$532 million committed to National Battery Strategy, but no plan yet on how to reclaim supply chain

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Battery production will get a $500 million boost from the Federal government as part of a newly released national battery strategy. The funding will be a tax incentive for production, but the details of the scheme remain unknown.

Transcript

00:00 Well, the funding is designed to go to companies that are looking to turn raw minerals, critical

00:08 minerals in particular when it comes to batteries, into elements that can be used in batteries,

00:13 be they liquids or solid parts or battery components, or to make entire battery systems

00:19 themselves. So this is around $534 million over seven years that will be spent in some

00:26 kind of tax incentive around production. We don't actually have the exact details yet.

00:31 That doesn't seem to have been determined at this point, but we do know that the government

00:35 intends for it to be some kind of incentive towards production. But the idea is that it

00:41 would move Australia's industrial involvement from simply digging up critical minerals,

00:46 which we do a lot of at the moment. Australia, for example, creates or produces around 45%

00:53 of the world's supply of lithium. But to go beyond that, transform it into materials that

00:59 can be used in batteries and to make batteries themselves, because at the moment Australia

01:04 only has about a 1% share of the value of batteries globally. So this is the government

01:09 trying to transform what Australian industry is doing in this space. On one hand, it is

01:14 about having Australian industry having a place in this big global economic transition

01:20 towards green energy. It's not just domestically that we need more batteries, but globally

01:24 that's needed as well. And Australia could have a big economic opportunity there. But

01:29 it's also about making sure that China doesn't have full control of the supply chain. When

01:35 it comes to batteries, China has something like a 75% share of the market globally. And

01:41 that means not only would that be a great concern in security matters, if there were

01:47 to be a kind of global conflict, or if there were supply chain issues and we couldn't get

01:53 those parts here, but it also means that China has a really significant role in price setting

01:58 when it controls that much of the market. So it is partly about the economic opportunities

02:03 of getting into the renewable energy space, but it is also about national security and

02:08 economic security of making sure that one country doesn't have too much control of the

02:13 market of a critically important piece of infrastructure.

02:16 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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