The Dawn of EV, page-822

From AFR Article today: Electrifying new opportunities in the mining sector (copyright link)

Greener vehicles

The mining vehicles will likely initially be diesel powered, but Hess expects that to change as technology improves. And because the mine will be shipping out finished products, they will only weigh about a third of what the processed material would have, saving on transport emissions.

Element 25 is another Australian miner that will benefit not only from the cost savings gained from using renewable energy, but also as a producer of a key battery raw material.

The West Australian miner currently produces manganese concentrate, which is used for steel making. But it is planning an expansion to include renewable power generation and to process the mineral into high-purity manganese sulphate, which is used in the battery industry.

It currently runs its electric processing plant on diesel generation, but is looking at renewable options and managing director Justin Brown expects 60 to 90 per cent of the mine’s electricity to be renewable once the expansion is finished in three years’ time.

“It’s pretty fair to say that even on the traditional seven to ten-year mine life, renewables compete quite effectively with diesel and gas,” he says.

“In our case, we have an extra advantage and we’ve got this exceptionally long mine life so that the capital cost of the renewable solution is not that big of importance to us.”

Brown says the end users of products such as the high purity manganese, nickel and cobalt “are very motivated to get to a near-zero carbon footprint”.

“The electrification of the mines that produce these products in Australia and other places is a really paramount commercial consideration because if you’re a Volvo or a VW or whoever else is producing electric vehicles, it’s very clear they want to do it in a low carbon fashion.”