Good News & Bad News, page-18836

sorry, - that paste was quite hard to read - this is Ken's bit in the article.

These concessions are what will drive demand for Australian lithium according to Ken Brinsden, former chief executive of Pilbara Minerals and now chairman of Patriot Battery Metals.

Patriot, which is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and has lodged a prospectus with the ASX, owns the Corvette Lithium Property, a 200-square-kilometre deposit in the newly discovered Corvette lithium district in Canada.

Brinsden says Australia and Canada will benefit from the US demand for lithium because it will be impossible for the US to source the forecast supply from mines in the US.

“Greenfield mine developments have been notoriously difficult to get up in the last decade in the US,” he says.

“There is an element of Nimbyism going on there – we want the raw materials, but we don’t want the mine in our own territory.

“The Americans will increasingly become more desperate in their support of the battery raw materials developments because the alternatives are pretty horrible.

“The alternative is you’re wholly reliant on North Asia, but especially China as a solution for your EV industry and, of course, they don’t want that.”

Brinsden says American and foreign car companies are already developing significant battery facilities in the US, even though they haven’t established raw material supply chains to match that demand.

“China dominates the middle section of the battery raw materials supply chain in such a way that the Western world is just absolutely trapped unless they start developing these alternate supply chains,” he says.

‘Incentive for pricing’

Brinsden says the demand for new battery minerals mining development will overwhelm the relatively small companies that have been focused on the developing the sector.

“I think there’ll be incentive pricing for quite some time to motivate new raw material supply because the electrification of industry is going to put a lot of pressure on the mining industry,” he says.

“And the truth is – and much of our industry might not like to hear it – we’re just not ready to deploy enough capital in those new mineral species.

“Somewhat controversially, I would say the big guys have just got fat on the old economy – the iron ore and the coal industry – and now they’ve got to fundamentally change, and it’s not easy to do.

“A lot more capital needs to be deployed, and it can’t all be done by the junior and the mid-tier companies like Pilbara Minerals, or even Patriot.

“What you need is the big balance sheets of the global majors to be deployed in the direction of critical minerals, otherwise we just won’t get enough capital deployed.”