Rio gets funding for hydrogen power trial

If there’s a bigger buzzword than hydrogen in the resources sector, DataRoom is yet to hear it.

Upon hydrogen is pinned the hopes of corporate Australia and the federal government, as they seek to meet the twin goals of maintaining an energy export industry and make good on promises to make their operations, and the country, net carbon zero, eventually.

And key to reducing carbon emissions is the aluminium and alumina industries – Australia’s sixth-biggest export earner by value in 2019 to 2020, at $12.7bn, but also worth 24 per cent of the nation’s direct carbon emissions.

While a chunk of that comes from the fact some alumina refineries are coal-powered, the process of turning bauxite into alumina also requires high temperatures that usually come from the steam generated as a by-product of thermal power stations powered by gas or coal.

Enter Rio Tinto, the world’s second-biggest mining company, which today will accept $579,786 from the government’s Australian Renewable Energy Agency towards a $1.2m trial of the use of hydrogen in the calcination at its Yarwun alumina refinery in Queensland.

Rio is believed to be about to publish a raft of new patents around its hydrogen system and the funding, to be announced by Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor on Wednesday, will go towards putting some of that early work into a feasibility study on the technology at its Melbourne technology headquarters before – hopefully – building a demonstration plant to scale it up to commercial use.

Rio is not the only alumina major taking advantage of the government’s push for a fix to carbon problems. In May, global giant Alcoa accepted $11.3m in funding from ARENA to trial a system to turn renewable energy into steam in Alcoa’s West Australian alumina refineries.