$532 million committed to National Battery Strategy, but no plan yet on how to reclaim supply chain
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.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
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]