Niobium
If you wanted a temperature check on Western Australia’s exploration sector last week, you didn’t need a feasibility study.
When global power plays, policy whiplash and economic shocks collide, opportunity hides in the chaos — and for Australia’s critical minerals sector, survival now depends on strategy as much as supply.
It’s not every day that a government geoscience leader talks about AI assistants, rare earth mapping, and century-long prosperity in the same breath – but that’s exactly what Melissa Harris did in Perth.
When it comes to critical minerals in emerging nations, geology is often the easy part - what makes or breaks a project is navigating the politics, markets, and risks that sit behind the orebody.
China quietly built the world’s most powerful critical minerals supply chains while other nations - including Australia - dozed through a geopolitical shift that now threatens economic security, trade independence, and defence readiness.
The 2025 South Australian State Budget has landed with all the fanfare of a damp squib for the state’s mineral exploration and mining sector.
What if resource estimation wasn’t just updated, but completely reimagined? At the AusIMM 2025 Mineral Resource Estimation Conference in Perth, two respected voices in the field—Jacqui Coombes and Paul Hodkiewicz—stepped away from PowerPoint slides and into a candid, thought-provoking dialogue that challenged the mining industry to rethink its most foundational assumptions.
Australia has solidified its status as a global leader in the resources sector, emerging as the world’s largest holder of vanadium resources and a dominant force in critical minerals essential for clean energy and advanced technologies.
