Looking at opportunities everywhere’:Rio Tinto on the hunt for...

Looking at opportunities everywhere’:Rio Tinto on the hunt for more lithium assets

Mining giant Rio Tinto is huntingfor opportunities to grow its exposure to the electric-battery raw materiallithium and is assessing an earlier start date for its undeveloped mine inArgentina amid surging interest from global car-makers scrambling to lock insupplies.

Aspart of accelerating efforts to diversify its iron ore-dominated business, thesecond-largest Australian miner is pursuing a deeper push into a range ofminerals including lithium and copper that will be urgently needed to power agrowing global fleet of electric vehicles.

io Tinto established a new unit lastyear dedicated to battery materials, which has already grown to 1250 employeesspanning five countries.

SineadKaufman, Rio Tinto’s head of minerals, said the company saw enormous futuredemand for lithium as the key building block of lithium-ion batteries. She said the company was actively searching for newacquisition opportunities, including in Western Australia, which was home tosome the world’s largest hard-rock lithium deposits.

“The battery materials business is fairly location-agnostic, sowe are looking at opportunities everywhere,” Kaufman said in an interview with The Age and the Herald.

“The question is: is the businessright for us? Can we add value to it? Do we understand the technology?”

Kaufmansaid forecasts for electric cars to make up 50 per cent of light vehicles onthe road by 2030 meant that world’s lithium consumption would surge from350,000 tonnes of today to 3 million tonnes. Meanwhile, even if all new lithiummines being planned across the globe proceeded, they would only bring totalsupplies to 1 million tonnes, she said.

As supply worries and soaring lithium prices propel the value ofAustralia’s lithium stocks to all-time highs this year, Kaufman said Rio Tintowould be conscious of ensuring any acquisitions were at the “right price”.

The company’s pushinto lithium suffered a major setback earlier this year when Serbia’sgovernment tore up the company’s permits for its $3 billion Jadar lithium minethat would have been Europe’s largest amid community concerns about itspotentially harmful impact on the environment and mIn March,Rio Tinto completed a $1.1 billion acquisition of the Rincon lithium project inArgentina.

Asthe permitting process for Rincon progresses, Rio Tinto is consultingcommunities and carrying out studies exploring possible pathways for a “smallerstart-up to accelerate market energy”.

“We’redefinitely seeing really strong interest from car manufacturers – as thatawareness of supply chains and shortages comes in – wanting to talk to us aboutlithium,” Kaufman said.

Incopper, another commodity vital to the clean-energy transition, Rio Tinto iscarrying out a multibillion-dollar expansion of its large Oyu Tolgoi mine inMongolia’s Gobi Desert.

However, its plans to develop a new copper in mine the UnitedStates through a joint venture with BHP are facing oppositionfrom the San Carlos Apache tribe, which fears the mine will impact sacred and actively utilised religious land.

onths of large-scale protests

Across Rio’s global business, thecompany is investigating or starting production of multiple other criticalminerals found in mine waste, known as tailings. Critical minerals includingscandium oxide, tellurium and lithium are being extracted from existing wastestreams at operations in Quebec and Utah without the need for new mining.

“Theidea that you could have a mine where you don’t produce anywhere near as muchtailings, or maybe even any, or you don’t have dumps left at the end,” Kaufmansaid. “When we think about mining in 100 years’ time, that’s the sort of stuffthat we need to we need to get really good at.