Lynas Rare Earths’ Amanda Lacaze says the critical minerals sector needs improved shared infrastructure to be competitive with China's dominant rare earths industry.
Lynas Rare Earths’ Amanda Lacaze says the critical minerals sector needs improved shared infrastructure to be competitive with China, in what she described as a 30-year catch-up game in developing the industry in Australia.
Speaking at the 33rd annual Diggers and Dealers conference, Ms Lacaze said the Chinese had been working on developing their dominant rare earths industry and expertise over 30 years, and Australia couldn't think it would be able to catch up without focused effort.
That came in response to Kim Beazley's call in his keynote speech for state intervention in the rare earths market, calling on taxpayer money to be used to fund project development as an investment in the defence sectors of the nation’s partners.
“Some of that's about funding, but some of it is about the fact that we [operate in a] high-cost environment in Australia and we need to be looking at improving the sorts of infrastructure that will allow us to be competitive," she told journalists.
“It's one thing to say customers should pay more but that means that if we say they should pay more than ultimately, the consumer pays more.”
The chief executive of the rare earths producer said Kalgoorlie was a case study for needing improved infrastructure, calling a single high transmission line and a 100-year-old pipeline insufficient.
"Developing a successful critical minerals industry means governments need to be active in creating an environment in which we can be successful. This means recognising the distributed nature of our natural resources...and recognising the critical minerals operations can never match the scale of iron ore and coal," she told delegates of the annual conference.
"It means governments need to focus on developing infrastructure in our regional areas, things like low cost, reliable, efficient logistics systems.
"Today, we gather in Kalgoorlie, the capital of one of the highest earning post codes in Australia, yet it has infrastructure that just barely manages to meet the needs of the residential population but it's wholly inadequate for industry.
"We can be a critical minerals player, but not by wishing it is so."
With an election on the horizon, Ms Lacaze said uninterruptable power, and plenty of it, at low prices was at the top of her wish list. Lynas was hit by the major electricity outage in late January which left Goldfields businesses and residents without power for days.
“For us to be able to do more with the facility that we have already built here, we need power, and we need low cost power,” she said.
“Number two on my list is once again related to hearing Kalgoorlie, which is some really significantly improved logistics.
“If we want to be a critical minerals superpower then we need to identify hubs that can operate like that for the different minerals around Australia.
“[In Kalgoorlie] If we really had a hub which was really serviced well, we've got rare earths, we've got copper, we've got lithium close by, all of these things could actually feed into that.”
Rare earth prices dropped in 2023 off the back of sufficient supply from China and softer than expected growth in electric vehicle demand.
Ms Lacaze said she was “cautiously optimistic” they might be a “little bit of improvement” in the commodity’s price.
“On our assessment last year there was quite a lot of inventory built in China and some of that had to do with quotas getting a bit ahead of the game,” she said.
“I think we've seen so far this year a fair bit of that unwind.
“We will be cautiously optimistic that we might see a little bit of an improvement, but China's economy is still very soft, and it’s the dominant dynamic within the sector.”
But the experienced mining executive, one of just three women speaking at the conference, came to tout Lynas' updated mineral resource and ore resource.
She joked to the room to "read the figures and weep" in reference to Lynas' increased tonnage and contained total rare earth oxide from Mt Weld deposit in the northern Goldfields compared to 2018's estimates.
The producer reported a 92 per cent increase in its mineral resource from 55.4 million tonnes to 106.6 million tonnes at 4.12 per cent TREO from 2018 to 2024.
Lynas posted a 63 per cent increase in ore reserves from 19.7Mt to 32.0Mt at 6.44 per cent TREO in the same period, alongside a 46 per cent increase in contained TREO compared to the August 2018 Mineral Resources estimate, which it says adds resources and replaces depletion.
The update supports a 20-year life of mine at 12,000tpa neodymium and praseodymium production capacity- used in the production of magnets and other advanced technologies- according to Lynas.
"We are in Kalgoorlie, so I understand that gold bars are sexy, but I want to talk about something that I think is seriously sexy and that's our updated mineral resources," she jested.
Lynas said the update coincided with its Mt Weld mine and concentration expansion project, of which stage one is complete and commissioned after a tight construction timeline due to its Malaysian operating licence previously hanging in the balance.
