Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to welcome the announcement from GFG Alliance and Sanjeev Gupta of an investment timeline for the Whyalla Steelworks. Just yesterday, he announced that work on their solar farm will begin—I think it's the biggest solar farm in the Southern Hemisphere, as it so happens—within the next month or two. That's very welcome news. They've laid out the path towards green steel—new technology in Whyalla, which will make it the centre of attention around the world. His first intention is to build a direct reduction iron plant: when you feed magnetite pellets into the blast furnace it has a great reduction in CO2 emissions. It will build an arc furnace and a new rolling mill. All those things will come together and, as I said, give that initial reduction in CO2 emissions. Following that, the hope is in the future to be able to use the electricity from the solar farm, further bringing down the footprint, and then convert the plant from gas to hydrogen generated from the solar plan, thus getting to the equation of green steel.

But of even more importance was his commitment to the Whyalla workforce that he sees no reason to put any worker off and that they are there for the long haul. It's a real pick-up in the Whyalla community at the moment. I thank them for that announcement.