Out Western Australia way unlikely new environmental heroes can be found toiling in the red ochre dust of the Pilbara.

Until recently companies such as Altura Mining, which has a long rap sheet of coal projects to its name, weren’t exactly contributing to the effort to curb global carbon emissions, but that is about to change.

The coal price has slumped, so too that of iron ore – the Pilbara’s primary source of income – and mining companies are eyeing off the building blocks of green economies of the future, such as neodymium and yttrium rare earths for the magnets used in wind turbines, and gallium and indium for solar panels and energy-efficient lighting.

While these all have varying levels of supply capacity relative to demand, where the supply chain falls seriously short in comparison to the projected need is the materials needed for battery systems crucial for storing the intermittent energy output of solar and wind as well as powering the fleets of electric cars that companies such as Tesla are planning to roll out in huge numbers over the coming decade.

That’s where Altura Mining comes in, timing plans to develop the Pilgangoora Lithium project to coincide with the battery boom. Altura Mining has secured an offtake agreement with Chinese batteries material producer Lionergy, and recently completed a feasibility study mapping out the mining, processing, logistics and support infrastructure required to commence mining and processing of spodumene, a hard rock source of lithium, at Pilgangoora.

The company is just one example of 40 Australian firms working in the lithium sector. According to the US Geological Survey Australia produced more lithium than anywhere else in the world in 2015, harvesting 13,400 metric tonnes, ahead of Chile in second place at 11,700 metric tonnes.

Until recently lithium was mostly used in the production of aluminium, ceramics and glass, but lithium-ion batteries are now the biggest growth area, with Tesla planning to make more of these batteries annually in just one factory by 2020 than were produced worldwide in 2013.

Most of the mining action is taking place in Western Australia, home to massive operations such as Talison Lithium’s Greenbushes project in the state’s south-west, a hard-rock lithium mine that has been running for 25 years and is the world’s largest.

Damien Giurco, professor of resource futures at the University of Technology Sydney’s (UTS) institute for sustainable futures, cautions that when it comes to the emerging market for lithium-ion batteries, some forms of lithium are more suitable than others.

“There are two dominant pathways,” he says. “One is hard-rock mining where Australia is the leader, but the other, which has big reserves particularly in South America, is to get it from salt lakes, and it is more readily taken from brine form to use in batteries.”

Brine harvesting is extremely water-intensive compared to hard-rock lithium mining, but is cheaper and more efficient in most other respects. This presents a challenge for Australian producers hoping to compete given the additional processing required to utilise hard-rock lithium in battery production.

In a joint venture partnership with Venus Metals corporation, Lithium Australia is out to prove that it can process hard-rock lithium at a competitive price by undertaking a study into the establishment of a lithium processing hub.

Lithium Australia managing director Adrian Griffin says the company is seeking to start construction on a small scale pilot plant in New South Wales, before building a larger scale pilot plant in one of four shortlisted locations.

“The aim is to produce a pilot plant on a sufficient scale that it can cover operating costs by selling the product, so investors can come have a look at the operational parameters,” he says.

He singles out Port Hedland, located approximately 120km north of Pilgangoora, as the leading contender among the shortlisted sites.

“It is almost inevitably going to become one of the world’s largest lithium centres. There’s going to be increased demand, a shortage of supply, and we’ve got plenty of resources here. The demand will come from lithium-ion batteries to a large extent. People would have you believe it will be mostly electric vehicles, but there’s also stationary power back-up, the likes of the Powerwall from Tesla, competing products from Panasonic, and even Australian companies are coming up with stationary power storage domestic backup systems.”

Griffin notes the extensive port infrastructure established to export iron ore would also advantageous, along with the appropriately-skilled workers in the region.

Back at UTS, Giurco says lithium harvesting has – like any mining – an environmental impact, but a limited one overwhelmingly offset by the potential for lithium-ion batteries to reduce carbon emissions.

“It is not a process for instance like gold mining where chemicals are being leached [into the ground],” he says. “You have [issues such as] the environmental impact of constantly driving diesel trucks down into the mine, but with electric trucks it would be a different story.”

What he is more concerned about is what happens to the lithium batteries when they are disposed of. It’s a problem he believes Australia could turn into an opportunity by developing stringent certification systems and involving itself in the entire production cycle of lithium: mining, processing, leasing the batteries to users, then collecting them for recycling.

Lithium is by no means the only material required for the coming battery-storage revolution – lithium-ion batteries themselves require other minerals such as graphite, and then there are competing prospective technologies such as aluminium-ion batteries for electric cars and vanadium flow batteries for grid-energy storage.

The vanadium sector is less developed in Australia than lithium, but there is some activity: Australian Vanadium last month announced the development of a Perth pilot plant to research the preparation of electrolyte for use in vanadium redox batteries. The company is also undertaking a feasibility study on the Gabanintha deposit in the Murchison region of Western Australia, one of the highest-grade vanadium projects globally.

The Murchison area has seen this all before. One of its first claims to fame was as a hub for a mining frenzy that preceded even the iron ore boom: the Western Australian gold rush of the 19th century. The Murchison goldfields are littered with the ruins of ghost towns from that era, a lingering reminder that in chasing the next big thing, be it vanadium, lithium, or whatever else, those doing the digging would be wise to do so sustainably – in every sense of the word.