Premier Peter Malinauskas said the Hydrogen and Renewable Energy Bill was a nation-first initiative that will put the state on the front foot in a renewable energy “gold rush”.

Developed following a 12-month consultation period with landholders, First Nations people and industry, the Bill aims to minimise red tape and will introduce five new licences relating to the different stages of renewable energy projects.

The legislation will also facilitate the process by which private companies can explore the potential of renewable projects, as well as the construction of the infrastructure and the generation of renewable energy like solar and wind.

Malinauskas said attracting investment into hydrogen projects was a core part of the Bill’s purpose and comes as the state government is in the procurement process for a partner to deliver a $593 million hydrogen power plant near Whyalla.

He said the legislation “has the power to have a very profound and positive impact on South Australia for generations to come”.

“The Hydrogen and Renewable Energy Bill is genuinely nation-leading legislation – we believe world-leading legislation – that has the objective of unlocking huge sums of investment into our state to grow the renewable sector with the explicit objective of producing hydrogen,” Malinauskas said.

“The Act takes five to six pieces of legislation consolidated into a single-purpose legislative vehicle that allows would-be investors to understand exactly what the rules of the game are to be able to access vast tracts of land in South Australia.

“Should the legislation be passed in Parliament, it will allow the government to make available to the market vast tracts of land where we know we have a high-quality solar and wind resource to be available to produce renewable energy and hydrogen at a scale seen unlike anywhere else in the world.”

The proposed legislation applies to both freehold and government-owned land, as well as state waters.

It preserves current arrangements for freehold land, whereby investors will need to secure access to land through direct agreement with landowners.

For state pastoral land and waters, a new competitive system will be introduced for conferring access and licences, which the Premier said enabled the government to responsibly assign the most prospective areas for renewable energy developments.

This will involve a competitive tender process whereby applicants will compete based on ‘transparent selection criteria’ to ‘ensure the state only hosts those projects willing to embrace coexistence with current land uses and deliver community and environmental benefits through their projects’.

Five new licence types will be created via the proposed legislation relating to key stages of renewable projects from early research right through to the construction and operation of the facilities. These include:

• Renewable Energy Feasibility Licence/Permit: enables exploration for renewable energy, including construction of monitoring equipment
• Renewable Energy Infrastructure Licence: permits construction operation, decommissioning and rehabilitation of renewable energy infrastructure
• Renewable Energy Research Licence: permits construction, option, decommissioning and rehabilitation of renewable energy infrastructure for the purpose of researching the capabilities of a technology, system or process
• Hydrogen Generation Licence: permits construction, operation, decommissioning and rehabilitation of hydrogen generation facilities.
• Associated Infrastructure Licence: permits ancillary infrastructure (transmission lines, roads, water treatment) and associated facilities (hydrogen power plants, ports for hydrogen product export, desalination for hydrogen production)

Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis said pastoralists were already being approached by international capital investors to lock up land and that the Bill would make that process “orderly”.

“We’ll identify the areas that we’ll release, they’ll do their own bilateral agreements – the same way you do now with the Mining Act. We issue a tenement and we expect the proponent and the landowner to come to an agreement about any loss of use of land and payments will be put in place,” Koutsantonis said.

“We don’t want to see large European companies just locking up land permanently in South Australia with some agreement with a pastoral lease holder and the South Australian public not getting access to the benefits of what might be developed. That resource belongs to South Australians.”

Koutsantonis said that consultation done for the Bill was “comprehensive”.

“I’ve never seen a level of consultation like this ever before,” he said.

“We’ve held three seminars with every Indigenous group in South Australia. We’ve gone out and engaged with industry.

“This Bill is designed to make sure that we go into the 21^st and 22^nd century with a fit-for-purpose foundation.”