Mining sector urges Peter Dutton not to class gas a critical mineral if Coalition wins election
Mineral companies in the running to develop the Australian deposits of areas necessary in different products such as electric cars, smartphones and military hardware are pressing the coalition to bring back an electoral commitment to allow the peress of fossil fuels to access their economic loans in the sector.
While the leader of the opposition Peter Dutton tries to fight the Albanian government for the policies and the prices of energy, the coalition of last week has declared that the same status as a “critical mineral” such as lithium, cobalt and graphite would have granted to natural gas, if it won the elections, as part of its plans to accelerate the new gas trainee programs and send the market with the “bucket” of the fuel.
The lithium mine of the Pilbara minerals with pilgangoora, western Australia.
The classification of the gas as “critical mineral” would qualify gas trails for the support of a 4 billion dollar loan structure established by the Federal Government in 2023 to start more minerals and metal transformations that the world will need in much greater quantities such as blocks of buildings for clean energy products and infrastructure.
“This will guarantee that gas projects – so critical for our national and international security – are able to access specialized teams within the Department of Resources to support their projects,” said opposition resources Susan McDonald.
However, the leaders of the mining industry have requested the reserve of $ 4 billion dollars only for the critical mineral industry. Australia has some of the largest reserves of known minerals including elements of copper, cobalt, lithium, nickel and rare soils. But the industry, which has fought a prolonged recession of the prices of raw materials, will need billions of dollars of government investments to grow in a more significant economic factor and one day they challenge China’s narrow compared to the offer of critical minerals.
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“Obviously we want to see the structure of critical minerals used to support critical mineral projects,” said Warren Pearce, CEO of Australian Mining and Exploration Association, representing 500 explorers, miners and emerging producers. “I think that in this sense the available money will go much further with the critical mineral projects of how much it would not do with giant gas projects.”
The CEO of Arafura rare Earths Darryl Cuzzubbo said that the structure was “particularly vital” for the nascent industries such as the extraction and elaboration of rare lands, in which companies have faced “further challenges due to underdeveloped skills, supply chains and markets”.
The Minister of Federal Resources Madeleine King has accused the planning coalition of cutting “all the support of the government to critical minerals”, after Dutton also promised to repeal the work plan to provide a 10 % tax credit to critical mineral companies that developed the processing on the valley, which has branded “tax interruptions for billionaires”.
