Hallett Group’s Green Cement Transformation Project is ramping up to be a revolutionary low-carbon initiative.
After more than a decade of development, investment, and persistence, Hallett Group is approaching a turning point that could redefine how cementitious materials are sourced, processed, and supplied in South Australia.
At the centre of it all is the company’s Green Cement Transformation Project, which relies on a cement distribution terminal at Port Adelaide and a complementary processing operation at Port Augusta. Together, the two facilities deliver low-carbon cementitious materials at scale while strengthening local supply chains and reducing reliance on imported products.
For Hallett Group chief executive officer Kane Salisbury, the project represents far more than a single infrastructure investment. Salisbury said it is the outcome of a long-term, strategic decision to secure supply independence, lower carbon intensity, and future-proof the state’s construction materials sector in an increasingly constrained global market.
“This has been more than a decade of gestation to get where we are today,” Salisbury said. “But we’ve now got a project that delivers security of supply, environmental benefits, and commercial sustainability all at the same time.”
The Green Cement Transformation Project can be traced back to 2016, when South Australia’s last coal-fired power station shut down, removing the state’s only local source of fly ash. With the close of the Northern Power Station at Port Augusta, South Australia transitioned from a locally supplied market to one entirely dependent on imported supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs).
“When the power station closed, South Australia became a 100 per cent import market for supplementary cementitious materials,” Salisbury said. “That changed the risk profile of the entire industry overnight.”
Salisbury said that at the time, global demand for SCMs such as fly ash and slag was increasing as governments and construction companies sought to reduce the embodied carbon of concrete.
“If these materials were easy to process, they would have already been done. None of them are straightforward,” Salisbury said.
Hallett Group began investigating whether South Australia’s own industrial by-products could be transformed into viable, high-performing SCM. The challenge lay in those materials.
Legacy fly ash at Port Augusta had been hydraulically deposited using salt water, making it incompatible with concrete without extensive processing.
Slag from the Nyrstar smelter at Port Pirie presented environmental and consistency challenges, while steel slag from Whyalla lacked the granulation needed for cementitious use.
From 2016 onward, Hallett Group embarked on an extensive research and development program that pushed the business beyond traditional quarrying and concrete operations. The company undertook years of laboratory testing, invested heavily in pilot-scale processing infrastructure, and travelled extensively overseas to study similar technologies.
“We went all over the world,” Salisbury said.
“Europe, the US, Japan, China, looking at people doing different parts of what we’re trying to do. No one was doing exactly what we needed, but we were able to piece together the technologies.”
By 2020, Hallett Group had established a large-scale pilot plant capable of processing up to 10 tonnes per day, allowing the company to test washing, drying, grinding, and classification techniques at meaningful scale. Over several years of refinement, two of the three industrial by-product streams passed performance, durability, and environmental benchmarks.
“By the end of it, we were able to say, hand on heart, that these products perform as good as or better than other market alternatives,” Salisbury said. “And they’re made from South Australian industrial by-products.”
The Port Augusta facility will progressively remediate two of South Australia’s largest industrial legacies, the former northern Power Station fly ash dam and the Port Pirie slag heap, by converting them into construction inputs rather than long-term environmental liabilities.
“We get to fix two of the biggest environmental legacies in South Australia and put them back into concrete,” Salisbury said. “That’s a massive outcome.”
South Australia’s premier Peter Malinauskas hailed the initiative as critical to both industrial renewal and long-term economic resilience.
“It’s appropriate that this initiative is based on the site of the former Northern Power Station, whose waste products will now play a key part in the industrial renewal of the Upper Spencer Gulf and the transition to a low-carbon economy,” he said while announcing a $12 million concessional loan to support the project.
The Government backing builds upon a $20 million federal grant and reflects ongoing support for the project’s goals. Malinauskas said the Green Cement Transformation Project aligns closely with South Australia’s broader industrial transformation agenda.
“This project will help South Australia meet its booming demand for building products used in homes, businesses, and industry, while providing sovereign capability and supply chain resilience,” Malinauskas said.
“South Australia is building, and the state needs to produce the materials to keep up the pace. This project will help realise that ambition, while reaffirming the Upper Spencer Gulf’s long-term prospects as a hub for energy and industry.”
For Hallett Group, an equally important component of the project is ensuring that lower-carbon outcomes are delivered without imposing additional costs on customers. Salisbury said the company has no intention of charging premium for green cementitious products.
“These materials will not be sold at a green premium,” he said. “People want greener materials, but they don’t necessarily want to pay more for them. We can process these materials and get them into the market cheaper than general purpose cement.
“South Australian industrial by-products should be in every cubic metre of South Australian concrete. The best way to decarbonise is to use the resources you’ve already got locally, not import other people’s waste streams.”
The new cement distribution terminal at Port Adelaide is near completion and scheduled for commissioning in early 2026. Built on one of the most constrained footprints on the port, the facility integrates bulk import, storage, blending and dispatch into a single, highly automated operation.
“What we’re building at Port Adelaide will set a global standard for cement distribution hubs,” Salisbury said. “We’ve taken a conventional cement dome and added a level of blending capability and flexibility that just doesn’t exist anywhere else.”
The Port Adelaide terminal will serve as a distribution backbone for Hallett Group’s cementitious materials strategy, while the Port Augusta processing facility provides the long-term competitive advantage. Once fully operational, the facility is expected to secure decades of local SCM supply for South Australia.
Malinauskas said the project complements other major industrial investments across the Upper Spencer Gulf.
“Coupled with green iron and steel in Whyalla, and critical metals in Port Pirie, this project is paving the way for huge opportunities for the Upper Spencer Gulf and South Australia,” he said.
As commissioning progresses and operations ramp up, the Green Cement Transformation Project is poised to reshape South Australia’s cement and quarrying landscape.
“We don’t want to be the biggest construction materials business in the country,” Salisbury said. “We want to be the best.”
