Creating a sustainable supply of minerals for a decarbonised future

Last updated: 16 May 2022

Opinion: Sinead Kaufman, Chief Executive Minerals at Rio Tinto

Global metal and mineral production has increased significantly in the past century to meet growing demand generated from urbanisation, and more recently from the accelerating transition to renewable energy and transport.

Public discussion on combating climate change largely focuses on the ‘shop window’ – that is, the new technologies we all see contributing to CO₂ reduction like batteries, electric cars and wind turbines.

But it’s equally important to watch the ‘back end’, because if the materials that make renewable energy possible cause more harm in production than their products offset, nobody benefits. So sustainably and responsibly sourced materials are even more important when it comes to renewable infrastructure like wind turbines, solar panels and batteries.

Clean-energy technologies often require more critical minerals than their traditional counterparts. An electric car, for example, uses around five times more minerals than a combustion engine, and a wind farm on land uses around eight times more minerals than a conventional gas-fired power plant with the same capacity.

So demand for critical minerals will grow rapidly as governments and businesses take action to meet the goals of the Glasgow Climate Pact under the Paris Agreement – and the projections are breathtaking. In 2020, the World Bank estimated that to meet increasing demand for clean energy technologies, minerals such as graphite, lithium and cobalt could increase production by nearly 500% by 2050. And to achieve the target of below 2°C global temperature rising, they estimated that wind, solar and geothermal power generators and associated storage infrastructure will need over three billion tons of minerals and metals for deployment.

A mining company like ours must take a long-term view and factor this context into our strategy and our investments. And given our size and scale of operations, mining companies are uniquely positioned to have a significant impact on decarbonisation.

But we need to act fast be part of the solution.

Working together is essential

There’s no doubt we have work to do to reach our goals.

Forming partnerships to help pioneer solutions will be essential to the future of our business, given we are still discovering new ways to mine minerals that are essential to a net zero future.

Our Research and Development Centre in Sorel-Tracy, Canada and our Technical Development Centre in Melbourne, Australia, underpin our partnership approach to developing technologies that will assist in achieving the world’s transition to a low carbon economy. In partnership with academia and other scientific institutions, we have operated these centres for more than 50 years, investing in technical capability, researching process improvements and developing new products. We are playing the long game, and we know we will need to innovate to overcome many roadblocks along the way.

The process behind our boron lithium project in the US, for example, was pioneered by our Technology Development Centre in Melbourne, drawing on our long-standing partnership with the US Department of Energy’s Critical Materials Institute. And our scandium project was achieved in partnership with the Government of Quebec.

Collaborating to achieve breakthroughs is our industry’s biggest opportunity. Partnerships like these will pave the way to developing diverse and sustainable sources of critical minerals for the future.