs intense pulses of electrical energy to a hydrogen capsule the size of a pea. We can’t know yet whether this approach is the most technically or commercially effective and it will be at least 2035 before a working electricity generator using fusion of any sort joins the power network. However the US clearly sees progress in fusion as absolutely vital in its battle for supremacy against Chinese technologies, including in military fields, so we can expect continued strong state support. The fullest account I found of Pacific Fusion’s project is here.

8, Urban tree cover improves child mortality, and possibly wider population health.

A new academic study shows that higher levels of tree cover and, separately, smaller gaps between tree canopies, are associated with lower levels of child mortality. The improvements tail off once tree cover reaches 30%. The study focused on lower and middle income countries but the results are similar to previous work in wealthy states. The researchers hypothesise that better levels of tree cover improve protection against climate extremes and air pollution while also improving mental and social health of children and parents. The work identified areas of eastern Africa and south Asia that would particularly benefit from tree planting. This research may have even wider relevance; the percentage of children dying before the age of 5 is a predictor of general population health and improving tree cover may also improve adult illness and mortality.

9, A new method for producing sustainable aviation fuel (eSAF as in note 6).

Metafuels in Switzerland opened its demonstration plant using green hydrogen and captured CO2 to make methanol which is then converted into eSAF using a proprietary catalytic process. The site is small, making only 50 litres a day, but the company targets full commercial production in 2030. Other eSAF producers are going a different route, focusing on conventional Fischer Tropsch (FT) conversion of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, but Metafuels claims its approach is cheaper and more environmentally friendly. In a related development, the UK’s Zero Petroleum told us that it had used its proprietary Fischer Tropsch technology to develop a ‘100% replica’ of aviation fuel. This is an important advance because existing FT processes do not result in a fuel that is chemically identical to the complex mix of hydrocarbons in standard aviation fuel.

10, Are manganese flow batteries the future for long duration storage?

Flow batteries may be the route to week-long energy storage. Vanadium batteries of this type suffer from the high cost of this metal and manganese could offer a very much cheaper alternative. This might make them commercially attractive even if they are only used ten or twenty times a year. RFC, now called Certain Energy and a subsidiary of UK fuel cell producer Ceres, announced a £10m early investment round, bringing in the UK state and Temasek. By the standards of the flows into other storage technologies, this amount is utterly tiny. But Certain does claim to hold important IP that gets around the problems that have blocked past attempts to avoid the deposition of chemically inert manganese dioxide inside the battery. The cost target of $20 per kilowatt hour - perhaps a quarter of lithium iron phosphate - and a round-trip efficiency aim of 75% (compared to around 50% for iron-air batteries, for example) offer huge commercial potential.

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