Real Zero, Not Just for Australia
The December issue of Maritime Reporter magazine includes a feature story on Australian mining company Fortescue’s pioneering ammonia fuel trial on the platform supply vessel Green Pioneer.
The Green Pioneer was named one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025.
The conversion journey of its diesel-electric power system to dual-fuel ammonia started in 2022, on land, when Fortescue converted a four-stroke Cummins engine at is Perth testing facility in Western Australia.
“The Fortescue Green Pioneer is proof that safe, technical solutions for ammonia power engines exist” said Dr. Andrew Forrest, the Chairman of Fortescue back in 2024, and he has continued to push for “real zero” fossil-free operations on land and at sea.
Fortescue Shipping owns a fleet of eight conventionally powered Singapore-flagged very large ore carries as well as the Green Pioneer. Fortescue plans to retrofit all of its own ships with ammonia engines by 2030 and any newbuilds will feature ammonia engines.
Fortescue also charters in ships which contribute to the group’s Scope 3 emissions, the Net Zero target for which is 2040.
Fortescue has also developed a decarbonized mining approach. By 2030, the company’s mines will feature battery electric trucks, excavators and drills, autonomous vehicles, fast battery chargers for mobile mine equipment, and ore processing powered by wind and solar, supported by battery energy storage systems.
The company’s Green Metal project will use renewable energy and green hydrogen reduction technology to produce low emissions metal suitable for most global steel plants. Shipping semi-processed metal instead of the ore will also reduce shipping volumes with a consequential reduction on shipping emissions, supporting the company’s aim to reduce emissions intensity levels from shipping iron ore by 50% from 2021 levels by 2030.
The findings of a report, commissioned by Fortescue and published prior to COP30, support Forrest’s ambition, indicating that the world has reached a green tipping point. “Firmed renewable energy is now the cheapest form of energy in nearly every corner of the world.”
The economics of Real Zero are clear across three sectors, according to the research, which finds:
Heavy trucking (Europe): Battery-electric long-haul trucks are projected to reach cost parity with diesel equivalents by 2026 – a tipping point for zero-emission transport.
Fertilizer (India): By 2026, green ammonia for fertilizer production will carry only a marginal cost premium over grey ammonia (made from fossil fuel) in parts of India, and by 2030 will undercut grey ammonia in renewables-rich regions.
Steel (Japan): Green hydrogen-based steelmaking could be cheaper than fossil routes by the early 2030s – even sooner with modest carbon pricing – while scrap-based electric arc furnace production is already cost-competitive.
“Fossil fuels are no longer an economic necessity — they’re a financial liability,” said Forrest on the report's release. “In sector after sector, the green option is now the cheap option. This research confirms what we see every day at Fortescue – that eliminating fossil fuels makes solid commercial sense, even in the hardest-to-abate sectors.”
