ESG Isn't Quite Dead Yet, But the Value of the FT Certainly is

"The hydrogen pipeline hasn't proved to be viable. That also implies that hydrogen production plans are also put aside," Equinor's spokesperson Magnus Frantzen Eidsvold told Reuters. "We have decided to discontinue this early-phase project.”

Oh. You don’t say - the hydrogen pipeline hasn’t proved viable? Who could have seen that one coming?

Thus does a ballyhooed major offshore blue hydrogen project proposed by Equinor come to a somewhat ignominious end - not with a big bang, thank God, but with a whimper, an admission that plans to site a huge blue hydrogen operation offshore in the North Sea and move the produced hydrogen onshore via a massive pipeline are too costly and simply non-viable.

As reported by Reuters, the project would have included building the world’s first offshore hydrogen pipeline. It was a plan so filled with risk and lack of demand for the planned hydrogen/ammonia production that Equinor finally had to give up the ghost, but not before it had spent months signaling lovely virtue to burnish the company’s sort-of green credentials.

The fact that the virtue signaling is every bit as important as the profitability - or lack thereof - tells us all we need to know about the rank insanity governing major investments in the energy space right now. That model in and of itself is not sustainable for much longer, as admitted in a recent op/ed at what we used to refer to as the Financial Times. I’m not sure what we should call that publication now, other than pretty much useless in any real business sense.