KPMG Partner Shares Strategic Playbook for ASX Mining Funding

Critical minerals funding

Herring highlighted a few specific grants in his talk, with the first being the Queensland Critical Minerals and Battery Technology Fund, which is targeted to support businesses across the critical minerals supply chain.

He said that the fund supports a broad range of supply chain-related projects in the sector, citing how Queensland Pacific Metals (ASX:QPU) was recently awarded AU$8 million in funding for its Townsville Energy Chemicals Hub project.

The next point of discussion was the International Partnerships in Critical Minerals grant, offered by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. This is exclusively for critical minerals businesses to have a maximum of AU$20 million in funding to grow end-to-end supply chains with Australia’s international partners.

Magnium Australia received AU$6.5 million under this grant, which was allotted to accelerate the development of Magnium's CSIRO-patented technology for the clean extraction of magnesium metal and construction of the Collie magnesium refinery pilot plant in Collie.

Another category he discussed was debt and equity funds, with Herring specifically talking about the National Reconstruction Fund (NRF). Dedicated to investment-ready projects, this is a AU$15 billion fund over 10 years for debt equity and guarantees. As the NRF is new, it has not yet made any investments, but it is aimed at investment-ready projects in priority sectors such as renewables and value addition in mining.

Herring also touched on other opportunities for hydrogen and critical metals projects, as well as funding for research partnerships through Australia's Economic Accelerator program.

The most important thing, according to Herring, is for companies to analyse their projects. “Understand what was available at one point in time to try and match with the projects that you might have on board,” he advised.

Towards the end of his talk, he gave a few tips on how companies can up their game:

• Spend time researching and planning to align your projects with available funding.
• Ensure you have good processes and the wide capability and capacity, either in-house or contract, to apply for the funding.
• Build relationships with key stakeholders, alliance partners, clients and more.
• Don't spend all your time chasing grants at the cost of other priorities.

“If you do these things well and you have good quality projects, you absolutely maximise your chance of success,” Herring ended.