Australian university joins $230m future materials project backed by mining giant

A $230 million project investigating ways to make extracting future materials more sustainable will bring together five research groups from five continents, including one from Australia. 

Mining giant Rio Tinto announced the investment as part of its Centre for Future Materials on Thursday, with Australian National University tapped to provide expertise. 

The 10-year project, led by the Imperial College London, also promises to consider First Nations’ expertise through the university. 

The announcement comes amid warnings from the International Energy Agency that demand for critical minerals could more than double by 2030 as part of the worldwide energy change, with materials such as lithium and cobalt highly sought-after. 

The five institutions involved in the project include universities in the US, UK, Canada and South Africa, with research designed to investigate how materials can be sustainably sourced, processed and recycled to fuel renewable energy projects.

Australian National University will tap into a multidisciplinary team of researchers, ANU Professor Caitlin Byrt told AAP, to tackle the enormous challenge from different angles. 

“How we supply the critical resources we need in the future whilst looking after our people and planet is … a huge challenge where you need a range of different disciplines involved,” she said. 

“From ANU, we’ve got our First Nations portfolio team, we’ve got social science experts, we’ve got physicists, engineers, I’m a biologist.”

An early focus for the Australian research team would be the sustainable extraction of copper, Prof Byrt said, which would be vital to energy generation, storage and transmission but would be needed in much larger quantities than ever before. 

The university’s First Nations researchers would also play a significant role in the project, she said.

“In the past, across the whole planet, groups have come in, extracted, and haven’t factored in the rights of the people whose land they’ve extracted from,” Prof Byrt said.

“A better way to do that is to understand what the traditional owners would like to see happen in terms of how that land is managed.”

Ensuring cultural knowledge was considered in the energy transition would be important, the university’s First Nations vice-president Professor Peter Yu said.

“The sense of urgency around this work is not just about our changing climate or the projections around the volume of minerals needed to replace fossil fuels in our global energy systems,” he said. 

“It is equally rooted in fostering Indigenous rights and creating a more equitable society for all.”

The project would also investigate new technologies to fuel the change from fossil fuel to renewable energy, Rio Tinto chief innovation officer Dan Walker said, many of which did not “exist yet”. 

Australia has a legislated target to reduce emissions by 43 per cent in 2030, and to reach net zero by 2050. 

Renewable energy made up 46 per cent of the national energy market in December, according to the Australian Energy Market Operator, breaking previous records.

AAP