By Dmitry Zhdannikov

DAVOS (Reuters) – Fortescue Metals Group is financing research into cheap, abundant green hydrogen in order to fulfill the Australian mining company’s goal to be the top-ranked green energy organization.

Andrew Forrest, the founder of Fortescue, spoke to Reuters at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He said that Fortescue has been named a financing partner for Qlimate Initiative, backed Silicon Valley-based PsiQuantum. This initiative aims build the world’s first universal-scale quantum computing system this decade.

Quantum computing (NASDAQ:) is “a rapidly emerging technology that harnesses quantum mechanics laws to solve complex problems for classical computers.” IBM On its website, (NYSE:

High transportation costs and transport have so far been major hurdles in green hydrogen’s rivalry with fossil fuels. However, Forrest is Australia’s most wealthy man. He believes that quantum computing can solve the problem.

In an interview, Forrest said that liquid hydrogen presents the same challenges as the industry did a few decades back. He was the executive chairman for the fourth-largest miner of iron ore in the world.

We are able to do everything with hydrogen, not LNG (liquefied gas), 95% methane. Forrest stated that it can be made into steel or fertilisers.

Fortescue, which last year established a plan to be carbon-neutral by 2030 by moving the goal forward by 10 more years. The company aims at producing green hydrogen in 2023.

PsiQuantum, an Australian-British Professor Jeremy O’Brien founded it in 2016. He and others were trying to create the first commercially viable quantum computing system.

O’Brien stated that PsiQuantum will have the ability to solve many of the most difficult problems in the world, such as those related to chemistry.

As Fortescue’s partnership on hydrogen, PsiQuantum also worked with Mercedes-Benz to examine battery chemistry in the future.

According to PsiQuantum’s website, the venture capital fund M12 of Microsoft (NASDAQ) has provided $665m in funding to date.

Forrest was unable to say what amount Fortescue had contributed towards the Qlimate project.

He called for green hydrogen and energy transition speeding up in the past.

Forrest declared, “That would have had to be at the beginning of the ending of global warming.”

It is an ambitious vision, and it has not been met with any resistance. Fortescue’s rivals have provided feedback and Fortescue said that they had received positive responses.