R-012 · CLIMATE · 11 Aug 2026 · 11 min
Gladstone's hydrogen build-out is creating a software market nobody priced in
Every gigawatt of announced capacity drags along a long tail of monitoring, compliance and workforce software.
The headline numbers around Central Queensland's hydrogen and renewables build-out are about steel, land and offtake agreements. Underneath them sits a less discussed line item: the software required to run, monitor and certify all of it.
We modelled the software and services attach rate against comparable LNG projects and arrived at a conservative $210M of addressable spend over the next six years. Nine Queensland companies are currently positioned to capture any of it.
“Heavy industry always underestimates how much of the project is a spreadsheet problem.”
Three sub-categories look genuinely attractive. Emissions certification tooling is the most obvious, driven by buyer requirements out of Japan and Korea rather than domestic regulation. Workforce compliance for rotating regional crews is a boring, sticky, underserved problem. And grid-edge forecasting is technically hard enough to defend.
The failure mode is selling a horizontal SaaS product into an industry that buys projects, not seats. The teams making progress have all adapted their commercial model to look more like engineering services with a software core.