Critical Minerals and the New Geopolitics

Australia is the world’s biggest producer of lithium – a key ingredient in the manufacture of the batteries that will power the fourth Industrial Revolution. It also has aspirations to be a battery maker. But, as Sophia Kalantzakos, an expert on the geopolitics of minerals writes, it is a field that promises to be both a strategic and commercial scramble as the great powers in the Indo-Pacific vie to secure vital, and scarce, supplies.