Rio Tinto has opened the Centre for Future Materials in London to help find cleaner, smarter ways of extracting copper to fuel the renewable energy and electric revolution.
It’s an urgent problem. As we now know the world will need a lot more copper if we have any hope of supplying all the electric vehicles, solar, wind and tidal power, and technology envisaged for our future. Around 22M tonnes of copper were mined in 2023, a 30% increase from 2010, and yearly demand will reach around 50M tonnes by 2050, analysts say.
But extracting a lot more copper can, given current methods and knowledge, also have big energy and environmental costs. It’s a dilemma facing all mining of course, but Rio Tinto hopes the cutting edge hub will help “connect some of the world’s best researchers” to provide sustainable answers.
Based at Imperial College London in partnership with the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, the University of California, Berkeley, the Australian National University and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, the new Rio Tinto Centre for Future Materials will be funded by the miner to the tune of $150M for its first 10 years.
“The world needs to electrify its energy systems, and success will absolutely depend on copper,” materials scientist and Imperial vice-provost Prof Mary Ryan told the British media.
“The metal is going to be the biggest bottleneck in this process”.
One possible project will involve tapping underground sites where copper-rich brines are still in liquid form. Traditionally copper is extracted from minerals that have already crystallised from those brines, a process that needs lots of energy to break open the rocks and bring them to the surface, and also generates waste.
Rio Tinto Chief Executive, Jakob Stausholm, said: “Innovative partnerships between industry and academia are critical for the world to meet the deeply physical and complex challenge of the global energy transition”.
“The Rio Tinto Centre for Future Materials should become a global hub for investment and collaboration that will ultimately create the conditions for technological breakthroughs”.