A thinking person might wonder why the worlds largest producer of lithium does little more than export concentrate.
I found the following from Austrade and the Govt. A brief thought the minister credited Simon Birmingham was super keen on lithium batteries as part of Australia’s future.
The value chain is represented in the following chart. It is a year or two old.
From global production of lithium batteries just 0.5% of the final value is earned in Australia. It’s difficult to say it is also earned by Australia (IE value kept in the country) without pulling apart the ownership of each Miner and producer of lithium in Oz.
The global industry was worth more than $213 billions in 2017. Relevant to another topic is the prominent role of China in the key processing stages of production after mining.
