Seequent Segment Director Mining, Dr Janina Elliott, spoke to Dr David Skilling, Founding Director of Landfall Strategy Group, about challenges facing the mining industry.
Source: Bentley Systems
By Paul Gorman.
The world is seeing a ‘real race’ to harness minerals essential for the green transition.
Economist and public policy specialist Dr David Skilling, Founding Director of Landfall Strategy Group, said electrification and the transition to greener sources of power was under way in the United States and Europe’s advanced economies, and also in many parts of the emerging world.
‘Critical materials will be central to that. Adjacent to that, there’s going to be a massive boom in infrastructure spend all over.
‘The fact interest rates are a little bit lower than they have been – obviously mining is a capital-intensive industry – that’s very, very helpful as well.’
Mining was fast becoming a locus of strategic competition between the big powers, he said.
‘China, obviously, has been investing massively for the last period of time and now has a dominant position in many global supply chains. It is putting real competitive pressure on many of the Western firms.
‘We are seeing massive build-out as China vertically integrates from raw materials right through to batteries of electric vehicles. And now we’re beginning to see some of the Western governments and Western firms playing catch-up and trying to build their own supply chains…and trying to innovate in response.’
There were differences now when compared with past periods of economic uncertainty, Skilling said.
‘The scale and the speed of what we are seeing is unprecedented. The world needs to pull off a green transition-electrification process very, very quickly.
‘There’s an intensity to get minerals out of the ground into productive use from an electrification standpoint. But also because minerals and adjacent activity are central to the geopolitical competition we are seeing between the US, China and others.
‘There’s a real race to get to the commanding heights of the global economy,’ Skilling said.