Hidetaka Nishimura, Deputy Director General, Commerce and Information Policy Bureau, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), Government of Japan

• Strengthening and diversifying critical mineral supply chains.
• Ensuring these supply chains support environmental and labor priorities.
• Policy efforts to further the green revolution.

• Asia Pacific's role in the global race to 300TWh deployed capacity
• Shifting thinking from GWh to TWh for true Net Zero by 2050
• Designing efficient gigafactory supply chains from mine to EV

• Understanding where structural deficits and surpluses exist in critical material supply chains
• The importance of securing an entire battery supply chain through diversity, resilience, and sustainability
• Beyond extraction – breaking into the black box of refining capacity across different commodities & resource types
• The benefits and risks of vertical integration and consolidation in international supply chains of exact specifications
• Ensuring quality control starts at the mine site and continues through extraction, mid-stream chemistry and battery production

• Leveraging Australia’s role as critical minerals superpower & investment hub
• Building partnerships in the global lithium ion economy
• Exporting expertise, best practice and technological innovation

• Building a world class nickel supply base
• Ensuring sustainability and downstream development
• High-Pressure Acid Leaching (HPAL) potential to unlock reserves & boost production capacity

• Scaling anode, cathode & battery component production
• Improvements in the structures and properties of battery design
• Ensuring circularity in the battery ecosystem

• How leading jurisdictions are designing policy and incentive structures to balance cooperation and competition, mobilise finance and drive investment at pace and scale?
• Demand focused policy: Assessing mandates, subsidies and investment in green power and charging infrastructure to encourage battery value chain development
• The need for global & regional coordination, dialogue, transparency & consistency among policy makers

• Aligning industry, policy and finance to unlock capital for the battery value chain
• Identifying roadblocks between capital and battery industry projects
• Importance of ESG credentials to facilitating investment in the new energy economy

• Latest analysis on market balance, capacity landscape and forecasted development
• The challenges of achieving battery-grade lithium hydroxide or lithium carbonate
• What is the true price of lithium? Understanding cost pressures and how purchasing models may impact price
• Spodumenes, Lepidolites & Brines: What technologies are opening up new lithium resources to development and when can they be expected to impact the market? 

• What is the capacity for additional supply from Australia, Indonesia and other resources in Asia Pacific? What factors are limiting the ability for resources to scale?
• What are the pricing pressures in these minerals that are critical to cathode production
• How might next generation cathode chemistries impact demand?

• Understanding the current landscape of graphite production and forecasted challenges and opportunities
• Natural graphite: Where is ex-China flake graphite in development? How are the spherical processing ambitions changing?
• Synthetic graphite: How is the ex-China synthetic graphite and needle coke supply chain developing?
• Silicon anodes: how will next generation silicon-based anode technologies improve EV performance and what will this mean for raw material demand?

• What is the true carbon footprint and environmental impact of the EV, the gigafactory and the lithium ion battery value chain? How can this be managed and improved?
• How can policy makers and industry leaders ensure that local communities throughout the value chain are informed, consulted, and upskilled to take benefit from the green economy? 
• What steps are required to improve the governance, gender balance and minority representation within the value chain leadership?

• The importance of a closed loop for the lithium ion battery economy
• What can policy makers, OEMs and other stakeholders be doing now to improve circularity?
• Pyrometallurgical, hydrometallurgical or direct recycling processes: What are the new technologies that are impacting recovery rates and purity of recycled critical materials?
• Adding balance to the market? What is the true potential supply and when will it be available?
• Will longer life and second life applications of lithium ion batteries impact the availability of recyclable battery materials?

• Understand the significance of rare earth elements as critical minerals and their unique properties that make them essential in various industries
• Explore the demand dynamics in advanced electronics renewable energy, electronics and electric vehicles
• Discuss the supply chain vulnerabilities, strategic considerations and geopolitical implications