Call her Kate. She teaches an electrotechnology course at a TAFE campus in Geraldton, and for three years her pitch to first-year apprentices has echoed the state government's own: learn to wire turbines and electrolysers, because the coast north of town is about to become one of the engine rooms of Australia's next export industry. Two hundred kilometres up the highway, the Oakajee Strategic Industrial Area — a 6,400-hectare strip of coastal land earmarked since 2023 for green hydrogen and ammonia — has been allocated to six companies, including BP and Fortescue, to build the plants that will supposedly turn Geraldton's port into a hydrogen export terminal (Government of Western Australia, media reporting, Oct-2024). Kate's early cohorts have graduated into a labour market where that port is still, for now, shipping iron ore, grain and mineral sands, not ammonia. Kate is a composite, standing in for a documented pattern rather than one named teacher — a state government that has spent seven years telling Pilbara and Mid West communities that a renewable hydrogen industry is coming, set against a global industry that spent 2024 and 2025 cancelling or shrinking exactly the kind of projects Western Australia is counting on to prove it right.
What the government did
Western Australia was one of the first Australian jurisdictions to formalise a hydrogen export ambition into government policy. The McGowan Labor government released the Western Australian Renewable Hydrogen Strategy and Roadmap on 19-Jul-2019, naming the Pilbara and the Mid West (centred on the Oakajee Strategic Industrial Area near Geraldton) as priority hubs, alongside Kwinana and Collie closer to Perth, and establishing a Renewable Hydrogen Fund with an initial $10 million available in its first round (2019) and a further $5 million in a second round (2020) (Government of Western Australia, Western Australian Renewable Hydrogen Strategy and Roadmap, 19-Jul-2019). In September 2021, the government added a $61.5 million package, of which $50 million was earmarked to stimulate local demand for renewable hydrogen in transport and industry (WA Government media statement, $61.5 million boost for WA's renewable hydrogen industry, Sep-2021).
Roger Cook became Premier in June 2023 and has kept the strategy running rather than reworking it. In May 2023 the government announced the first companies moving to establish operations at the Mid West Hydrogen Hub, and by October 2024 it had committed $60 million to preliminary works at Oakajee, including a new access road, and allocated industrial land there to six companies, among them BP and Fortescue Future Industries (WA Government media statement, First companies progress move to WA's Mid-West Hydrogen Hub, 26-May-2023; WA Government, reported Oct-2024). That October the Cook government also published an updated Renewable Hydrogen Strategy 2024–2030, restating the ambition to become "a leading producer, user and exporter of renewable hydrogen" without attaching a specific export-tonnage target (Government of Western Australia, Western Australia's Renewable Hydrogen Strategy 2024–2030, 24-Oct-2024). The 2025-26 Budget added a further $30 million round through the Investment Attraction Fund for critical minerals, hydrogen and carbon capture, part of a broader $500 million top-up to the Strategic Industries Fund announced 19-Jun-2025 (Government of Western Australia, $1.4 billion investment to help secure a future that is Made in WA, 19-Jun-2025). Separately, the Commonwealth's Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has backed individual WA projects inside these hubs directly — $47.5 million to the Yuri renewable hydrogen-to-ammonia project at Karratha in 2022, and $814 million of production support to the Murchison Green Hydrogen Project in the Mid West in March 2025, the largest single grant under ARENA's Hydrogen Headstart program (ARENA, Yuri Renewable Hydrogen to Ammonia Project, updated 15-Apr-2025; ARENA, Murchison Green Hydrogen Project given a headstart, Mar-2025).
The strongest case
A state this dependent on one commodity has good reason to build a second export industry before the cycle turns
Start with the exposure the strategy is designed to reduce. Iron ore alone is forecast to supply around 75% of Western Australia's total royalty income from 2023-24 onward, after peaking near 83% in 2022-23 — a level of single-commodity concentration no other state carries (WA Government, Overview of State Taxes and Royalties 2024-25, Nov-2024). A government that lives this close to one price cycle has an obvious incentive to seed a second export industry before it turns, and it would not be the first such bet Western Australia has made: the LNG industry it built from the 1980s took decades of state-backed development before it became one of the state's largest exports. The Pilbara and Mid West genuinely have some of the best combined wind and solar resources in the world, which is not just a marketing line — it is why the Commonwealth's Hydrogen Headstart program, assessed independently of the state, chose a Mid West project as the single largest grant recipient in its first funding round. And unlike some announced-only hydrogen plans, Western Australia already has hydrogen moving at small scale: Fortescue's Christmas Creek Green Energy Hub has produced hydrogen from on-site solar electrolysis to fuel mine vehicles since August 2024, real evidence the chemistry works under Pilbara conditions, even before exporting it at scale is settled. Backing an early, capital-intensive industry with public money, on a resource base this strong, is a defensible use of a mining state's balance sheet while the commodity cycle can still afford it.
The evidence — money committed, hydrogen delivered
Set against that ambition, the physical record of what has actually been built in Western Australia is small. Fortescue's Christmas Creek hub runs two 700-kilowatt electrolysers — 1.4 megawatts of total capacity — producing around 530 kilograms of hydrogen a day, or roughly 190 tonnes a year (approx., calculated from the cited daily figure), used entirely on-site for mine trucks and buses rather than exported (H2 View / CSIRO HyResource reporting, Aug-2024). The Yuri project at Karratha — a 10-megawatt electrolyser backed by $47.5 million from ARENA and $2 million from the WA Renewable Hydrogen Fund's first round — was announced in September 2022 with a project timeline that, on ARENA's own tracker, now runs to December 2027; as at the tracker's most recent update, 15-Apr-2025, the project remained listed as still in development, more than two and a half years after the funding announcement (ARENA, Yuri Renewable Hydrogen to Ammonia Project, updated 15-Apr-2025).
The world is pulling back
The gap between the state's flagship number and its delivered number is not unique to Western Australia — it mirrors what has happened to the global hydrogen industry, including to the projects Western Australia is relying on most. The Australian Renewable Energy Hub, approved by the WA government in January 2023 for a revised 26-gigawatt footprint of wind and solar aimed at producing up to around 1.6 million tonnes of green hydrogen a year at full build-out, lost its majority owner and operator on 28-Jul-2025, when BP announced it would exit the project entirely, walking away from a 63.57% stake it had built up since first investing in 2022. BP said the move reflected a "strategy reset" that would see it "grow its upstream oil and gas business" and "invest with increasing discipline into the transition" — a capital-discipline decision, not a claim that the Pilbara resource itself was inadequate (pv magazine Australia, reporting BP's exit announcement, 28-Jul-2025). The project's two remaining partners say they intend to continue, but as at the time of writing no replacement lead investor or revised timeline has been announced.
Woodside, the WA-headquartered gas major that once branded its Kwinana project "H2Perth" a green-hydrogen "powerhouse," halted development of that project and a companion Tasmanian one in September 2024, citing the gap between the cost of producing green hydrogen and what customers were willing to pay for it (RenewEconomy, reporting Woodside's ASX announcement, Sep-2024). By September 2025, reporting on the restructured project found Woodside had gone further, dropping electrolysis-based green hydrogen from the plan altogether in favour of gas-based blue hydrogen with carbon capture, on a smaller scale and later timeline than first announced (BoilingCold, Woodside's Perth hydrogen plan: smaller, later, dirtier, 25-Sep-2025). Fortescue — the WA miner whose founder, Andrew Forrest, was the loudest corporate voice for green hydrogen in the state — cut around 700 jobs globally in 2024 as it scaled back its hydrogen program, and its flagship green-ammonia plant at Gibson Island (outside WA, but part of the same corporate push funding Fortescue's Pilbara hydrogen work) has effectively lapsed after Fortescue missed repeated deadlines to reach a final investment decision (Mining.com, reporting Fortescue's restructuring, 2024). Globally, the IEA's Global Hydrogen Review 2024 found only 7% of announced low-emissions electrolyser capacity worldwide had reached a final investment decision or begun construction, up from 4% the year before — most hydrogen projects announced anywhere, including in Western Australia, remain paper commitments rather than funded builds (IEA, Global Hydrogen Review 2024, Executive summary, Oct-2024).
The critique
None of this proves Western Australia's bet is wrong — the IEA's 7% figure shows the state faces an industry-wide problem, not a uniquely local one. But it does mean the state's own strategy documents, describing an ambition running to tens of gigawatts and a "leading" export position, are describing an outcome that on the industry's own recent record most comparable projects worldwide fail to reach. And the specific projects Western Australia is most exposed to have not been immune: its largest single hydrogen bet just lost the partner that held both majority ownership and operational control, for reasons its remaining backers did not dispute; its most prominent gas company walked its flagship Perth project back from "green" to gas-based within roughly a year of first shelving it; and its most vocal corporate hydrogen champion is now the clearest evidence that the economics have not caught up with the rhetoric that helped build support for the strategy in the first place.
A gigawatt on a strategy map and a gigawatt under construction are not the same thing — and Western Australia's hydrogen plan currently has far more of the first than the second.
Water compounds the commercial risk in ways the strategy documents describe only in passing. Electrolysis needs on the order of 10 to 15 litres of highly purified water per kilogram of hydrogen once purification losses are counted, and considerably more once industrial-scale cooling is included; ARENA's own description of the Murchison project — sited on the arid Mid West coast — specifies its water will come from "a new desalination facility" built for the purpose, because no existing supply can serve that scale (ARENA, Murchison Green Hydrogen Project given a headstart, Mar-2025). That is not a flaw unique to Murchison; every Pilbara or Mid West hydrogen project of real scale is, in practice, also a desalination project, adding capital cost, energy demand and approval risk on top of the wind, solar and electrolyser build the headline gigawatt figures describe. None of the government's funding announcements to date attach a figure to that added cost.
The public money already committed is not trivial against that backdrop. Since 2019, Western Australia has announced at least four distinct rounds of hydrogen-specific state funding, from $5 million to $61.5 million each, plus a further $30 million round in 2025-26 — sitting alongside a single Commonwealth grant of $814 million to just one WA project, Murchison, on top of $47.5 million already committed to Yuri. All of it bets that Yuri and Murchison, the state's two most advanced projects, reach commercial operation close to their announced timelines, at a moment when three of the highest-profile companies attached to WA hydrogen — BP, Woodside and Fortescue — have each pulled back from their own green-hydrogen commitments within the past two years.
The risk to the future
A strategy without an export target is a strategy that is hard to fail — and hard to hold anyone to
The 2024–2030 update to WA's Renewable Hydrogen Strategy restates the ambition to lead the export industry without committing to a specific export-tonnage target — a choice that insulates the government from a hard failure metric but also removes the one number the public could use to judge, in five years, whether the bet paid off. If Yuri, already years behind its original funding announcement, or Murchison slip further, or stall the way BP's stake in the Pilbara hub and Woodside's green ambitions already have, Western Australia risks repeating a pattern from earlier resource booms: land allocated, training pipelines built, and public money committed around an export volume that never arrives at the scale used to justify it. For Mid West and Pilbara communities the strategy specifically names as future hydrogen hubs, the near-term risk is not that the industry fails to arrive at all — Christmas Creek shows the chemistry works — but that it arrives at a fraction of the scale used to sell the training places and land allocations already committed, leaving those communities, and apprentices trained for jobs not yet materialised, to absorb the gap between the strategy's gigawatts and what a still-unproven global market for green hydrogen actually pays for.