You can download the full PDF here.
Executive Summary
The Australian Hydrogen Council (AHC) welcomes the opportunity to input into the Economics and Industry Standing Committee Inquiry regarding Western Australia’s role in helping achieve net zero.
The AHC is the peak body for the hydrogen and derivatives industry in Australia – including ammonia, methanol and iron made with low carbon hydrogen – and our membership includes companies from across the value chain. Our members are at the forefront of Australia’s hydrogen industry, developing the technology, skills and partnerships necessary to ensure that hydrogen and its derivatives play a meaningful role in decarbonising Australian industry.
Western Australia is central to Australia’s industrial and export identity, and it now stands at the front line of the industrial transition. Its resource and manufacturing sectors are both the source of current prosperity and the platform for the next generation of low carbon industry. Hydrogen and its derivatives will be essential to decarbonising these value chains and maintaining export competitiveness. As ore quality declines, hydrogen-based direct reduction also offers a pathway to preserve the value of Pilbara ores in a decarbonising steel market, but only if the right technologies and infrastructure are pursued.
Western Australia’s location, renewable resources and existing infrastructure give it a natural advantage. The state has already made significant progress, with the SWIS (South-West Interconnected System) reported as regularly reaching up to 84 per cent penetration of wind and solar.[1] Yet it faces a race against time: while global enthusiasm for hydrogen has tempered, our trading partners are embedding decarbonisation into trade policy and investment frameworks, and competing exporters are accelerating deployment through integrated policy, infrastructure and finance systems.
This competition is compounded by Australia’s high operating costs and complex delivery environment. Key challenges include:
- Slow and duplicative approvals processes.
- A lack of co-funded and coordinated common user infrastructure to share risk and build investor confidence.
- Limited social infrastructure and high living costs in regional centres such as the Pilbara.
Until these structural issues are addressed, Western Australia’s relative cost disadvantage will continue to erode competitiveness in export-oriented industries. The infrastructure required for hydrogen and its derivatives must therefore be viewed as industrial infrastructure;electricity, water, port and transport systems capable of supporting a portfolio of clean industries over time. Planning these assets as common user from the outset will ensure that today’s decarbonisation investments reinforce the export industries underpinning Western Australia’s prosperity.
To secure this opportunity, we make the following recommendations.
Recommendation 1: Commit to Western Australia’s industrial decarbonisation as a strategic economic and trade project.
To recognise and enable Western Australia’s role in both national and global decarbonisation, the Western Australian Government should:
- Formally acknowledge industrial decarbonisation as a state priority of strategic economic and trade significance, linking it to Western Australia’s export competitiveness and long-term prosperity in global markets.
- Collaborate with the Australian Government and trading partners under the Future Made in Australia package, as well as through bilateral frameworks to align funding, approvals and investment promotion for industrial infrastructure and clean export supply chains.
Recommendation 2: Streamline approvals and reduce duplication.
- To avoid approvals delays and unnecessarily overlapping processes, the Western Australian Government should at the least implement bilateral assessment pathways, so proponents prepare one set of materials and follow one timetable to address both state and federal processes. This should be supported through the Office of the Coordinator General.
- The federal Net Zero Economy Authority and Investor Front Door should ideally provide support to coordinate cross-agency decision-making.
Recommendation 3: Support the delivery of common user industrial infrastructure.
To avoid each proponent needing to self-fund and duplicate infrastructure, and to avoid excessive risk for first movers, the Western Australian Government should:
- Establish special-purpose vehicles (SPVs) at the precinct or SIA level to plan and own shared transmission, water and port assets under published access and tariff rules.
- Pre-plan and co-develop minimum shared infrastructure (berths, desalination, pipelines) to serve both new industries and existing users.
- Support precinct CfDs/production credits targeted to high-temperature/hard-to-abate uses (green ammonia feedstock; DRI). Pair with government offtake or guarantees where possible.
- For each anchor facility, negotiate facility-specific decarbonisation compacts tying public infrastructure milestones (water/port/transmission) to private FIDs (calciner retrofits, feedstock switches, DRI pilots). This can also be supported with financing instruments such as mezzanine finance or subordinated equity to bridge the gap between government infrastructure delivery and private FID.
- Work to lead nationally harmonised ammonia/methanol bunkering codes, pilot Dampier as a first mover, and pre-permit generic safety designs (berths, bunkering pipelines) to allow proponents to focus approvals on their plants, not the whole chain.
- Maintain a single SIA-level intake where state and Commonwealth agencies coordinate approvals and finance (connecting to Recommendation 2).
Recommendation 4: Address social and regional enablers.
To support the social foundations of SIAs, the Western Australian Government should co-invest in liveable communities, reducing reliance on FIFO workforces. This could include:
- Mirroring the Collie Transition Package approach across SIAs where this is reasonable, linking industrial projects with workforce, housing and local procurement programs.
- Applying the Western Australia Community Benefits Guideline as a standard approval condition for shared assets, using consistent templates for local jobs, training and infrastructure.
- Implementing the First Nations Clean Energy Strategy to build capability on both sides for effective engagement and benefit-sharing.
You can download the full PDF here.
[1] Parkinson, G. (2025) ‘Death of baseload: World’s biggest isolated grid is reaching 84 pct wind and solar almost daily’, Renew Economy, 20 October, seehttps://reneweconomy.com.au/death-of-baseload-worlds-biggest-isolated-grid-is-reaching-84-pct-wind-and-solar-almost-daily/.