Mining companies are finding technology in university labs to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Photo credit: Getty Images
The world’s largest mining companies are increasingly tapping into university research to find new clean energy solutions. Rio Tinto, the British-Australian mining company, for example, announced in August 2024 that it had pledged $150m to fund university research at Imperial College London and University of California, Berkeley, setting up the Rio Tinto Centre for Future Materials.
Rival UK multinational Anglo American, meanwhile, is partnering with a spinout built by Cambridge Future Tech, a UK venture builder that specialises in making commercial ventures from deep tech startups.
Mining companies are under pressure to move fast to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. On the one hand, the industry is indispensable in sourcing the materials needed for the transition to cleaner energy sources, such as the lithium for electric vehicle batteries, cobalt for wind turbines and copper for wiring. But mining itself is an energy-intensive industry. A 2020 McKinsey report said it was responsible for an estimated 4% to 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Companies have committed to ambitious sustainability targets which will need new technologies to come on stream fast.
“We have very challenging long-term sustainability-related goals,” says Bruno Arcadier, head of Vale Ventures, the investment arm of Brazilian mining company Vale. Vale aims to reach net zero in its scope 1 and 2 emission by 2050. These are emissions produced directly from operations and indirectly through the company’s use of energy.
It has also pledged to cut its scope 3 emissions by 15% from the 2018 levels by 2035. These are those generated from the downstream use of its mining products, such as the sale of iron ore to the steel industry.
Arcadier says Vale Ventures takes an interest in university research output in the US and other geographical areas. It has recently invested in two Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) spinouts making decarbonisation technology.
“We have a very good relationship with the industrial liaison programme and with MIT professors and the the Boston ecosystem as a whole,” he says.
“We’re seeing a lot of very interesting initiatives.”
MIT decarbonisation spinouts
One of the spinouts is Electrified Thermal Solutions (ETS). It makes a thermal battery it calls an E-Brick, which heats through electricity and can retain the heat for days. Its E-Brick could be used to supply hot gas to industrial furnaces, boilers and kilns without the need to burn fossil fuels. Electrified Thermal Solutions claims the heat generated can reach as high as 1,800 degrees Celsius, which Arcadier compares to Vale’s heat requirements across its operations, which range between 200 and 1,200 degrees Celsius.
Daniel Stack, co-founder and CEO of Electrified Thermal Solutions, says that “working with corporate investors has been invaluable to [the company’s] growth.”
Along with Vale Ventures, the CVC arms of the Portuguese utilities company EDP, the construction materials maker Holcim and Turkish oil company Tupras invested in the spinout’s $19m pre-A round in December.
Stack says backing from a corporate venture unit can help take the technically sound product from the lab and get it working in the real world.
“The biggest challenge we face isn’t technical, it’s market adoption in traditionally risk-averse industries,” he says.
“These strategic partnerships help us develop our manufacturing and deployment capability while providing crucial validation.”
Mantel is another MIT spinout that is now a Vale Ventures portfolio company. The CVC participated in its $30m series A funding round in September. Founded in 2022, Mantel’s technology is an example of point source carbon capture, where emissions are contained at the point they are given off, rather than being allowed into the atmosphere.
Carbon capture technology is being explored as a way of helping industries reach net zero in line with the Paris climate agreement goals. It takes the emissions from industrial processes and separates the CO2, which can then be used for other purposes or stored. At present, most of the world’s captured carbon is used to help extract oil. Environmentalists argue that the technology is a distraction from the main problem of burning fossil fuels, and that it may not scale fast enough to achieve industry net zero targets, let alone prevent climate breakdown.
Mantel’s co-founder and CEO, Cameron Halliday, says that adapting high-emission industries to contain carbon capture solutions is the “pragmatic approach” to dealing with the problem of emissions. Mantel’s advantage will come from making the process affordable, he says. “If carbon capture was affordable it would be a no brainer [for industries to deploy],” he says.
Mantel uses molten borates to capture carbon, which is different to the common amine-based capture systems. Molten borates allow for more energy efficient carbon capture because they can operate at the extremely high temperatures found in facilities like furnaces. This means that after the separation of the CO2, the energy that remains in the form of CO2-lean gas will still be useful for the industrial process, for example as hot steam. Other carbon capture technologies that can only function at lower temperatures are not as likely to produce a byproduct that can be put to good use by the plant.
Preserving this useful energy output helps offset the energy used in the separation process, meaning plants do not suffer so much of what Halliday calls an “energy penalty,” where carbon capture reduces a site’s efficiency. Mantel has proved its technology at the research stage but still has a big task ahead to work at scale.
“This is just a scaling story. Time is really our competition. We worry very little about other carbon capture tech. We worry about the clock,” he says.
“My research [at MIT] was like a shoe box-sized system. We have to go multiple orders of magnitude to be relevant, and then another multiple orders of magnitude to be commercially interesting, and then another multiple orders of magnitude to get to be commercially attractive.”
Mantel’s technology is designed to work across various industrial sectors, including steel. This makes it attractive to Vale Ventures. Arcadier says steelmaking is Vale’s main source of of scope 3 emissions.
Anglo American and PeroCycle
It is a similar story for Anglo American, the UK mining multinational, which estimates 76% of its scope 3 emissions come from the steel industry. The company aims to reduce these by 50% against 2020 levels by 2040.
As part of this effort, Anglo American is helping to launch PeroCycle, a carbon recycling company that uses technology developed at the University of Birmingham in the UK by Professor Yulong Ding and Dr Harriet Kildahl, who work in the chemical engineering department. This is the mining company’s first announcement of working with a decarbonisation startup since it shut down its CVC unit, Decarbonisation Ventures, at the end of last year, following a restructuring.
Ordinarily, blast furnaces treat iron ore by burning coke – a coal-derived fossil fuel – to generate carbon monoxide, which is used to smelt pure iron. PeroCycle’s technology reduces the use of fossil fuels by creating an input-output loop. It breaks down the CO2 emitted from the process to isolate carbon monoxide, which is then fed back into the furnace as an alternative to coke.
PeroCycle is being developed by Cambridge Future Tech. Steve Raffe, commercial director at the venture builder, says the technology is at the “lab scale”.
The spinout will have to grow both technologically and operationally. On the technological side, the next phase in development is underway at the lab, after which point it will pilot at a plant, where the reactor can be applied to a real blast furnace.
“Then it will go through various further scale up stages until eventually you end up with a solution that can be bolted onto a blast furnace asset of any size,” says Raffe.
Cambridge Future Tech works on the commercial and operational side, with the University of Birmingham team responsible for the technology. It is working to tackle the venture’s risk, for example by working with steel producers to understand potential roadblocks to deploying the technology. At the same time, it is going to build the team that will eventually run PeroCycle once it is an established venture, capable of seeking external funding.
“There’ll be a self-sustaining venture that’s funded,” says Raffe. “That’s got a world class team, that’s got a derisked strategy, that has solid governance, a board of advisors, and that has all of the risk removed that we can remove from it. And so in an ideal world, the only risk left to getting through to commercial success will be that of the technical scale up road map”
