2.2 Why is WA the best place for Lithium Valley? According to Klaus Schwab, the Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, 1 the world is in the middle of the fourth industrial revolution (the fourth stage). Information technologies, artificial intelligence, automation and new energy systems are the fourth stage technologies that will underpin New Energy metals processing industry in WA, but the term also refers to social media, online communities, gaming, 3-D printing, genetics, breakthroughs in the materials sciences and virtual and augmented reality. Collectively, these technologies are fundamentally altering the way we live, work, and relate to one another. They are also transforming the global economy and WA’s position in it. Fourth stage technologies offer WA the opportunity to develop a much larger industrial base that is complementary to its world-leading resource extraction sector. These technologies shift the competitive advantage of early stage value adding away from low cost labour countries to the earliest point in the value chain where all the input materials can be brought together for highly automated manufacturing processes. Components are then shipped to the major global manufacturing centres for later stage manufacturing where proximity to markets or low-cost labour still afford an advantage. WA is in the unique position of having abundant quantities of almost all the New Energy metals, giving it a large advantage in electro-chemical processing. The abundance of New Energy metals in Australia, mostly in WA, is set out in Figure 4 .
Figure 4: Country Reserves of Key Battery Materials 4
Country reserves of key battery materials as a percentage of known global reserves
250%
200%
150%
100%
50%
0%
Lithium Cobalt
Manganese Vanadium Iron ore Nickel
Copper
Bauxite Graphite Rare earths Ilmenite Rutile
Source: USGS; Future Smart Strategies (21 March 2018)
1 Schwabb, K (2015) “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”, World Economic Forum, Geneva, https://www.weforum.org/about/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-by-klaus-schwab.
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