Hydrogen Hub Futures
How the hydrogen hub model for industrial decarbonisation in Australia is imagined, contested, and lived.
- Years
- 2025–2029
- Funder
- Australian Research Council, Discovery Early Career Researcher Award
The hydrogen hub model is envisioned to fast-track environmental approvals, draw on existing social licence from previous industrial workforces, and accelerate the scaling-up of hydrogen by co-locating supply with demand in heavy industry.
This project asks how imagining regions as 'hubs' produces forms of circular speculation, may end up deferring decarbonisation, and concentrates environmental and social impacts in particular communities, as well as how such visions enact and reproduce inequalities. The project is the centre of a broader research agenda on industrial decarbonisation and its social effects in Australia.
Field site: Whyalla, South Australia
An industrial city on the Upper Spencer Gulf, home to a steelworks and to one of South Australia's flagship hydrogen proposals.
Whyalla brings together many of the dynamics at the heart of the hydrogen hub model: a long-standing heavy industry and workforce, state-led investment in hydrogen production, power generation and storage, and the promise that co-locating hydrogen supply with industrial demand could help decarbonise steelmaking.
It is also a place where hydrogen futures have been announced, revised and deferred, making it a revealing site for understanding how hub visions are lived, contested and imagined by the communities expected to host them.
Links
All researchNext: Embedding Net Zero Carbon Emissions in Northern Australia