Australia leads the global iron ore industry, supplying about 37 per cent of global production and over 52 per cent of total exports, playing a crucial role in supporting the world’s iron and steel production. Most of the exports are medium grade ores, which are currently processed through the blast furnace-basic oxygen furnace (BF-BOF) route. However, the BF-BOF route emits around 2.3 t of CO2 per tonne of steel. The direct reduced iron-electric smelting furnace (DRI-ESF) has emerged as a promising pathway to utilise medium-grade iron ore, particularly Australian hematite-goethite iron ores, in a low emission ironmaking route. A comprehensive understanding of thermodynamic principles is essential to evaluate the metallurgy and physicochemical reactions during DRI-ESF ironmaking as they provide insights into equilibrium of the reactions, phase stability and energy calculations. This study presents preliminary thermodynamic calculations of Australian hematite goethite ore hydrogen-direct reduced iron (H-DRI) smelting in electric smelting furnace (ESF) using FactSage 8.3 software and compares the results with a lab-scale electrode smelting furnace experiment carried out with H-DRI produced from MAC iron ore fines. The calculations evaluated phase stability, hot metal and slag compositions as functions of temperature and charged carbon to-iron ratio (C/Fe). The results showed that higher temperature promoted SiO2 reduction, leading to higher silicon content in the hot metal. Increasing charged C/Fe increased both carbon and silicon contents in the hot metal. Comparison with the smelting experiment showed that the experimental carbon and silicon contents were lower than those predicted by FactSage, highlighting the limitation of single-zone equilibrium calculations, which do not account for kinetic effects, temperature gradients, and carbon losses in real smelting operation. Adjustment of the system pO2 improved the agreement in carbon content between calculated and experimental result. However, silicon remained overpredicted. Overall, this study highlights the need for an advanced multi-zone thermodynamic model to better represent the actual furnace operation during H-DRI smelting in ESF conditions.