Metals and mining corporation Rio Tinto and Imperial College London have launched the Rio Tinto Centre for Future Materials, as part of a programme aimed at accelerating the development of new sustainable techniques and technologies required to deliver the materials necessary for the energy transition.

The centre, created with an investment of $150-million from Rio Tinto over the next ten years, will connect researchers with the capability and commitment of industry to help change the way materials are sourced, processed, used and recycled to make them more environmentally, economically and socially sustainable.

The centre will function as a hub for collaboration with other 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.

“This investment is a major vote of confidence in the UK and will help us find new sustainable ways to deliver our renewable energy transition, supporting our ambition to become a clean energy superpower,” says UK Business and Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds.

The first “grand challenge" for the new centre will focus on the considerable bottleneck to electrification: “Delivering future material systems for energy transitions with integrity: Overcoming the copper challenge”.

Copper is pivotal to electricity generation, storage and transmission; however, more would be required in the next decade than has been mined in the entire last century, and there currently is not enough in circulation to meet this demand, requiring a reduction in demand for copper measures 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 environmental, social and governance from the perspective of Indigenous communities.

Imperial College London president Professor Hugh Brady comments that 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. “This work will transform the ways we extract, process, and reuse critical resources to make them more environmentally, economically and socially sustainable.”

Rio Tinto CEO Jakob Stausholm highlights the importance of innovation and finding new ways to deliver the materials that the world needs.

“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,” he says.