Rio Tinto, the British-Australian mining corporation active in South America and other regions of the world, has opened a $150 million research center to “transform current mineral extraction approaches to support the global transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.”

Established at Imperial College in London, the Rio Tinto Centre for Future Materials aims to tap so-called blue sky research to find more efficient, lower-impact means of mining. Blue sky research is scientific investigation whose real-world applications are not immediately apparent but which at times has yielded outcomes more valuable than those of agenda-driven research.

The first project will be to investigate new ways to produce copper, of which Chile is the world’s main supplier and Peru the third, says Imperial College’s Sarah Gordon, co-director of the new center.

Copper is considered a material crucial to the world’s energy transition. Fast-rising demand for the metal has created pressure to find truly sustainable means of extracting it. That pressure, Gordon says, has spurred interest in exploring the full gamut of scientific research for solutions. Observes Gordon: “[I]n a way, the more science-fiction the research sounds, the better.”

More addition than transition

Copper, already a staple in electric-power systems, is considered an indispensable and much-sought input in the world’s transition from fossil-fuel power to renewable energy. That shift, which would substantially reduce carbon emissions, was expected to accelerate rapidly but has yet to occur.

Wind and solar energy have grown quickly, to be sure, advancing from a negligible share of the world’s electricity 15 years ago to 15% in 2024—and increasing demand for copper in the process. But the rise of renewables hasn’t led to a reduction in the use of fossil fuels. What is unfolding is not an energy transition but an energy addition, underscoring that a wholesale shift to renewables will be far more difficult than expected.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) calculated in 2021 that for the world to meet its target of net-zero emissions by 2050, greenhouse-gas emissions would need to decline rapidly from their level at the time, which was 33.9 gigatons annually.

But these emissions have gone in the other direction, reaching 37.4 gigatons in 2023, the last year for which figures are available.

Contributing to the increased demand for copper is the fact that many renewables require substantially more copper than their conventional counterparts. For instance, an electric-powered vehicle requires 53 kilograms (117 pounds) of copper, while a conventional car only needs 22 kilograms (49 pounds).

Data centers, where the world’s growing amount of digital information is stored, also require prodigious amounts of copper. Their need for copper is expected to increase six times by 2050. Global demand, meanwhile, is expected to increase by roughly one million tons a year until 2035, double the annual growth of the last 15 years.

Experts say it will be difficult to satisfy this demand, pointing to the declining production of existing copper mines and the declining quality of the copper they produce.

It is against this background that the Rio Tinto Centre has selected copper extraction as its first challenge.

Multi-disciplinary strategy

Gordon says the center at Imperial College is employing experts from different disciplines—economists, historians, social scientists, biologists, geologists and engineers—as it looks far and wide for ideas that might be brought to bear.

“Some of the magic is bringing together the different disciplines,” she says. “We need them to speak to each other, ask the silly questions. That’s where the breakthroughs happen.” They are deliberately involving universities from many different parts of the world so they can mix cultures.

Gordon says many novel concepts are on the table.

“For instance, we’re looking at some of the advances [that have come] from Covid research,” she notes. “We’re seeing if we can take a virus and the right protein and harvest copper from the abundant waste material around the mines, and perhaps improve the landscape for the local people at the same time. That would be a win-win all round.”

Matthew Jackson, also a professor at Imperial College, says researchers are also trying to locate underground copper-rich brines to “create a new lifecycle of copper.” They haven’t found any copper brines yet, but they have indirect evidence that they exist.

“The brines are hot, so you could use geothermal energy to pump up the brines, extract the metal and even sell some of the energy locally,” he says. “You could then pump the brine back underground, leaving no spoil heaps. It’s an adventurous idea, with everything suggesting that it is viable.”