Rio Tinto and SiTration have partnered to recover metals and other compounds from the water generated during the mining process.
Innovation presents an eternal challenge. A big company has a problem that requires a solution that it doesn’t possess. A startup has a technology, but it doesn’t know the specific problem it could eventually solve. Getting these parties together is the first step to success, and that is what happened with SiTration and Rio Tinto.
SiTration began in 2020, coming out of MIT’s materials science department. Brendan Smith was doing his doctoral and post-doc work, and, along with his supervisor, Professor Jeffrey Grossman, invented a new ultra-durable filtration membrane technology.
It was promising, but as Smith, SiTration’s CEO and co-founder, says, start-ups born in academia are often “hammers looking for a nail to hit.” He wasn’t sure where it could provide the most real-world value, so over the course of many years, in parallel with optimizing and scaling up the technology, he “efficiently meandered through the market landscape,” talking to stakeholders and evaluating diverse industrial use cases. The consensus answer was to focus on the critical materials space.
At Rio Tinto, we thought this was a great innovation challenge and posted it on our website to scout for companies to partner with who can help us solve this water challenge
That might have given the company a direction but it still didn’t provide the partnerships necessary for commercialization. One of these came from Rio Tinto, an ILP member and global mining and materials company founded in 1873. It was looking to find partners with technologies that aim to enable the recovery of metals and other compounds, such as cobalt, lithium and copper, from the water generated at operating and closed mines. Traditionally, these metals are removed from the water as a waste by-product, which represents lost revenue. “At Rio Tinto, we thought this was a great innovation challenge and posted it on our website to scout for companies to partner with who can help us solve this water challenge,” says Nick Gurieff, principal adviser for mine closure research and development at Rio Tinto.
It sounds like a fairly straightforward request, but it was a big step to implement a process to develop an R&D portfolio focused only on water treatment. Gurieff says that the company took some convincing, but what helped was that the objectives of this R&D portfolio fit well with a new circular economy approach developing within Rio Tinto. Also, while the initial opportunity would be to improve mine closure outcomes, many of the technologies being developed could potentially deliver positive outcomes throughout the lifecycle of Rio Tinto’s operations. Since the R&D challenge focused on water treatment, the company realized it didn’t have all of the existing technologies to meet the challenge. It also knew that an opportunity was out there.
“We had to try something new and we wanted to move quickly,” he says.
The Power of Language
What helped narrow what could be a long, inefficient matchmaking process was the RFP. Rio Tinto made it specific, allowing companies to understand exactly what it wanted. Smith, who learned of the request through the ILP, originally wasn’t going to respond to what he sensed might be a “distraction” because SiTration had no experience in mining. Its focus had been on the recycling of lithium-ion batteries, but then “all the keywords start popping out,” he says, like “critical materials” and “acidic feed streams,” the same factors involved with battery recycling, and he saw the crossover potential.
The company submitted its proposal in August 2022. By October, it was on Rio Tinto’s shortlist of candidates. Gurieff says that SiTration’s membrane, by being both tunable and sturdy enough to handle mine wastewater, helped set it apart. Negotiations followed, which were finalized in June. Both call what’s happened so far in the process “frictionless”. Smith says he’s been impressed with the pace and with Rio Tinto’s openness to new technologies, something that’s not always seen in the mining industry. For Gurieff, SiTration has been open to feedback and making adjustments.
Smith says that being flexible and constantly incorporating feedback from commercial partners has been key for SiTration’s survival. He stresses that “the instinct and temptation in an early startup is to get to a product as quickly and efficiently as possible, but if this speed is achieved at the expense of making sure you are building something of value to the customer, it can also be a detriment.” By listening and learning from the start, SiTration knows what Rio Tinto’s site operators are dealing with and how its technology has to perform. To Rio Tinto’s credit, Smith says that the company was open about what their pain points were, another thing that a lot of big companies tend to avoid.
The instinct and temptation in an early startup is to get to a product as quickly and efficiently as possible, but if this speed is achieved at the expense of making sure you are building something of value to the customer, it can also be a detriment
Rio Tinto’s openness about technology also represented a shift for the company, one born out of practicality. In the past, the company would have wanted to own whatever technology a startup developed, but Gurieff says that with this project, the aim is to form a strong R&D and commercial partnership with each technology developer, and supporting SiTration’s growth and development protects Rio Tinto’s investment. “Yeah, it was big effort,” Gurieff say, “but we are happy with the outcome.”
The 10-Year Plan
Gurieff says that they’re at the start of what’s potentially a 5-10-year timeline with the aim to eventually get to full-scale. Smith says the early steps will include demonstrating the required performance while scaling up SiTration’s process to a throughput of roughly 10 liters per day in parallel. One of the largest benefits of working directly with Rio Tinto is the ability to run tests with water sourced from real mine sites, not synthetic materials that are less complex and can skew the results. After that, if the outcomes look promising, the usual development process will follow: building a small-scale modular unit, piloting at the site, and collecting data. Eventually, the companies hope to develop a demonstration unit processing 100 cubic meters of water per hour.
The end result will be a focused technology development effort. As Smith says, “All the resources and effort put into product development are going towards the creation of real-world value and impact, because you’re constantly validating it with an industry-leading stakeholder.”
And as Gurieff adds, they’re starting together with SiTration from square one. “It’s not simply taking existing technology and applying it in mining,” he says, “but building a technology platform that is designed to fit the demands of the mining industry.”