Australia is the world's leading lithium producer. Why don't we make electric vehicles?   

ABC News
Thu 9 Feb 2023

In the early '90s, as the Australian car-making industry was getting sucked into its death spiral, a tin mine in Western Australia found itself with an abundance of a low-value mineral: lithium.

"We realised we had a hell of a lot of lithium and didn't have much to do with it," recalls Mike King, who was the mining manager at the Greenbushes mine at the time.

"We had lithium everywhere. We were pouring it out the tailings."

Thirty years later, Australia no longer makes cars, but lithium is being touted as the reason for the resurrection of the automotive industry.

The price of lithium has increased many times over, and those WA reserves are being rapidly dug up and shipped overseas, to be turned into the rechargeable batteries that are an indispensable element of the world's effort to decarbonise.


What was once discarded has become an essential and sought-after mineral.
Australian minerals are in most of the world's new electric vehicles (EVs).

So, should Australia make EVs of its own?

Renewable energy superpower? Get in line
For those who saw the Australian auto-manufacturing industry wither and die over decades, the proposal to start it back up may come as a surprise.

The idea gained momentum early last year, with an election-night speech and a think-tank report.

The report came from the Australia Institute in February, laying out the case for "rebuilding vehicle manufacturing in Australia".

Workers at Holden's Adelaide Factory standing around a red car
Workers at Holden's Adelaide Factory pose with the last Holden in 2017.
Then in May, Anthony Albanese in his victory speech declared: "We can be a renewable energy superpower."   

About four months later, in September, Tesla chair Robyn Denholm publicly backed the idea, saying Australia "can and should" manufacture EVs, due to its abundant supply of battery metals.

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Days later, energy minister Chris Bowen said, "We can make electric vehicles in Australia. Not only do I think that, so do the EV manufacturers."

The case for EV manufacturing comes down to value-adding: Australia is the world's largest lithium producer, but captures a tiny fraction (possibly as little as 0.5 per cent) of the ultimate value of the mineral it exports.

Almost all of the tens of thousands of tonnes of lithium Australia ships every year is a lightly processed lithium-bearing ore called spodumene.

And most of that ore is waste rock: only about 6 per cent is lithium.

Pilbara Minerals spodumene rock
The type of lithium-bearing spodumene rock mined in Australia.(ABC News:
Australia's current role in the global clean energy economy is as a giant quarry, said Peter Newman, a professor of sustainability at Curtin University.

"We've been digging up enormous quantities of lithium, and we send it away and all the clever stuff has been happening overseas," he said.

Eventually, the lithium may end up back in Australia, in the form of electric vehicles, or home energy-storage batteries.

Three-quarters of the lithium in Tesla batteries worldwide comes from Australia.


Hence the argument for local manufacturing. Cars are at the top of a long chain of value-adding, from mining to processing to battery-making.

But there's a catch: other governments have also seen this opportunity. They want to be adding value, to be making the batteries and EVs to sell to the world.

So lots of countries want to be green energy superpowers, said Shannon O'Rourke, CEO of the Future Battery Industries CRC.

"We're seeing very aggressive moves by our allies and rivals to capture the battery industry."

These moves include the US's Inflation Reduction Act, passed in August, which provided billions of dollars of incentives for US clean energy businesses. Europe is looking at similar policy.

Australia could be outmanoeuvred: the EV and battery factories will be built in other countries before we get around to doing it here.

"The US and Australia are locked in a clean-energy arms race," Clean Energy Council CEO Kane Thornton said this week.

"We've already fallen behind."   

No not yet, although I do think Michael Moore docs are good.  Capitalism a love story.  Sicko To mention a few.