Panel 1 | Common User Processing Facilities; white elephant or essential infrastructure?

Day and session TBC

Australia’s push to capture greater value from its critical minerals is driving renewed interest in government-backed common user facilities, shared testbeds designed to de-risk scale-up, accelerate flowsheet development and enable industry to validate processing at commercial-relevant scale. From Queensland’s Resources Common User Facility (QRCUF), which will allow miners to trial production processes and produce market-ready samples, to Western Australia’s proposed Critical Minerals Advanced Processing (CMAP) facility, focused on demonstration-scale downstream and midstream processing, states are competing to attract investment and position themselves as hubs for onshore refining. This panel brings that contest to life in a lively, state of origin style debate, Queensland versus Western Australia, government versus industry, exploring whether these facilities truly unlock commercialisation, how they should be governed and funded, and where the balance lies between public infrastructure and private capability. Expect a robust, good-humoured exchange on what it will take for Australia to move from resource supplier to processing powerhouse.