The port city of Gladstone – long a centre of fossil fuel production and exports – has unveiled a ground-breaking 10-year roadmap plotting a future based around renewables and green hydrogen to replace the fossil fuel exports it has built its economy on.
The regional council’s 10-year energy transition roadmap – a first for the country – outlines five other areas which could move it towards what it calls the “new economy”, and renewables and green hydrogen are the pillars that makes the most of the city’s current export infrastructure.
The plan is the result of a two year project with the regional economic development agency, The Next Economy, and included engagement with 220 community, government and industry stakeholders.
It’s a landmark project because while many port and industrial cities have come face to face with the realities of the transition, none to date have put together a plan that ensure a just transition is put in place.
“The roadmap will see this community in prime position to respond to once-in-a-generation changes in the energy sector,” the council says in its report.
It notes that Queensland is only second to Western Australia in terms of the number of hydrogen developments underway, and is home to 14 initiatives, including two of the six national hydrogen hub development projects gearing up to meet export demand.”
Just last month Mitsubishi Gas Chemical Company and Cement Australia started looking at how to use the former’s circular carbon methanol production technology to capture carbon dioxide from the latter’s Gladstone plant and, using green hydrogen, make green methanol.
The roadmap expects technical issues with storage and transportation to be solved by 2032 as it lays the groundwork to campaign for industries with hard to abate emissions such as steel and alumina production, heavy transport and ammonia production to select Gladstone as a hydrogen hub.
It also hopes the future industry, which is yet to emerge from demonstrations and pilot projects, will develop responsibly, addressing community concerns around water use and high production costs.
But a lot needs to happen for green hydrogen — the hydrogen colour of choice for overseas buyers such as Japan and the EU — to emerge as an industry that Gladstone can rely on.
The roadmap notes that to break into the global hydrogen industry Australia as a whole needs “massive amounts” of yet to be built infrastructure and renewable energy, investment, new talent, domestic demand, and technologies such as electrolysers to be cheaper.
The roadmap also proposes more support for renewable energy sources, diversifying the economy by attracting renewable and green hydrogen industries, retraining people for those industries, sharing benefits of being an “industrial engine room” with the border community, and lastly, protecting the environment, as the other five pillars of Gladstone’s 10-year future.
Diversifying into renewables
Community support for the transition to an electric future was also full-throated, as Gladstone residents saw the benefits of cheaper renewable power, the construction of new energy infrastructure and the introduction of new industries in that space.
The regional council is also desperate to diversify its economy away from “old economy” commodities.
This year the Queensland state government put $40 million into helping Gladstone investigate battery metals and green hydrogen in order to capture some of the benefit of these growing industries.
The Gladstone roadmap indicates highlights that the region will need to provide incentives to first bring businesses there and then create jobs for both workers from out of the area and people who are “marginalised” from the workforce including women, First Nations people, young people and older workers.
Sharing the wealth
But in an admission of what it hasn’t done right in the past, the regional council’s roadmap says the benefits of past boom industries haven’t been spread across the community and it will need to share the wealth from any future transition.
“The rapid expansion of industries in the past, such as, LNG, have generated employment opportunities and wealth for some, but it has also contributed to housing shortages, higher costs of living, pressure on existing services, a deterioration of local infrastructure, and a lack of long-term employment opportunities for locals,” the report said.
“Census data showed 18.8 per cent of Gladstone regional households are living on less than $650/week, even though the average median weekly household income is $1639/week. The widening gap is attributed to the high wages of some workers as well as the increased costs of living, all of which is intensified during boom periods.”
The benefits of renewable energy and green hydrogen boom would need to be more fairly shared, the roadmap says, be that by setting windfall profit taxes to spend on roads, health or childcare, to creating affordable housing.
