...this does not look good for Australia. But IEA is behind the curve?
...Australia's labour cost is far too high to compete in mineral processing. We should focus instead on low labour intensive cutting edge technologies.
Three interesting facts on Indonesia's mineral industry from
1. Indonesia will be the single largest miner of key energy transition minerals for decades to come. Its market share in mined products would be larger than Africa's.
2. Policies that banned nickel ore exports and required domestic processing have made Indonesia a major player in mineral refining in the space of a few years. Without these policies, it would just be exporting ores.
3. Indonesia's nickel downstreaming policies have contributed to reducing the world's dependency on China's mineral refining (geographically that is, since most refining is done by Chinese companies in Indonesia).
