Rio Tinto ready for smaller, riskier projects in green energy hunt
London | The scramble to find more projects intransition materials such as copper and lithium has prompted a strategic rethink at Rio Tinto, with a push into smaller mines and potentially riskier frontier locations.
Rio chairman Dominic Barton also on Friday signalled a stronger tilt into aluminium, where customers are prepared to pay a premium for green product. And he underscored the company’s ambition to join the lithium bonanza.
Rio Tinto chairman Dominic Barton.
Mr Barton said Rio Tinto’s new approach could mean taking on projects that might start small and scale up – probably in concert with a government or local partner – rather than always picking the biggest and most shovel-ready mines.
“The bias, at least on Rio’s side, is big – that it’s better, big, fast and hulked up,” Mr Barton told the Financial Times mining summit in London.
“We need to be thinking about a more longer-term approach within countries, and working with others.”
Most of Rio Tinto’s operations are in Australia and North America, although it has projects in South America, South Africa and Oman, and also in Guinea, Mozambique, Madagascar and Mongolia.
Mr Barton said some central Asian countries had asked Rio why the company was not working in their jurisdictions, but “some of the places, at least from our point of view, are geopolitically quite risky”.
“There are minerals, there’s hydropower, but there’s also risk to investors. How do we think about that?,” he asked.
“Working with partners is a good thing to do. Especially it could be a local partner, it could be more of a sovereign type of partner. But I think we have to be thinking about doing that, more working with other mining companies.”
This could involve heading into countries that were
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