Research Stories

Sam Broom-Fendley (CSM) attended the UK-India Critical Minerals workshop in Bhubaneswar, Orissa State, India, funded by the UK FCDO. The aim of the workshop was to create a UK-India community of academics, innovators, investors, and companies to address challenges and identify best practices relating to critical raw materials; explore gaps and opportunities for future research; and identify at least 2 grand challenges for future funding. These aims are against a backdrop of Indian mineral exploration opening up to additional outside investment, the publication of the Indian Critical Minerals list, Critical Minerals being outlined as an area of cooperation on the UK-India 2030 Roadmap, and an anticipated inclusion of Critical Minerals as a focal point of the (TBC) UK-India Free Trade Agreement. There were approximately 20 delegates from the UK and around 40 from India. In each case these were from a roughly equal split of academia and industry. Indian academic representatives from Earth Science facing institutes were from IIT Bombay (Sakthy Chinnasamy – specialising in orogenic Au deposits), Indian School of Mines (Sahendra Singh), and the Geological Survey of India - Odis (Kanhu Charan Das). Those from minerals and materials processing institutes included the Institute of Minerals and Materials Technologies (Ramanuj Narayan) and IIT Roorkee (Nikhil Dhawan), and Indian Industry representatives included delegates from Tata Steel – both the mineral exploration and minerals processing units, Tirupati Graphite, Gujarat Mining and Development Corporation, Altilium, Coal India and Precious Metals. Sam also paid a visit to Jindal Steel and the Institute of Minerals and Materials Technologies. Arising from the meeting the DBT and innovate UK plan on ring-fencing some money for building links further around two specific goals, which are still to be formalised, but will probably be themed around mineral exploration (industry and education) and materials processing/recycling.

The SrAMIC (Strontium Alternative Magnets Innovation Consortium) has been funded by the Innovate UK CLIMATES call. Sam Broom-Fendley is the PI for the Exeter component of this, which is a 9-month project to research the global inventory of Sr contents in carbonatites, and to do some pilot studies on the feasibility of direct extraction of strontium carbonate for the use in Sr-ferrite magnets. The award value to Exeter is ~£52k, and Rob Fitzpatrick and Frances Wall are Co-Is. The companies involved are GeoLithical – a start-up exploration company run by former MSc graduate Ed Loye, and Grinding Solutions Ltd. This grant should be useable as evidence for direct income coming in off the back of the Shared Prosperity Fund grant for minerals processing equipment!

Karen Hudson-Edwards has been successful with her Innovate UK CLIMATES2 call. The project is called UpReREE and it is a follow-up to Karen’s ReREE Innovate project. UpReREE aims to scale up the sustainable extraction and processing of rare earth elements from mine tailings. Karen is the PI, Frances Wall is CoI, Eva Marquis is Research Fellow, and Richie Chalkley is Research Assistant. The industrial partner on both projects is Altilium, a UK-based lean technology group supporting the transformation of the global energy sector from fossil-based to zero-carbon by recycling waste streams. The award value to Exeter on this one is £140k.

A team of interdisciplinary researchers from Camborne School of Mines, the Centre for Geography and Environmental Science, and the Centre for Ecology and Conservation, have published an article in Nature Sustainability which presents a systematic case for an international moratorium on deep-sea mining:

Crane, R., Laing, C., Littler, K., Moore, K., Roberts, C., Thompson, K., Vogt, D., and Scourse, J. D. ‘Deep-sea mining poses an unjustifiable environmental risk’. Nature Sustainability (2024). doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01326-6.

Read more at the associated press release here: 'Unjustifiable environmental risk” leads to calls for worldwide moratorium on deep seabed mining'.

(Photo: Getty Images)

Karen Hudson-Edwards, with colleagues from the University of Lincoln and in Chile, has secured an Urgency Grant from NERC entitled 'Atmospheric rivers and recent tailings storage facility failures in central Chile: a harbinger of climate change impacts on critical mineral supply'. The grant, worth £98k, aims to determine the environmental impacts and projected recovery of the Rio Chinchorro following the partial collapse of a tailings storage facility in the Las Cenizas copper mine complex in Chile.

CSM PhD candidate Cassia Johnson had a piece published in The Conversation. The article, ‘Slow mining could be a solution to overconsumption in an increasingly fast-paced world’, was written with Cassia’s supervisors Kate Moore (CSM) and Deborah Johnson (Politics and International Relations). Read the wonderful article here!

The image is a placer mine with two Yukon Geological Survey geologists on site to help out the miner and collect data. The two dogs in the photo offer some reflections of the ‘slowness’ and lifestyle drivers of Yukon’s placer mines.