Fortescue puts cattle stations purchased to make green energy up for sale
The Andrew Forrest-led Fortescue is looking to sell cattle stations it acquired in 2022 at the height of its plans to build vast wind and solar farms.
Fortescue is preparing to sell three cattle stations in northern Australia that it acquired at the height of founder Andrew Forrest’s green energy ambitions.
The iron ore miner is poised to sell Emu Creek Station in the Pilbara and Ella Valla Station and Yalbalgo Station in the Gascoyne after abandoning plans to produce green energy on the vast landholdings.
The three stations, all acquired by Fortescue three years ago for undisclosed prices, cover about 300,000 hectares combined and will hit the market soon as the Perth-headquartered company continues to clean house on green energy.
Fortescue declined to comment on the sale of the cattle stations.
Fortescue last week confirmed energy chief executive Mark Hutchinson was exiting his role after a three-year stint that failed to deliver the green hydrogen projects touted by Dr Forrest.
Mr Hutchinson’s departure was announced to the market hours after The Australian asked if he was still employed at the company.
And earlier this month, Fortescue sacked about 90 staff working on a green hydrogen project, spread across its Queensland electrolyser facility and a hydrogen laboratory in WA.
Those exits came on the back of 700 job cuts in July last year, most of them in the energy division.
The three cattle stations were acquired by the energy division, then known as Fortescue Future Industries (FFI), around April 2022, a few months before Mr Hutchinson joined the company.
Fortescue was obligated to keep running cattle on the stations under WA laws covering pastoral leases but stated it wanted the land to produce renewable energy.
Maia Schweizer, the then FFI boss in WA, said at the time that wind turbines could be built on grazing land and solar farms developed on less productive parts of the stations.
Emu Creek, in combination with Forrest-family owned Uaroo Station, was earmarked to supply green energy to Fortescue’s iron ore mines as part of plans to decarbonise the operations by 2030.
The plans for Ella Valla and Yalbalgo Stations were less clear with Ms Schweizer saying their acquisition could support green energy exports in the form of hydrogen or ammonia.
Fortescue had planned to build 340 wind turbines and a solar farm with capacity of up to 5.4 gigawatts supported by battery storage on the Uaroo and Emu Creek stations as part of what was known as the Uaroo Renewable Energy Hub.
It quietly scrapped those multibillion-dollar plans – to connect wind and solar farms covering more than 10,000 hectares to the Eliwana mining hub via a 225km transmission line – toward the end of 2023.
Fortescue started work on a 190 megawatt solar farm at the Cloudbreak mine last month and is trying to determine how much renewable energy and battery storage capacity it will need under plans to stop using diesel and gas in its iron ore mining by 2030.
The company now aims to build all of the renewable energy assets needed to decarbonise – potentially dozens more solar farms – on its own tenements over the next five years.
However, it is yet to secure miscellaneous tenements covering about 150,000 hectares that it applied for in 2023. Fortescue needs to secure the tenements to develop renewables projects under WA’s Mining Act.
Uaroo is unlikely to be sold by the Forrests even though, in common with the three Fortescue-owned stations, it no longer figures in green energy plans.
Uaroo is owned by Andrew and Nicola Forrest’s Harvest Road agribusiness, and includes Dr Forrest’s childhood home of Minderoo Station. Minderoo and Uaroo form part of what Harvest Road calls the Minderoo aggregation that also encompasses Nanutarra and Urala stations and covers a combined 760,000 hectares.
The Minderoo aggregation is part of Harvest Road’s vertically integrated beef supply chain that also includes the Springvale aggregation of multiple cattle stations in the Kimberley covering almost 600,000 hectares, plus other stations in the Kimberley, Pilbara and the Gascoyne.
Harvest Road and parent company Tattarang did not respond to questions on Uaroo or whether the Forrest agribusiness would be interested in acquiring the cattle stations being put up for sale by Fortescue.
Fortescue shares closed up 3c at $15.54 on Monday.
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