At Christmas Creek mine in Western Australia’s remote Pilbara region, the first steps towards a revolution in metal production are taking place.
Australian mining company Fortescue, which is seeking to decarbonise its mining operations by 2030, is also looking to expand into zero-carbon metals processing.
“Although we’re very ambitious in decarbonising the iron ore industry, we fully appreciate that the majority of the carbon emissions results from the downstream, or the use of our iron ore,” says Dino Otranto, the company’s CEO for metals and operations.
Fortescue is close to completing a prototype facility at Christmas Creek that will be able to produce 1,500 tonnes of green iron per year. The facility will use green hydrogen in the direct-reduced iron (DRI) process, which removes oxygen from iron ore in preparation for the next phases of the steelmaking process.
We’re not trying to be a threat to the Chinese or the European steel industry. We’re actually just upgrading our iron ore to a green product
Hydrogen DRI serves as an alternative to the traditional method of using coal-fired blast furnaces, since the electrolysers that produce green hydrogen are powered by solar and wind energy.
Otranto emphasises that Fortescue will be producing an intermediate product. “We’re not trying to be a threat to the Chinese or the European steel industry,” he says. “We’re actually just upgrading our iron ore to a green product that ensures that the customer doesn’t need to buy the coal.”
Scaling-up?
Other Australian iron ore miners are also exploring the possibilities of green iron production, although executives from both Rio Tinto and BHP said publicly last year that producing green iron in Australia would be uneconomical.
Otranto says Fortescue remains committed to a much more ambitious agenda, although he does recognise that producing a product that can compete economically with coal-based methods will be far from easy.
“It all comes back to the same challenge,” he says. “You need low-cost electrons to create low-cost hydrogen.”
Multiple green hydrogen projects around the world have proven unable to live up to the hype that swirled around the industry in the early 2020s. Otranto concedes that Fortescue “probably went a bit too early” in some of its other green hydrogen projects. The company cancelled two schemes in 2025, one in Arizona and one in Australia.
Yet Otranto insists that, as the cost curve for producing green electrons continues to come down, producing green hydrogen for the iron industry will become economically competitive. He points to burgeoning demand in China for green metals, especially for use in products that are linked to the energy transition.
There is a long way to go before Fortescue, or any other Australian company, can deliver green iron on a truly large scale.
The Christmas Creek plant will be a pilot facility, where Otranto says Fortescue will test several different technologies. But he adds this is just the beginning. “I think then what happens is you need to build a 1mn or a 10mn tonne plant, and that’s what we’ve got in study at the moment.”
