What does Australia produce and export?

The Hamersley ranges of the Pilbara hold banded iron formations laid down more than two billion years ago, later enriched by weathering into hematite ore rich enough to ship almost as it is dug. The deposits are close enough to the coast that mining companies built their own heavy-haul railways to Port Hedland and Dampier, which is why the ore is competitive despite the distance to Asian mills. Australia mined 38% of the world's iron ore in 2025 (USGS) and held 55% of world iron-ore export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI), the largest single-country share in any major commodity trade.

Gas came later and from three directions: the North West Shelf off Western Australia, the deepwater Browse and Ichthys fields, and coal-seam gas drilled in Queensland's Surat and Bowen basins and piped to liquefaction plants at Gladstone. Because there is little domestic demand near the fields, almost all of it is chilled and loaded onto ships under long-term contracts with Japanese, Korean and Chinese buyers. Australia produced 3.5% of world natural gas in 2025 (Energy Institute) but took 10% of world natural-gas export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI), a gap that shows how much of its output is traded rather than consumed.

Agriculture occupies a crescent along the southern and eastern edge where winter rain falls. Wheat is sown into autumn rains and harvested in early summer, on the opposite calendar to the northern hemisphere, so Australian supply reaches the market in the northern off-season. The country grew 4.3% of world wheat in 2024 (FAOSTAT) and held 9.9% of world wheat export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI). Yields swing violently with drought. Irrigated cotton in the Murray-Darling basin behaves the same way, rising and falling with water allocations, and accounted for 14% of world cotton export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI). Old greenstone belts around Kalgoorlie gave 8.5% of world gold production in 2025 (USGS).