I recently moved back to northern NSW. I grew up here, and being back reminded me of how great regional TV and radio ads can be. The ads in Sydney just can’t compete with corkers like the perpetual sale at Cyrus Persian Carpets Lismore, AJ Magnay getting into the jingle games, or the iconic Abracadabra.1
These days, I don’t watch a lot of commercial TV or listen to much radio so most of the ads I get are spliced into podcasts. A month ago, I got two ads back to back that really caught my attention.
The Toyota Mirai - “Emits less CO2 than a human emits on a run”
The first ad was for the Toyota Mirai. The ad was an audio version of this video. I also separately got a banner ad for the Mirai a little while later.
The Toyota Mirai is a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle and is, at least in theory, a competitor to electric vehicles. With hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, you could drive into a repurposed gas station, hook the nozzle up to your Mirai and fill up much quicker than you might be able to recharge a battery electric vehicle. The hydrogen passes through a fuel cell which combines the hydrogen with oxygen to make water and electrical power. The power drives the car, and the water trickles out the back — voila! Transport from from carbon emissions! Better yet, the hydrogen can be made via electrolysis,2 where renewable energy separates water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Of course, in reality, it’s actually kinda shit. In comparison to electric vehicles, hydrogen's only advantages are that it’s faster to refuel and maybe, in some situations, offers increased range. Electric vehicles are cheaper to buy, operate, easier to refill and there’s a far greater range available. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and electric vehicles were “duking it out” a few years ago before common sense prevailed and electric vehicles have emerged as the clearly superior option for zero emissions vehicles. Personally, the ability to recharge a car while I’m at home is so appealing. Over the lifetime of owning a car, would I rather save 25 mins on road trips in exchange for the convenience of an EV? Absolutely not.
One of the selling points for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is that they can be a solution to range anxiety, i.e. unlike EV drivers, you’ll be certain can make it from A to B. The irony is the impossibility of recharging a Mirai in Australia. At least according to Toyota, the only place you can recharge your Mirai is in Altona West, Melbourne. Although, internet sleuth that I am, I found an ActewAGL refuelling station in Canberra. Imagine my range anxiety having to make a 2,000km roundtrip to Canberra for a refill. At least it’ll be a quick top up. Or it could take 30 mins to get to the front of the queue to refill.
Of course, the inference is that there’ll be many more hydrogen refuelling stations in the near future. I’m not holding my breath. In the UK, which is ahead of Australia on the adoption of zero emissions vehicles, Shell has gone full circle — building, operating and closing down hydrogen refuelling stations. How’s that for a new, exciting type of range anxiety? What if the only station available for refuelling is permanently closed?
Globally, the numbers tell a pretty clear story. According to the International Energy Agency, there are about 76,000 fuel cell vehicles on the roads.3 This compares to the 18 million (and exponentially increasing) electric vehicles currently on the road.
The outlier globally for fuel-cell take up is South Korea, where half the fuel cell cars in the world were sold. The South Korean government subsidies wipe off almost half the upfront cost of both the cars and the refuelling stations. Even as the world leader in fuel-cell cars, South Korea is wayyy behind its targets for fuel-cell uptake.
Which makes it so strange to get an ad for a Mirai now. It seems abundantly clear that there’s no market for fuel cell passenger cars in Australia. Yet Toyota have persisted with fuel-cell cars, despite having once been a world leader in hybrid cars with the Prius. The new Toyota CEO Koji Sato doubled down on fuel cell vehicles, saying Toyota “wants to ensure hydrogen stays a viable option.” Sato was appointed on 1 April — take from that what you will.4
If I had to guess, I’d say Toyota has made a bad bet and the inertia within such a large conglomerate must make it difficult to have a very public about face and abandon fuel cell cars for battery EVs. The cost borne by Toyota will be how much ground it the world’s second largest car manufacturer loses in the race to sell battery EVs.
I’m pretty clearly a big fan of battery EVs relative to fuel cell cars. EVs aren’t perfect and there’s lots of infrastructure that needs to be built, especially to service those who can’t charge at home. But to me, they are still so exceptionally better than fuel cell cars. Access to electricity is so ubiquitous that charging EVs will be solved despite hiccups.
The Toyota Mirai brochure says the car is “taking inspiration from the impossible”. Putting that into practice, they’ve produced a car which might well be impossible to refuel in about five years time. No wonder their ads centre around people running everywhere — they don’t have functional vehicles.
Natural gas - Like VB but for hot water?
The second ad was for natural gas. I’m not actually sure which gas lobby group paid for the ad so I wasn’t able to find the actual ad to re-listen, but I recall it going a little something like:
*Shhhrroooosh*, “oh wow I just love my hot shower and the water is really hot cause I burned gas” — cut to — *fwoosh-sss* “yum I love cooking with my gas stove it tastes so much better” — cut to — calm radio voice man saying: “go and visit blah blah website and learn about how gas is actually renewable and definitely don’t go electric. please.”
The audio cues reminded me of how VB and Coca Cola push the sound of a beer/coke being cracked open inducing some sort of Pavlovian response. Are we supposed to salivate at the sound of a gas stove?
While I couldn’t find the actual ad, there is this series of campaign videos from Australian Gas Networks (AGA). The channel name is australiangasnetworks3826 which I initially thought must’ve been a strange fan account or a burner account or something due to the number at the end. But I checked their website and it is the actual channel.
They do seem to have some dedicated fans because a couple of their videos kinda went viral. Most of their videos have a couple of hundred views, but there are two videos that went into the millions. “Love Gas 2.0 - Heating” has almost 2 million views, but zero likes or comments. That’s strange right?
We’ve covered the culture wars and advertising in the gas industry before. The purpose of these ads is two-fold: first, delay the transition to electrification by fostering some love for gas and getting people to invest in “renewable gas ready” appliances; second, dangle the carrot of a renewable gas future, i.e. don’t worry about feeling bad for the environment, we’ll convert that gas to hydrogen or biomethane and you’ll have a clean conscious.
Of course, just like the hydrogen fuel cell cars, there are good reasons to think this renewable gas future is never going to be a reality. From the Australian Gas Networks website, they suggest they’ll get to “10% renewable gas by 2030”. If this is achieved by blending hydrogen into the natural gas networks, due to the lower energy density of hydrogen gas, it would mean you only have a 3% reduction in emissions, even if the hydrogen was 100% renewable. How’s that for ambition?
The AGA Renewable Gas FAQs are full of gems.
They’re not resting on their laurels after a 3% emissions reduction by 2030. Like a good kickstarter, they set a stretch target of 100% by 2040. How they’ll actually get to this stretch target is not covered in the FAQs.
There’s a offhand comment that 100% hydrogen might require new appliances and burner parts. Not a lot of commentary on how that might happen or who will pay for it or whether it needs to be coordinated with the day the grid is switched over to 100% hydrogen - pay no heed weary consumer!
In terms of whether the blended gas is more expensive, AGA say they’re working with “Victorian Government and our regulators with the intent that any small cost increase associated with blending renewable gas will be more than offset by expected reductions in the cost of delivering gas to your home or business through our network from 2023 onwards.” In my reading, this is saying they could’ve lowered their costs of providing natural gas, but some of those saving are being diverted into making hydrogen to sell to you.
They engaged consultants to do some modelling and guess what? The most expensive outcome is electrification (gasp). According to the modelling, using natural gas to make hydrogen through steam-methane reforming and buttressing on some carbon capture and storage is the cheap solution.
Of course, the positions put forward by AGA aren’t universally held. For example, experts seem to agree that there’s no role for hydrogen in space heating. And despite AGA seeming to asset that it wouldn’t be too hard to get to 100% hydrogen, large-scale trials in the UK have ground to a halt due to pushback from residents. Carbon capture and storage also has a checkered history.
This gas-love advertising is much more insidious to me than the Toyota Mirai ad. Of course, like all advertising, AGA is pushing its business strategy and that strategy centres on not having a whole bunch of stranded gas networks. It sucks to me because it also smacks strongly of trying to delay the inevitable transition away from burning gas in our homes to utilising renewable energy. It’s presenting a renewable gas future as a realistic option and some people are going to make investment decisions influenced by these ads. Sure, renewable gas, biofuels and hydrogen will play some role in the energy transition, but it seems incredibly unlikely to be in our homes or cars.
Getting these ads was interesting and it gave me something to write about, but going forward, I’d rather hear from this guy.
Things happen
A class action has been taken out against AGL. The action was launched by SA Pubs.
The AER has introduced a short-term cap on the costs of disconnecting from the gas grid. Hopefully this is rolled out across the rest of the country!
Woolworths has committed to replacing all of its petrol home delivery trucks with electric versions by 2030. This is laudable, but for a company which consistently turns over A$1.5b in profit after tax, we think you can do better.
The Sun Cable saga continues. Mike Cannon Brooke’s Grok successfully beat out Twiggy Forrest’s Squadron to rescue the project from administration. But Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners, partnering with Grok, is agnostic about the future of the very (like, seriously, very) long cable.
This is a bit indulgent of me. It’s been fun reliving the ads I watched so often as a kid. I hope that even if you don’t know these ads, they bring you back to a classic regional Australian ad.
Also known as “green hydrogen”. There’s an entire spectrum of colours used to describe the production energy source, which is honestly a beautifully pointless classification system.
Toyota has stared hedging its bets somewhat by investing into battery vehicles.
Although not aired in the Northern Rivers, surely thiis GE Energy coal ad is worthy of a currently speaking deep dive: https://youtu.be/q6ueDHn2HTk