as australia looks to secure its supply of critical minerals in an ever-changing geopolitical environment, ensuring investment into our resources by companies that will provide australians with access to our critical minerals is essential. To understand how well australia is placed to exploit its own critical minerals, we need to understand who is investing into developing critical minerals-related technologies in australia. It is also important to identify the opportunities and threats that exist within our onshore supply chain. In this presentation, we focus on the level of investment in nickel and cobalt technologies. We use patent data to provide us with an indication of the state of development of technology related to critical minerals in australia. From this, we identify emerging trends in critical minerals in australia and identify the gaps in our supply chain. This helps us to understand the areas that require further investment for australia to ensure a reliable supply chain into the future. Using patent data, we can explore and identify who the major investors are in the critical minerals sector and where the major investors are based. This can provide an indication as to whether certain companies or countries are looking to monopolise certain parts of the australian critical minerals supply chain. This allows us to identify potential threats to our supply chain. We can also look at those parts of the supply chain that are less technologically advanced to show us where the major opportunities lie. Finally, as companies look to add value to critical minerals, strategic partnerships between major players will become more crucial. We map the activity of competitors, which can help to identify potential research or commercialisation partners.