Beyond iron ore: the battery metals and critical minerals building WA's next industries

Ask most people what Western Australia mines, and you'll get two answers: iron ore and gold. They're not wrong, between them, those two commodities still account for the majority of the value in CME's Unearthing Potential report, with iron ore alone modelled at $5.5 trillion in saleable product value and gold at $473.5 billion. But the report's real story is how much value now sits outside those two commodities, and how differently that value is put to work.

Six groups, one portfolio

The report organises WA's 28 identified commodities into six groups: bulk commodities (iron ore, bauxite, potash), precious metals (gold, silver, platinum, palladium), base metals (copper, nickel, zinc, lead, cobalt, molybdenum), battery and critical minerals (lithium, graphite, rare earths, vanadium, manganese, tungsten, gallium), mineral sands (ilmenite, rutile, zircon) and energy resources (natural gas, crude oil, condensate, LPG, uranium). As the report puts it, WA's resource base pairs established commodities with emerging resources used in infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, digital technologies, defence and changing energy systems.

A few numbers make the diversification concrete:

• Lithium, modelled at $525.9 billion in saleable value, enough (on the report's illustrative conversion) to supply 1.4 billion EV batteries. It's already a top-five commodity by value, and the WA Government's own pipeline update specifically flagged the Mt Holland lithium expansion as a live project.
• Natural gas, $738 billion, WA's second-largest commodity by value, with illustrative uses ranging from powering Tokyo for 209 years to enabling 14.2 billion tonnes of fertiliser production.
• Rare earths, $85.1 billion, small in volume but strategically outsized: used in permanent magnets for defence systems, electronics and wind turbines. The Eneabba Rare Earths Refinery, also named in the government's pipeline update, sits squarely in this category.
• Nickel and copper, $187.3 billion and $60.9 billion respectively, both core inputs to electrification, batteries and electricity networks.
• Uranium, $26.4 billion, described in the report as "an extraordinarily energy-dense resource" with power-generation and medical applications.
• Gallium, vanadium, manganese, tungsten and graphite, smaller in dollar terms individually, but grouped by the report as strategically important materials for semiconductors, energy storage, defence equipment and advanced manufacturing.

Why this matters for the workforce

Different commodities create different jobs. The report's six "opportunity pathways", economic development, advanced industries, energy security, digital infrastructure, transport and the built environment, and strategic supply chains, map roughly onto this commodity mix:

• Advanced industries draws on nickel and cobalt (high-performance alloys and batteries), tungsten and molybdenum (cutting tools, high-temperature components) and rare earths (permanent magnets, robotics).
• Energy security draws on natural gas, uranium, copper and vanadium, generation, transmission and storage.
• Digital infrastructure draws on gold and silver (electronic connectors), rare earths (data-storage components) and copper (data-centre cabling).
• Strategic supply chains draws on rare earths, lithium, uranium and vanadium, materials increasingly treated as nationally significant, not just commercially valuable.

Each of these pathways needs a different technical skill set layered on top of the traditional trades and engineering core: process chemistry and metallurgy for battery-grade lithium and rare earth separation, specialist environmental and heritage management for new project types, and increasingly, the automation and digital skills covered in our companion piece on the sector's skills shortage.

Not instead of iron ore, alongside it

None of this diminishes the scale of iron ore, still WA's single largest economic asset by a wide margin, with an estimated 34.5 billion tonnes of saleable iron ore still in the identified resource base against roughly 17 billion tonnes produced to date historically. Natural gas, similarly, still has a long runway, the report models 1,093 million tonnes of saleable LNG from the currently identified reserve base. The point isn't that the traditional commodities are being replaced; it's that WA's resources story has quietly become a much broader one, with real economic weight now sitting in the minerals used to build batteries, semiconductors, defence equipment and renewable energy infrastructure.

For jobseekers, that breadth is good news. It means a resources career in WA is no longer synonymous with one or two commodities or one region, it spans the Pilbara's iron ore and gas operations, the Goldfields' gold and nickel projects, and an emerging critical minerals and rare earths sector with its own processing and refining infrastructure being built right now, from Eneabba to Mt Holland.

Source: Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia, "Unearthing Potential: The Scale of Western Australia's Resource Opportunity," prepared by EY-Parthenon, September 2026 (Sections 2.1, 2.3, 3.2, Appendix B); WA Government announcement, 14 September 2026. Illustrative use-case comparisons are approximate, non-additive and drawn directly from the report; they describe potential applications, not a forecast of actual production mix.