Australia eyes Indonesia’s nickel in its play for critical mineral supremacy

A specified time aft swearing successful his furniture connected 14 May, freshly re-elected Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese boarded a formation from Canberra to Jakarta, signifying to the satellite the value his authorities places successful the narration with its northerly neighbours.

Waiting to greet Albanese for the archetypal overseas sojourn of his 2nd word was Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto. While determination was undoubtedly overmuch to sermon during their Indonesia-Australia Annual Leaders’ Meeting, Albanese and Subianto rapidly turned to captious minerals, according to a associated communique, with predominant speech of “green infrastructure” and “clean vigor projects”.

The overarching trade-off underpinning the 2 nations’ statement is clear. Through the Australia-Indonesia Climate and Infrastructure Partnership, Jakarta secures supplies of lithium for its electrical conveyance (EV) artillery accumulation amid a propulsion to spell green, portion Canberra expands its marketplace stock for exports of its abundant captious minerals.

However, signs crossed the past six months person indicated that Australia’s involvement transcends an summation successful lithium exports.

Albanese’s broader imaginativeness is for Australia to rival China’s proviso concatenation power arsenic the world’s “critical mineral monolith” .

Beijing is simply a apical shaper of 30 of the 50 minerals labelled arsenic “critical” by the US Geological Survey and oversees ample swathes of planetary licensing, refining and processing. After US President Donald Trump initiated a commercialized warfare with China, Beijing restricted exports to the US of assorted minerals captious for smartphones, EV batteries and infrared missiles.

Since the compression successful proviso to occidental nations, Australia has tried to presumption itself arsenic a planetary shaper of captious minerals, with immoderate of the world’s largest deposits.

Paramount to Australia jostling for rod presumption arsenic a captious minerals shaper is nickel, which Indonesia has successful abundance.

Home to 2 of the world’s 5 largest reserves of the metal, Sorowako and Weda Bay, the state is the world’s biggest shaper of nickel, with 42.3% of planetary reserves. Australian mining companies person agelong eyed Indonesia’s nickel reserves, supported by the government’s tendency to summation Canberra’s engagement successful the planetary proviso concatenation of the captious mineral utilized for EVs and stainless steel.

However, Chinese companies ain astir 40% of the accumulation of mined nickel successful Indonesia. They are besides the shareholders of 75 of Indonesia’s 357 nickel mining, recycling and processing projects, according to China-Global South Project data.