Developing a mine to the point where it can feed a supply chain takes about five years. The downstream projects Gloria has been looking at in China get built in two to seven.
That gap is the thing she keeps coming back to. Processing capacity arrives quickly, and supply then runs ahead of demand. Upstream cannot move at that speed, and the money has not moved upstream to make it try. Her view is that more of the capital should go there, to release the material the rest of the chain is waiting for. It has not happened yet. She calls it part of the growing pain.
Gloria works with the Australian companies at that end of the chain: ASX-listed explorers, small caps and mid caps, the ones drilling holes to prove a resource exists. She was in China for the first time in four or five years, at the CLNB conference run by Shanghai Metals Markets, to see what the middle and the bottom of the chain now look like.
Nobody used to skip a step
The commercial pattern she describes used to be sequential and polite. A company upstream sold to its customer one level down, and out of respect nobody jumped a step.
In the past five or six years that has broken. End users, the companies making EVs at the far end of the chain, started talking directly to upstream companies to secure resource, signing offtake agreements, often funded by the government of their own country. Her phrase for the result is that they can sleep now.
The companies in between are left as toll processors.
Some deals now go further and are signed by all three parties at once: end user, supplier and processing company. Gloria likes these, and her reasons are practical rather than ideological. Pricing becomes visible to everybody, so there are no secrets about what one party charged another. And risk is shared. If the raw material price climbs, the pressure that lands downstream is visible to the people it lands on, and can be negotiated rather than absorbed.
What is in the ground, and what it costs to prove it
Australia has close to 380 operating mines and around 19 commodities Gloria counts as genuinely rich: lithium, rare earths, nickel, cobalt, and copper, which she points out also ends up in an EV. She puts the country in a small group of resource nations alongside Canada and the United States, and notes that Vietnam holds the second largest rare earth resource.
Proving all this is expensive in a way that is easy to miss from outside. Every drilling programme costs real money in labour and equipment. Ten holes, fifteen holes, and the cash is gone. "We're burning cash," she says, and then the cycle repeats: raise again from the Australian market, from institutional investors, from Europe and the United States, and spend it on drilling.
She is not pessimistic about the lithium price, which is a less common position than it sounds. Her argument is about the baseline. Measured against five and ten year growth history, lithium is still running above average, so the market has not fallen off a cliff. It looks bad because everyone became used to the high. What produced the correction was expectation rather than demand, everyone rushing in at once, and the oversupply that followed. The volume going into EVs, and the role lithium plays, have not changed.
Then the flat observation underneath it: "The good thing with low is you can only fall so far, then you go up again."
Rare earths, the market she worked in for a long time before moving to lithium, behave differently. Lithium is largely controlled by the market. Rare earths move on policy and quota.
The country stopped making things
Australia's downstream barely exists, and Gloria does not offer a tidy explanation for it, which is to her credit. She says plainly that there is no definitive answer.
What she describes is a manufacturing base that went away over ten or fifteen years. Holden, one of the big domestic carmakers, is gone. She has met exactly one company in South Australia trying to manufacture EVs, at very small scale. "We just become a raw material country."
The consequence is circular. Australia exports material to China and south Asia, the finished product is made there, and Australia imports it back. Governments have started thinking about how to rebuild some manufacturing capacity at home. She treats that as recognition of the gap rather than a plan to close it.
The best records in the world, and a word she is tired of
Her case for Australian ESG credentials is not about policy statements. It is about record-keeping.
Each Australian state runs tenement and geological data systems she rates as the best in the world, shared with the federal level through Geoscience Australia. If she wants to find an available tenement, she goes online and searches for it. Anyone weighing an investment in New South Wales or Western Australia can do the same.
Environmental management was already strict before ESG became the term for it. Nothing happens without a permit: water, environment, rehabilitation, plants, animals. The rules have tightened to the point where ground, and even a tree, can no longer be marked, which she describes as pushing it to the extreme, while accepting that everyone is on a learning curve, Australia included, and that the process still has to leave a project commercial.
What changed with ESG is what surrounds it. Companies now run audits. Fund managers have set up dedicated ESG funds. And investors have become the enforcement mechanism, saying outright that they will not put money into a company that has not committed.
She is also sick of the word, and says so cheerfully: it is so overused it follows her into her dreams, and her husband has asked her not to mention it. Then she defends the substance behind it anyway.
74 lithium mines, and who is going to pay for them
The figures she quotes come from Benchmark, presented at a future-facing commodity conference in Singapore earlier in the year. To achieve the 2050 energy transition, a thirty-year horizon, the world needs something like 74 new lithium mines, 62 cobalt mines and 72 nickel mines. Energy storage needs around $582 billion of investment between 2020 and 2030, with about half of it going upstream.
Her point about that number is not its size. It is that equity markets cannot produce it. Retail and institutional money both matter, and neither is close to enough on its own.
So she lists what is filling the gap. Australian government investment into projects that carry major status, Liontown Resources among them. Korean banks and a German bank funding projects tied to offtake conditions, with the further condition that the resource benefits the host country's economic development. Export credit agencies working alongside government, stepping in at the front once a government has designated a project worth supporting, with money she is content to call loans with conditions attached.
And Thailand, which now has a policy called EV 3.5 covering cars, resources and processing together, in a country that currently relies on imports from China.
The last thing she says about capital explains why she was there at all. She came to China hoping the investment would start moving the other way: from the Chinese government, from companies, and from retail investors who might take an interest.
This piece draws on the full conversation, which is available with a complete transcript on the episode page.