Rio Tinto return: Queensland back in mining giant’s crosshairs

The global mining giant’s top brass confirms it is once again on the search for minerals in our backyard. Find out where.

One of the world’s biggest mining groups is returning to North Queensland to find the critical minerals we need to survive climate change.

Delivering the Sir George Fisher Lecture at an Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy forum in Townsville on Thursday, Rio Tinto Chief Executive, Minerals, Sinead Kaufman said the exploration was focused on Mount Isa and Cloncurry as well as Western Australia.

She also delivered a dire warning on the need to cut carbon emissions.

“The truth is it is one of the biggest risks and existential risks that we see for the world today,” Ms Kaufman said.

The 2015 Paris Agreement sought to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius but current projections were it would be closer to 2.5 degrees and that a “real change in mindsets” had now occurred to act, she said.

Rio is looking to decarbonise its operations — including sourcing huge new wind and solar generation for its alumina smelter and refinery at Gladstone by the end of the decade — and to produce the critical minerals needed for electrification.

She said much of the focus had been on the transition to clean energy technologies but that a key was having enough critical minerals to make the turbines, solar panels and batteries.

An electric car required five times more minerals than a standard vehicle and a wind farm eight times more minerals than a similar capacity gas-fired power station, she said.

“It’s really important people understand where they come from and, more importantly, what they are made from. We need more critical minerals for a clean energy future than we do for our current technologies,” Ms Kaufman said.

Rio has started to make scandium, used in alloys but also in batteries, from spent liquor at a titanium dioxide smelter in Canada, has established a battery materials business to focus on finding, producing and refining critical minerals, is developing a unique micro filtration technology to extract lithium from tailings and has partnered with Ford to supply lithium, aluminium and copper.

It is also making tellurium from waste tailings at a copper refinery in Utah to coat solar panels and has just bought a lithium project in Argentina.

Ms Kaufman said a $243m federal government package would be leveraged with $1bn in private capital to develop the technologies needed to decarbonise.

“It will develop new mines, new processing facilities and new jobs. I think it will help to sure up Australia’s supply of critical minerals which we know we have and expand our export opportunities of finished products as well,” she said.

Originally published as Rio Tinto return: Queensland back in mining giant’s crosshairs