Rio completes Lake MacLeod sale, launches new London future materials centre

Rio Tinto (ASX: RIO) completed the sale of Dampier Salt Limited’s Lake MacLeod salt and gypsum operation in Carnarvon, WA, to Leichhardt Industrials Group yesterday.

The sales agreement, entered into in January this year for a price of $375m, comes with the commitment by the new owner that the existing 127-person workforce will continue employment.

Rio Tinto Iron Ore managing director for port, rail and core services Richard Cohen comments on the full transfer of ownership.

“We are proud of Lake MacLeod’s legacy and the strong contribution of the operation and its workforce to the Carnarvon community and surrounding areas,” he said.

“We acknowledge the collaboration of community partners and Traditional Owners throughout this process.”

Leichhardt Industrials Group chief executive Scott Nicholas also comments on this.

“Lake MacLeod is a sustainable and perpetual operation,” he said.

“We will continue to invest in the Lake MacLeod project and the Carnarvon region to realise its full potential and ensure diversification for the State’s economy.

“We would like to acknowledge the collaboration with Dampier Salt Limited and all Lake MacLeod stakeholders to deliver a safe and seamless transition of the operations to Leichhardt.”

Lake MacLeod is located within Baiyungu and Yinggarda Country in the Gascoyne region of WA, 70km north of the town of Carnarvon.

It consists of a 1.5mtpa solar salt operation, 1mtpa gypsum operation and a deepwater port at Cape Cuvier.

Dampier Salt has no plans to sell any other assets within its business, which after the Lake MacLeod divestment will include a solar salt site at Dampier and a second solar salt site at Port Hedland.

Mr Cohen says “the sale of Lake MacLeod will enable Dampier Salt to focus on enhancing operational efficiencies at its remaining two Pilbara operations”.

New Rio Tinto Centre for Future Materials in London, UK

In other news, Rio Tinto and Imperial College London yesterday launched the Rio Tinto Centre for Future Materials.

The Centre aims to develop new sustainable techniques and technologies to deliver materials required for the energy transition.

Rio Tinto will invest $232m (US$150m) in the Centre over the next decade, after the UK Government’s recent Industrial Strategy Green Paper identifying clean energy industries as a key growth-driving sector.

The UK Government wants to make the UK “a clean energy superpower” and the new Centre will connect some of the world’s best researchers with the capability and commitment of industry to help transform the way materials are sourced, processed, used and recycled, making them more environmentally, economically and socially sustainable.

Imperial College London president Professor Hugh Brady comments on this.

“The Rio Tinto Centre for Future Materials will co-create and fund research programmes that empower diverse, interdisciplinary teams to deliver innovative and transformative solutions with environment, society, and governance at their core,” he said.

“This work will transform the ways we extract, process, and reuse critical resources to make them more environmentally, economically and socially sustainable.

“The clean energy industry, an engine of economic growth, is rightly at the heart of the government’s Industrial Strategy.

“Imperial – with its strong disciplinary foundations, highly collaborative culture, passion for innovation, and proven convening power – is well placed to support those ambitions.”

Rio Tinto chief executive Jakob Stausholm also comments on this.

“Innovative partnerships between industry and academia are critical for the world to meet the deeply physical and complex challenge of the global energy transition,” he said.

“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.

“Innovation has been a fundamental part of Rio Tinto’s DNA since we were founded in London over 150 years ago.

“We are constantly trying to find better ways to provide the materials the world needs, and this partnership with some of the leading research universities in the world, led by Imperial College London, will support this ambition.”

The Centre will act as a hub for collaboration with other leading global institutions, bringing together four new academic partners: The University of British Columbia, Vancouver; The University of California, Berkeley; The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; and The Australian National University, Canberra.

Imperial vice provost (research and enterprise) Professor Mary Ryan comments on this.

“The scale up of electrification needed for the energy transition requires a step-change in the production, supply and utilisation of a whole host of critical materials,” she said.

“It will require us to think about both the technology and the economics around the materials supply chain in new ways.

“The Centre will drive cutting-edge, industry-facing research that enables new systems-level and blue sky thinking. This approach is at the heart of Imperial’s strategy.”

First Grand Challenge

The first Grand Challenge for the new Centre will focus on the major bottleneck to electrification, “Delivering future material systems for energy transitions with integrity: Overcoming the copper challenge”.

Copper is critical to electricity generation, storage and transmission, but the world needs more in the next ten years than has been mined in the whole last century and currently we do not have enough in circulation to meet this demand.

We therefore need to both reduce our demand for copper and work out how to extract it in the most sustainable way possible.

Research will include investigating new ways to extract copper, such as: from fluids in the Earth’s crust; using microorganisms to harvest metals from rocks that only contain small volumes of copper; and the optimisation of the waste from old mine workings – with a focus on ESG from the perspective of indigenous communities.