Against the arid, red dirt of the Australian Outback, the Mount Holland lithium mine emerges to approaching visitors as a colossal grey-tinged crater, with trucks the size of houses edging along its steep inclines.
An expanding site at the heart of the world’s top lithium-producing region, the 2.6 billion Australian dollar ($1.7 billion) operation is emblematic of the plentiful additional supply of the battery material currently weighing on global prices, much of it from this neighborhood. Despite bullish long-term forecasts, the metal has been languishing near two-year lows as demand fails to keep pace.
But the sprawling mine is also a glimpse of the future for Western Australia, or of what this vast region, defined for decades by the demands of China’s steel industry, hopes will be a new, greener stage of development. The battery ingredient still makes up a sliver of exports but its prospects have already attracted attention — and billions of dollars of investment — from some of the region’s biggest and brashest mining names, from Gina Rinehart to Chris Ellison’s Mineral Resources.