Mining minnows stymie green super power ambitions
The investment fund backing the $30bn Sun Cable project has warned the ASX is stacked with small mining explorers who risk locking up critical mineral because of a lack of funding.
Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners, which is backing the $30bn Sun Cable project, has warned that the ASX is stacked with small mining explorers that risk locking up critical minerals because of a lack of funding.
Quinbrook managing partner David Scaysbrook told the Smart Energy Queensland conference in Brisbane that his fund was now partnering with some of these small firms to help progress its renewables energy projects centred on Queensland and the Northern Territory.
Quinbrook is a partner in delivering Darwin-based Sun Cable, the world’s first intercontinental power grid using a solar energy infrastructure network linking Australia with Singapore. It also proposes to develop and build a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility near Townsville for polysilicon, a key ingredient in solar panels.
“Quinbrook is a little bit unusual in the way we go about investing because in Australia, oddly, in some respects, half of our stock exchange is made up of undercapitalised explorers,” Mr Scaysbrook said. “They don’t even have the money to do the drilling that can prove the potential within their resource, and they sit on these exploration permits for a long time.”
He said Quinbrook was funding junior explorers to undertake drilling campaigns, including three separate quartz producers in north Queensland. Quartz is the starting material for the production of polysilicon, the most important raw material for photovoltaics. Quinbrook also has partnered with Central Queensland Metals, which holds the exploration permits for what is the largest known magnetite deposit in Queensland for the fund’s proposed green iron project in Gladstone.
“We have one of the greatest magnetite resources on the east coast of Australia,” Mr Scaysbrook said. “It is globally significant and is controlled by a couple of geologists in Eagle St (Brisbane). They don’t have the money to do the drilling, proving up the resource, or the ability to take the advances in metallurgical science and homegrown technology in the last decade that can unlock the potential of this resource.”
Mr Scaysbrook said Australia was now entering an era of de-globalisation and the geopolitical reality of a different world where access to critical minerals would be vital.
“It is an inconvenient truth how carbon-intensive it is to make the things that we need to drive energy transition forward,” he said. “It’s a cruel but real environment that includes China’s current control of our green minerals. These are all things that make it very difficult to navigate the next two years, three years.”
He said Queensland’s “green superpower opportunity” was that it was one of the world’s best locations for green manufacturing and renewable energy production. “Our sun, wind, biomass, deep water ports, road, rail, water, high-voltage transmission, all come together in Queensland which makes it genuinely unique,” he said.
“We search the planet for places like this. It’s about jobs and export-driven income for the long term from a new, value-added industrial base, in the same way as the LNG industry has already done for us, and the oil and gas industry has similarly.
“As we decouple from China, as we create resilient supply chains, we genuinely do have the answers in this state.”
Mr Scaysbrook said he was encouraged by the co-operation between different levels of government to ensure renewable energy projects got off the ground. The company’s Townsville project, for example, would not have been possible with access to power from the Queensland government-backed Copperstring, a high-voltage transmission network extending from Townsville to Mount Isa.