Aweh Ruminants and Groupies
Disclaimer: The following account is entirely fictional and bears absolutely no resemblance to any real projects, organisations, industries, investment committees, strategy decks, hydrogen ambitions, or deeply optimistic spreadsheets, past or present. Any similarity to actual events is purely coincidental, unfortunate, and almost certainly the reader’s imagination doing far more work than intended.
The Number That Should Have Killed It
The project began, as these things often do, with a number that should have killed it. Not a detailed model. Not a 200-tab spreadsheet humming with assumptions and macros. Just a simple, back-of-the-envelope calculation. A Fermi estimate.
Rough inputs. Order-of-magnitude thinking. The kind of arithmetic you can do with a pencil, a coffee, and a mildly sceptical disposition.
How much renewable power would be required? How often would it actually run? What would that do to the cost per kilogram? Where would the water come from? How would the hydrogen be moved? And, slightly awkwardly, who, exactly, was going to buy it?
The answers were not subtle.
The power requirement alone was… ambitious. Not in the inspiring sense. In the “this would require building an entirely new energy system before we even start” sense. The load factors didn’t cooperate. The logistics didn’t exist. The customers were theoretical. And the cost, once you stopped being optimistic and started being honest, was nowhere near competitive with anything resembling reality.
It was, in short, ridiculous.
Which should have been the end of it.
When a Number Becomes a Narrative
It wasn’t.
Because somewhere between the back-of-the-envelope and the first proper meeting, something important happened. The number became a narrative.
The Vision Arrives
The first presentation didn’t mention the Fermi estimate. It didn’t need to.
Instead, it opened with a vision. A sweeping, sunlit landscape. Solar. Wind. Electrolysers gleaming with purpose. Hydrogen flowing, clean and inevitable, toward a waiting global market that had apparently been sitting there, patiently, waiting for this exact project to arrive.
The language did the rest. By the time the numbers appeared, they no longer looked like questions. They looked like answers.
The Quiet Questions
There were still people in the room who had done the arithmetic. You could spot them. They didn’t object immediately. That would have been… abrasive. Instead, they asked small questions. Careful ones.
“Just on the energy side—what capacity factor are we assuming here?” A reasonable question. The answer came smoothly. “A blended assumption based on global benchmarks.” Of course it was. Another question followed, equally polite, equally inconvenient. “And the delivered cost does that include transport and storage, or is that ex-plant?” A slight pause. “That’s ex-plant at this stage, but we see logistics improving significantly as the market develops.” Naturally.
The questions continued, briefly. Each one touched, lightly, on something structural. Each one was answered with just enough confidence to prevent further digging.
No one said what needed to be said.
Because that would have required collapsing the narrative back into arithmetic. And arithmetic, at that point, was no longer the dominant language in the room.
Burying the Obvious
As the project progressed, the early absurdity became harder to see. Not because it disappeared. But because it was gradually buried. Under more detailed models. More sophisticated assumptions. More stakeholders with an interest in the answer being “yes.”
The simple Fermi calculation, the one that had quietly demonstrated the problem in ten minutes, was replaced by a financial model that took months to build and was, therefore, taken much more seriously.
If a simple calculation gives you the wrong answer, build a complicated one.
The Model That Behaved Perfectly
The model, when it arrived, was impressive. It had depth. Texture. Authority. Every input had a source. Every output had a logic. Costs declined over time. Efficiencies improved. Markets developed. The future, in the model, behaved exactly as required.
The original problem that the project didn’t make sense at a basic physical and economic level was still there. It was just no longer visible.
From “Does This Work?” to “How Do We Make It Work?”
Dissent, at this stage, still existed. But it had changed form. Early on, it had been structural. The power didn’t add up. The cost didn’t work. The market wasn’t there. Now it was technical. A sensitivity here. A parameter there. A slightly different assumption on learning rates.
The argument had shifted, almost imperceptibly, from “Does this make sense?” to “How do we make this make sense?”
Which is a much safer conversation.
Full Internal Legitimacy
By the time the project reached the investment stage, it had achieved full internal legitimacy. The narrative was coherent. The model was complete. The risks were documented and, importantly, mitigated on paper. Nobody, at this point, was talking about the original Fermi estimate. It would have felt unsophisticated.
When the Bankers Arrive
Then the bankers arrived. They did not bring slides. They brought questions. Small ones. Irritating ones. The kind that ignores narrative and goes straight for arithmetic. “What’s the delivered cost per kilogram, all-in?” A number was given. “And how sensitive is that to actual load factors, not modelled ones?” A recalculation. The number moved. Significantly.
Another question followed. “What infrastructure exists today to support this export volume?” A pause. “Well, there are plans”, “Yes, but today?” Silence, briefly.
Back to the Beginning
They kept going. Not aggressively. Just persistently. Peeling away layers. Removing assumptions. Replacing optimism with something closer to accounting. And slowly, almost politely, the project returned to where it had started. Not to the model. To the Fermi estimate.
Nothing Changed
The power requirement was still enormous. The infrastructure was still absent. The customers were still hypothetical. The cost was still uncompetitive.
Nothing had changed.
Except for the amount of effort invested in not noticing.
A Project That Refuses to Die Properly
No one declared the project dead. That would have required clarity, and clarity tends to leave a paper trail. Instead, the project began to… reposition itself.
It became “early stage” again. Then “strategically interesting.” Then “part of a broader portfolio of future opportunities.” The timelines stretched just enough for urgency to dissolve without anyone having to say why.
Meetings stopped being scheduled. Emails slowed. The energy drained out of it in a way that felt almost polite.
At no point did anyone stand up and say:
“We got this wrong.”
The Silence Afterwards
There was no post-mortem.
No uncomfortable session where the original assumptions were held up against reality. No quiet rediscovery of the Fermi calculation that had, inconveniently, been right from the beginning. No one asked why the simplest version of the truth had been systematically ignored in favour of a more elaborate fiction.
Because that question does not stop at the project. It walks straight into how decisions are made, how incentives are structured, and how careers are built. And that is not a conversation this organisation was eager to have.
Success, On Paper
Instead, the system did something much more efficient. It moved on.
Performance reviews were completed. Contributions were recognised. The project, after all, had been large, complex, and strategically important. A great deal of work had gone into it. Stakeholders had been managed. Materials had been produced. Momentum had been demonstrated. These things count. Bonuses were paid.
Not for delivering something viable, that would introduce an unnecessarily objective standard, but for participating effectively in the process. It was difficult to argue with.
The Undead Project
The project itself never quite disappeared. It lingered. In folders. In future presentations. In slightly reworded proposals that borrowed its language, its structure, its quiet confidence. It was not shut down. It was… repurposed.
Which is a far more comfortable outcome than admitting it should never have started.
Nothing Learned
And so, nothing was learned. Not really.
Certainly nothing that would interfere with the next project, which would arrive with its own narrative, its own assumptions, and its own early calculation that someone, somewhere, would quietly perform and then, just as quietly, set aside.
The Moment That Passed
There had been a moment, right at the beginning, where things could have gone differently. It involved a pencil, a few numbers, and the willingness to say, without softening it: “This doesn’t make sense.” That moment passed. Not dramatically. Not negligently. Just… professionally.
An Impressive Outcome
By the end, the project was sophisticated, well-structured, and entirely unfinanceable. The organisation was unchanged. The incentives were intact. The story, in slightly modified form, was ready to be told again.
No Scalable Fix
There is no scalable solution to this. Because the problem is not a lack of intelligence or information. It is that the system rewards momentum, not correction. And once a narrative begins to move, it becomes much easier to continue than to stop, turn around, and admit you should never have left.
The Numbers Wait
The numbers, of course, never changed. They just waited. Briefly, for the bankers.
And then, like everything else, they were filed away.
Until next time
Bruce
Ruminant Pink Friday 