Australia mining industry will be driven by new technologies

24 Apr 2017

Australian mining industry is on the verge of a new mining boom based around so-called tech metals. And as the race cranks up across the nation to find new deposits of rare earths and other metals, industry itself is calling for the development of a value-adding component.

Australia’s two largest mineral commodities, iron ore and coal, are shipped offshore in bulk form where other countries, most notably China, value add by using them to manufacture many different products. These include a lot of imported products Australia buys that are made from the very minerals it exported. The tech metals complex is made up of rare earths and other minerals and metals that are used in what is referred to as the new economy.

They are essential to making high technology componentry such as mobile phones, solar cells and autonomous vehicles. They are also used to make the different kinds of batteries needed to store power from renewable sources, and new types of lightweight engines to replace traditional combustion engines.

Australian Vanadium has a high-grade vanadium deposit in central Western Australia, and chief executive Vincent Elgar insists there is every opportunity to create new value adding businesses. He said the way the last mining boom petered out quickly should be a salutary lesson. Mr Elgar said that “I don’t think that anyone in the lithium space, or the vanadium space, or the cobalt space for that matter, should not do that given our experience in the last boom, where we shipped a lot of tonnes away overseas.”

Vanadium is a metal that has traditionally been used as a strengthening agent for steel in the form of rebar, but Mr Elgar said its real value in the technological age was as a key component in redox batteries, also known as flow batteries. He said that “We’ve got this new developing industry with growing demand, and I think we should be able to make the redox flow batteries in Australia because we do have a lot of technology. And we also have a great skill set here in Australia, so let’s take it right through to its logical conclusion, which is make the batteries here. We’ve already successfully produced our first batch of vanadium electrolyte, needed for the batteries, at the University of Western Australia.”

Source : ABC NET