Critical minerals: The who, what and why for Australia and New Zealand - The West Australian

A West Australian report examined Australia and New Zealand's role in critical minerals supply, addressing their strategic importance as resources for global energy and technology transitions.

Where this fits

Australia holds reserves of minerals essential to renewable energy infrastructure: lithium for batteries, rare earths for turbine motors, cobalt and nickel for inverters and storage. But mining, processing and refining these materials is capital-intensive, long-cycle, and faces environmental and indigenous land constraints. More significantly, the processing and manufacture of finished components, solar panels, battery cells, inverters, happens overwhelmingly in China, which controls the supply chain from ore to product. A renewable-energy grid requires enormous quantities of these materials. Australia can dig them up; it cannot yet process or manufacture them at scale. That dependency is a materials problem, a cost problem, and a sovereignty problem all at once.

What it means

Australia is positioned as a quarry for the global energy transition, not as an independent actor controlling its own supply chain. Even as domestic renewable capacity grows, the grid's resilience rests on Chinese factories operating uninterrupted, on shipping lanes staying open, and on geopolitical tolerance for Australian exports. A firm, energy-dense alternative, nuclear power, requires far less material throughput per unit of reliable output and could be built with domestic supply chains over time. The honest trade is not between coal and renewables; it is between a renewables path that outsources materials security to a strategic rival, and a nuclear path that forgoes that dependency. Right now, law forbids the choice.