The mining veteran now wants to seize the opportunity presented by the increasing need for battery metals, which include a host of materials from vanadium through to lithium, graphite, nickel, and cobalt.

Davis warned last month that the supply of those materials was not keeping pace with demand growth. He said that the need for battery metals would “dwarf anything the mining industry has ever seen before, including the commodity impact of China’s industrialization in the last 20 years.”

“It’s a gold rush on steroids,” Simon Moores, managing director of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, told the Financial Times. “You’ve got the emergence of this green revolution where you have to build infrastructure from scratch. It’s not just China this time, it’s North America at the same time as China, and Europe at the same time as China.”