By John — Desalination News
Western Australia’s state government has reversed its position on a desalination plant for the southern coastal town of Esperance, with Premier Roger Cook acknowledging the facility will likely be needed to secure water supplies for the Goldfields region, according to ABC News. The admission comes as construction begins on a separate, already-funded $543 million (roughly US$355 million) upgrade of the century-old Goldfields and Agricultural Water Supply Scheme.
Esperance sits about 700 kilometres southeast of Perth. As recently as 2025, the idea of a desalination plant there was dismissed outright by the state’s then-water minister, Simone McGurk, who called a $100 million Esperance desalination proposal put forward by the WA Nationals “unviable” and a “thought bubble.” Fourteen months later, Cook has struck a markedly different tone, saying “I think we will need a desalination plant at Esperance,” and noting it could end up supplying either the town itself or the wider Goldfields network depending on how planning proceeds. Current Water Minister Daniel Pastorelli confirmed that state utility Water Corporation has begun early-stage planning work, though no cost estimate, capacity figure, or construction timeline has been released.
Peter Rundle, the WA Nationals MP who represents Esperance, said the about-face was “quite frustrating” given how firmly the government had rejected the idea only a year earlier — a pointed reminder that water security proposals dismissed as unaffordable in one budget cycle can resurface as necessities in the next, particularly in mining-dependent regional economies where both population and industrial demand are growing faster than legacy supply systems.
The backdrop to the announcement is the Goldfields pipeline project itself, which speaks to just how old — and how strained — WA’s existing inland water infrastructure has become. The Goldfields and Agricultural Water Supply Scheme dates to the early 1900s, when it was built to carry water more than 500 kilometres inland from the Perth hills to the Kalgoorlie goldfields, historically with the help of windmills and pumping stations dotted across the Wheatbelt. Contracts for the current $543 million upgrade — covering roughly 44.5 kilometres of pipe replacement, valve upgrades, and duplication of the Binduli Reservoir — were awarded in July to WA-based Georgiou Group and a joint venture of SRG Global and McConnell Dowell. More than $170 million of that spending is earmarked for Western Australian contractors, including at least $7 million for Aboriginal-owned businesses. Construction formally commenced this month, with completion targeted for the end of 2027. Water Minister Pastorelli said the new, locally manufactured pipes are expected to last up to 150 years, and the finished upgrade will lift the scheme’s daily capacity by about 7.2 million litres, roughly a 10 percent increase.
Even with that capacity boost, officials appear to be concluding it won’t be enough on its own — hence the reopened conversation about desalination at Esperance. The reversal fits a broader pattern already visible elsewhere this year: water scarcity concerns that were politically containable in one election cycle become central platform issues in the next, as seen recently in the U.S. state of Arizona, where water scarcity and competing desalination plans became a leading issue ahead of the November 2026 midterms. In WA’s case, the pressure comes less from drought than from the sheer age and limited capacity of a 120-year-old pipeline system straining to serve a growing Goldfields mining workforce and an expanding Esperance.
What happens next in Esperance remains open. Water Corporation’s early-stage planning will need to establish a site, capacity, and cost before any formal proposal goes to government, and there is no indication yet of how the project would be funded or how it would interact with the Goldfields pipeline upgrade now under construction. For now, the clearest signal is political: a plan once dismissed as unworkable is, eighteen months on, being treated by the same government as all but inevitable.
(Source: ABC News, Inside State Government)