The big promises put forward in the budget are always one of the key areas of interest when election time rolls around. Unfortunately, in this cycle, hydrogen was not one of the winners.
Investment into hydrogen in Australia, both in terms of infrastructure such as refuelling stations and support for maintenance, as well as trucks themselves, is still not quite to the level of what is being seen in other countries, like New Zealand.
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Rental businesses like TR Group have now got fleets of more than 20 hydrogen trucks being leased out to customers in New Zealand — a far cry from our own backyard.
One of the ways the federal government has looked to alleviate this is through the Hydrogen Highways Fund.
The program held the goal of turning Australia into a leader of hydrogen transport and was set up as part of Labor’s 2022 Driving the Nation fund, which has helped fund projects including the addition of electric vehicles to large operators including Toll Group, Linfox and ANC.
However, $75 million has been quietly removed from the fund in the 2025-26 Budget, to some disappointment from those heavily invested in the future and potential of hydrogen trucks in Australia.
It has been reported that the Hydrogen Highways project committed funding to just one project in its three years of existence, Line Hydrogen’s $5.5 million development in Georgetown, Tasmania, before the funding cut.
We spoke to Fiona Simon, the CEO of the Australian Hydrogen Council, the peak body for the hydrogen industry, about the impacts of the loss of funding.
The AHC made a pre-budget submission to the federal government covering a number of areas and priorities needed to make Australia into a global hydrogen leader.
Concerning the Hydrogen Highways fund, the submission stated that the government needed to ‘revise and progress the Hydrogen Highways initiative or reallocate funds to refuelling for other heavy transport applications for 2025-26.’
“The moving of $75 million of funding is not a surprise, to be honest,” Fiona says.
“In the budget submission we wrote that nothing had happened with that money, or that we hadn’t observed anything happening with that money at least.
“We needed to come out of that limbo of waiting to find out if anything was going to happen under the Hydrogen Highways program.”
Fiona says that the AHC has had positive conversations with the federal government regarding support for hydrogen trucking – the loss of funding is certainly not panic stations at all.
There was other significant investment laid out in the 2024-25 Budget, with the Hydrogen Strategy 2024 acting as groundwork for the future of hydrogen in Australia.
‘Australian hydrogen could avoid emissions of between 93 and 186 million tonnes of CO2 per year by 2050,’ the strategy states, with transport a big part of working towards that decarbonisation goal.
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