I'm not getting this. Australia has a great solar resource, but is it that much better than the Mediterranean countries or North Sea wind? Is there some ammonia-making technology only the Australians have that makes shipping it halfway around the globe viable? Are kangaroos involved?

North Africa and the Middle East are certainly a lot closer to Europe than Australia,

However recent unfortunate political events show that it is pretty dumb if convenient in the short term to rely unduly on unstable countries which may have a very different agenda.

And there is an element of limits to rising costs from longer distance transport once the ammonia or whatever is loaded on a ship in the first place.

Just the same with umpteen places closer than Australia which have wonderful wind and solar resources, from Namibia to South America, I am none too convinced that Australia will end up longer term supplying a large percentage of the European hydrogen market.

But not only are there plenty of potential suppliers, there are also loads of potential customers for hydrogen, with the likes of Indonesia, Japan and India stepping into the breach.

So even if they don't end up major partners long term, in the more immediate future setting up both ends of the supply chain with both customer and supplier as early adopters moving the technology to far cheaper mass deployment makes a lot of sense in my view.

As both other customers and other suppliers come online, then they can all swap partners to more convenient/cheaper options.

This is even more stupid that the Australia to Japan proposal.

World's Dirtiest Clean Energy Project

@sd

My pro nuclear credentials are impeccable, having supported it for 60 years.
I would particularly like to see SMRs using waste heat for district heating systems, as well as hydrogen production.

But to my considerable surprise, it now seems to me that massive drops in costs and improvements in technology mean that even in Europe most energy could be produced and stored using renewables, although I would still like to see perhaps 20% of electricity produced from nuclear to add additional flexibility and redundancy, in the event of, say, a major volcanic eruption greatly reducing solar output.

My remarks are based on some variation of solar, with improved efficiency and use of by product heat, and some variation of high altitude wind.

Here is Sunovate:

https://www.sunovate.com.au/service1

The basic idea is that there is a backing panel on the solar array, with retrofitting possible, and the use of air, not water, to cool the panels.
The heat in the simplest variant is then used to provide hot water in a house.

Keeping the panel temperature lower increases efficiency linearly, even in a Swedish winter, whilst even with current panels we can hit overall electrical plus thermal efficiency of 50% or so.

For storage different solutions depending on duration etc are needed, but liquid carbon dioxide strikes me as the great enabler.

Here is Energy Dome:

https://energydome.com/

For high altitude wind, recently the Bendix tower was looked at on this site, which is reasonably conventional, but there are also kites, from Kitepower and Skysails.
Here is Kitepower:
https://thekitepower.com/product/

They are only at around 100KW at the moment, so size has to be upped to perhaps 3MW for viability.

However, high altitude wind however done would up the renewable energy potential of Europe greatly.

So the bottom line is that I agree with you that large scale hydrogen/ammonia imports from Australia to Europe may be unlikely, but OTOH renewables produced and stored right here appear able to cope at a good price even with northern european winters.

@SJC:

:-)

Nice heckling!

And here is 'Engineering with Rosie's' interview with the Nuscale CEO and on SMRs, including perceptive comments:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a4CeJ6XjUE

I was particularly struck by this comment from 'Social Down Climber'

' As you probably know, in conventional nuclear they need to shut the reactor down if they detect a maintenance issue. This loses the plant a ton of money but after a couple of months it is back up and running again. With Nuscale, if they detect an issue they may need to recall the reactor if it isn't built for on site maintenance. With factory production, this recall may extend to other units. If any SMR manufacturer has to do a general recall, the losses will sink the company instantly. This is one of the main reasons I'm skeptical that unit production of reactors is really a benefit.'

On the whole I think Rosie gets a good balance on the issues, potentials and problems.

The big difference for me in my current and previous assessments is the huge falls in renewables costs, and even storage at 'good enough' efficiencies is looking ever more do-able.