Events

AusIMM Critical Minerals Conference
2-4 September 2025
Perth, WA

Hub-funded research presentations:

  • Keynote Presentation | Australian Government Geoscience – Supporting Critical Minerals Exploration and Development, Melissa Harris (Geoscience Australia)
  • Multiscale Mineralogy of clay-hosted REE deposits in Western and South Australia: Practical applications for exploration, sample domaining and resource modelling, Dr. Gabriel Berni (CSIRO)
  • Comparative study of kaolin – acid routes to produce high purity alumina (HPA), Dr. Godfrey Mawire (CSIRO)
  • A national-scale assessment of clay-hosted rare earth element mineral system potential in Australia, Dr. Jessica Walsh (Geoscience Australia)
  • Methods for the characterisation of high-purity alumina, Dr. Tommaso Tacchetto (CSIRO)
  • Keynote presentation | Now or Never: Designing Critical Minerals R&D for Maximum Impact, Dr. Chris Vernon (CSIRO and R&D Hub Operations Group Chair)
  • Adding downstream value to Australian tungsten concentrates, Dr. Carly Baker (ANSTO)
  • By-products – maximising Australia’s hidden critical mineral potential, Callum Kucka (Geoscience Australia)
  • Germanium By-Production from Australian Zinc Refining: Challenges and Opportunities, Dr. Chris Griffith (ANSTO and R&D Hub Operations Group)

Find out more about the Critical Minerals Conference

HUB SCIENCE WEBINAR
Metal to Market: Advancing Metallisation for Australia’s Critical Minerals Future
14 October 2025
2 – 3 pm AEST

As global demand for critical minerals continues to surge, the ability to convert raw materials into high value products is becoming a strategic priority.
This webinar brings together leading experts from CSIRO, Australian Strategic Materials (ASM) and ANSTO to explore the vital role of metallisation in building Australia’s sovereign capabilities and strengthening the downstream value chain.

International Mining and Resources Conference + Expo
21 – 23 October 2025
Sydney, NSW

The R&D Hub will be on the ground at IMARC Sydney 21-23 October, sharing a booth space with agency partners ANSTO, CSIRO and Geoscience Australia. 

This is a great opportunity to come and connect with the Hub team, learn more about our research projects and explore how we’re supporting Australia’s critical minerals future.

If you’re attending IMARC, be sure to drop by and say hello!

Find out more about IMARC

 

HUB SCIENCE WEBINAR
How pure is pure? The future of purity testing in Australia
12 November 2025
11a -12 pm AEST

You’ve heard of the expression “to the nth degree”? When talking about nanoscale characterisation, chemists also talk in ‘N’s – the number of nines that classify the purity of a substance. But how pure is pure?

Take High-Purity Alumina (HPA, α-Al2O3) where purity starts at 99.99% (4N) to at least 99.9999% (6N), depending on end-user requirements. Australia’s critical minerals list was updated in 2022, adding high-purity alumina. The purer HPA is, the more chemically stable, scratch and temperature-resistant it becomes. That makes HPA one of the key materials essential for the energy transition, with applications in LEDs, synthetic sapphire, catalysts, and lithium-ion batteries, where its growing use to coat separator sheets improves safety and battery life.

Australia has plentiful supply of aluminium-containing resources and potential to move downstream into high-tech manufacturing. The global HPA market is projected to increase from USD 4.63 billion in 2024 to over USD 15 billion by 2030, which presents a significant opportunity for Australia.

Accurately quantifying the extremely low levels of trace impurities is essential to the development of improved purification processes and processing of those minerals. But establishing precise information at such small scales using larger volume interactions of conventional techniques is challenging.

So, what are the different existing methods and techniques for high purity testing, and where does Australia’s capability currently lie? CSIRO’s Hub-funded research on HPA is tackling the purity challenge.

The findings are relevant to Australia’s ambition to move downstream and produce valuable high purity metals and materials from our critical minerals. Building this new analytical capability in Australia helps diversify purity testing options available to industry, as at today, most Australian companies send HPA and other high purity critical minerals overseas for testing by Glow Discharge Mass Spectrometry (GDMS) in the USA. This method is a widely recognised benchmark technique for high purity analyses, but also requires export permits, is costly and can take months to get results, putting project timeframes in jeopardy.

Join our webinar to find out about GDMS testing and ICP-MS/OES testing from both the research and industry, including the benefits, challenges, research underway and what purity testing options are on the table for industry to access.

Panel members include:

  • Lucy O’Connor, R&D Hub Manager – Event host
  • Tommaso Tacchetto, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, CSIRO
  • Professor Sara Couperthwaite, Queensland University of Technology
  • Andrew Daly, Principal Scientist, Labwest
Register to attend