I’m here at Geoscience Australia for the National Critical Minerals R&D Hub’s Science Conference. Critical minerals are an incredibly important part of our future and the Hub is one of the most important things we’ve ever done in this country in the critical minerals space. It brings together ANSTO, CSIRO and Geoscience Australia to solve important questions on critical minerals.
So, the Australian Critical Minerals Hub was set up with four years of funding, and the majority of that funding is going on collaborative research projects. The Hub also has a role to play in bringing more coordination to the R&D ecosystem across universities, industry, Government to make sure that we’re prioritising all our efforts to the biggest challenges and removing bottlenecks for industry to help develop the sector.
Geoscience Australia is typically focused more on the upstream potential for mineral resources, whereas ANSTO brings the down-stream and mid-stream processing. CSIRO spans all facets of the supply chain. To be able to collaborate with them and ANSTO together is excellent.
It’s a really great opportunity to talk openly about the challenges that we face. We have a great mix of young, middle career and late career researchers. The Hub has really brought together the best of the science agencies, which I haven’t seen before in my 25 years of R&D career.
We all have some really fantastic technical people with fantastic expertise in their area When you’re trying to address a big scale problem, the ability to bring those minds together on a common goal has huge benefits in the outputs of any kind of project.
The interaction with GA and ANSTO colleagues have been fantastic over the last few days. It just brings a fresh thinking that we’re not regularly exposed to. It’s always valuable, always appreciated. I’m the project leader of high purity alumina. The techniques and tools that are developed in this project will help HPA companies, but also I think it’ll help companies in the critical minerals space more generally. The tools we are applying on purification of solutions are widely applicable.
I hope that this is the foundation of something more to come and we’ll see more collaboration in this space across critical minerals. We need a multi-disciplinary approach to these issues. It’s actually really exciting.
I have absolutely loved seeing everyone coming together in the room, sharing their research results so far. Seeing how people have worked across the different organisations. Everything’s starting to snowball into the right kinds of results that are really going to help Australian industry in the future. Super satisfying to see the Hub working as we envisaged it could and should.