HANSARD
SITTING CALENDAR
SEARCH
LIVE BROADCAST
Hansard Dynamic Member Index
House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-03-22 Daily Xml
Contents
Xml

Hydrogen Power Plant

Mr HUGHES (Giles) (15:17): One of the big promises that Labor committed to in the lead-up to the election was the building of a hydrogen power plant in Whyalla along with storage and a 250 megawatt electrolyser. If we pull this off, and I have every confidence that we will, it will be the first time in the world that a project of this size uses renewable-based hydrogen to drive a power station; the first time in the world that it has been done.

So it is no surprise that in the expression of interest process we have had 29 companies express an interest formally in being part of this project. It is a project that is dear to my heart, as is hydrogen, given that there were some failed attempts in Whyalla to generate some interest in hydrogen some years back to generate interest from the private sector when I did some work with the Melbourne institute.

At that time, back in 2014-2015, we wrote to 50-odd companies to see if they would part-fund a study looking at Whyalla as a potential hydrogen hub. At the time, even though some of the companies expressed an interest, none of them were willing to come to the party with what was not a great deal of money, approximately $100,000, as part of a partnership with Whyalla to have a look at this direction. The world has significantly changed. I know that the Premier and the Minister for Energy and Mining are incredibly passionate about this project. It is a really big election commitment and it is potentially a game changer.

One of the reasons that I was very interested in hydrogen was not so much about electricity production at the time, it was that if you were looking at greening the steel industry you had to replace coking coal as the reductant in the metallic ironmaking process, and you have very few options when it comes to that. You can use natural gas, syngas or you can use hydrogen and if you source the hydrogen from renewable-driven electrolysers it means you are well on the way to production of green iron and green steel. This is an industry that contributes around 7 per cent of global emissions so it would be a real step forward.

The thing about the proposal for the hydrogen power plant in Whyalla is that I have absolutely no doubt that some of these companies will want to build on the particular state commitment to storage, to the electrolyser, to the power station and look at a range of other opportunities and potentially piggyback off that project.

I hope in one way or the other that one of those opportunities is going to involve the steel industry in Whyalla. I know that Sanjeev Gupta has been on the record about green steel. I know that the Swedes are well down the path with their hybrid project in Sweden. This will be the way to go. This is all about vision, somewhat similar to the vision that Playford had that initiated, with strong bipartisan support, integrated steelmaking in Whyalla with the coke ovens, the blast furnace, the BOS and the mill. That was a strong Playford initiative.

We have another opportunity here and that is the combination of hydrogen and the massive amount of magnetite, which is particularly suited to use with hydrogen for iron and steelmaking, in the Middleback Ranges. There is a JORC reserve of over 650 million tonnes but that might well go up in the future to over a billion tonnes of magnetite on our doorstep, which will give us the opportunity to produce green steel for generations to come.

PARLIAMENTARY BUSINESS
MEMBERS
GET INVOLVED
ABOUT PARLIAMENT
VISIT
LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL
HOUSE OF ASSEMBLY
CONTACT