Picking critical minerals winners requires hard choices

Second, internationally there are alternative sources of supply for many critical minerals Australia wants to target. Take lithium. A threefold increase in its price has delivered record exports of $19 billion in the past year. This led to the headline-grabbing prediction from the Federal Department of Industry's latest Resources and Energy Quarterly that export earnings of the two main minerals involved in the energy transition - lithium and copper - would exceed that of thermal coal by 2025. This may turn out to be the case - or not. But what is clear is that lithium is widely available and…