Imperial and Rio Tinto launch $150m partnership to support the energy transition

Imperial College London – the global top ten university – and Rio Tinto have today launched the $150 million Rio Tinto Centre for Future Materials.

The new programme will accelerate the development of new sustainable techniques and technologies required to deliver the materials necessary for the energy transition, and has been welcomed as "a major vote of confidence in the UK" by the UK Government.

The Centre, created with an investment of $150 million from Rio Tinto over the next 10 years, 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 to make them more environmentally, economically and socially sustainable.

"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." Professor Hugh Brady President of Imperial College London

The global shift to renewable energy generation, use and storage will require a significant growth in the production and supply of metals and minerals vital to this transition. The UK Government’s recent Industrial Strategy Green Paper identifies clean energy industries as a key growth-driving sector and makes clear its ambitions to make the UK “a clean energy superpower”.

Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said: “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.

“Bringing together academic innovation and industry is vital to secure our vital supply of critical minerals, and create the economic growth our country needs.”

Professor Hugh Brady, President of Imperial College London, said: “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.”

“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, 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.

 “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.”

"Innovative partnerships between industry and academia are critical for the world to meet the deeply physical and complex challenge of the global energy transition." Jakob Stausholm Rio Tinto Chief Executive

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.

Professor Mary Ryan, Vice Provost (Research and Enterprise) at Imperial, said: “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. 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.”

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.