Rio Tinto to Roll Out New Tech in Hunt For More Metals, More Cheaply
Demand for key energy minerals is set to grow rapidly
- Rio Tinto signed a five-year, multimillion-dollar deal with Ideon Technologies to use subatomic particle technology for mineral exploration.
- Ideon’s technology will be deployed at six Rio Tinto sites, including a U.S. copper mine and Australian iron-ore operations.
- The technology aims to reduce drilling by 40% to 80%, lowering costs, environmental impact, and shortening project timelines.
Rio Tinto has signed a five-year deal with Canada’s Ideon Technologies to roll out technology that harnesses subatomic particles created by supernova explosions to help find and map deposits rich in minerals faster, cheaper and more accurately.
Under the multimillion-dollar agreement, the world’s second-biggest miner by market value will initially adopt Ideon’s technology at six sites around the world, said Gary Agnew, Ideon’s co-founder and chief executive. That includes at a big U.S. copper mine and within its mammoth iron-ore business in Australia, Rio Tinto’s profit engine, he said.
Miners are seeking new ways to bolster production of metals they expect will be highly sought after for a boom in clean energy and data centers. Demand for key energy minerals is set to grow rapidly and there is expected to be a large shortfall of copper and lithium by 2035 based on the existing project pipeline, the International Energy Agency said in a May report.
They are also under pressure to mine more cheaply and efficiently, particularly after recent inflation pressures and lower prices for some commodities eroded profits. Rio Tinto in August installed a new CEO, former iron-ore chief Simon Trott, promising a sharpened focus on costs.
“It’s six sites to kind of get the ball rolling in a meaningful way,” Ideon’s Agnew said in an interview. “Those operations become the poster children of this technology and what it can do, that is then the vehicle for the next phase of sites to adopt.”
Rio Tinto declined to comment on the agreement. Both companies declined to share the specific value of the deal.
Ideon puts sensitive quantum sensors deep beneath the Earth’s surface to help miners map mineral deposits—as well as old mining tunnels, subterranean caves and potentially dangerous air pockets, among other things—using a technique known as muon tomography.
Muons are a type of subatomic particle created in the atmosphere. They constantly hit and penetrate every part of the Earth’s surface. As the muons pass through the ground, they slow and decay. Ideon’s sensors identify fewer muons when the earth is dense, and more when it isn’t.
The startup pairs information from those sensors with other data sets to produce what it says is like an X-ray or CT—short for computed tomography—of what’s belowground. “We’re ‘X-raying’ the Earth,” said Agnew.
Unlike those medical-imaging techniques, the technology doesn’t emit harmful radiation, using naturally occurring cosmic energy instead, he said. It also scans a significantly bigger area, collecting data from hundreds of millions of cubic meters of earth at any one time, he said.
Ideon’s technology can help miners like Rio Tinto get the most from existing sites, or so-called brownfield expansions, Agnew said. Miners have been spending more exploring near current mining operations rather than on undeveloped land, as new discoveries can be hard to find, take decades to develop and face challenges including huge upfront costs and possible community opposition.
Rio Tinto has already been working with the startup for several years, including testing its technology at the giant Kennecott copper mine in Utah. “Certainly we will be back at Kennecott” under the initial phase of the agreement, Agnew said.
Miners are especially eager to get their hands on more copper, arguably the most essential metal for a clean-energy transition because of its use as an electrical conductor and a market facing big challenges from a lack of new discoveries and falling concentrations of metal in existing pits.
Ideon has been working with several of the world’s biggest mining companies, including BHP Group and Vale, although Rio Tinto is the first major miner to agree to a global rollout, said Agnew.
The CEO of BHP, the world’s biggest miner by market value, last year called muon tomography “cutting-edge” work in a speech to the China Development Forum.
“Muons are a type of cosmic radiation that allow us to scan and map underground deposits faster and more accurately than before,” Mike Henry said, according to prepared remarks.
Ideon is backed by Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture-capital firm Playground Global.
Agnew said its technology can reduce drilling by 40% to 80%, lowering costs and environmental impact, and shortening project timelines.
“If you have two drill holes, you’re basically guessing what happens in between,” he said. “We help fill in the gaps.”