Key points
- Under the updated India Economic Strategy released in 2022, CSIRO and India have made a commitment to draw on complementary capabilities and resources to solve shared global challenges.
- There are two Australian Government funded R&D partnerships that started in 2023: the India Australia Critical Minerals Research Partnership and the India Australia Green Steel Research Partnership.
- Through these partnerships, joint funding has been established for the India-Australia Minerals Scholar Network, ensuring students and researchers have the resources and networks required to succeed.
Australia has vast resources of critical minerals. They’ve become the stock-in-trade in diplomatic negotiations as countries position themselves for access to minerals and materials. Both minerals and materials are needed for key low emissions technologies through a web of international partnerships.
Technology is also needed to extract these minerals from the ore to produce materials. This enables the establishment of domestic processing, manufacturing capabilities, and industries and secures supply chains.
Reducing emissions in established, hard-to-abate sectors such as steelmaking – an industry traditionally reliant on coal – is crucial for Australia, the world's leading iron ore producer.
India is heavily dependent upon the importation of critical minerals and materials for its local manufacturing industry. It is currently ranked second in the world for steel production. Their complementary activities and goals make them a natural partner for Australia in the quest to lower emissions.
The question is, how do we make bilateral partnerships work to achieve real-world, commercial and sustainable solutions?
The India-Australia Minerals Partnerships are showing how collaboration can work.
India-Australia Minerals Partnerships: time to take stock
As part of the updated India Economic Strategy (IES) to 2035, we manage two Australian Government-funded research and development (R&D) partnerships:
- the $12.2 million India Australia Critical Minerals Research Partnership focused on sustainable and resilient supply chains for critical minerals and materials
- the $10.4 million India Australia Green Steel Research Partnership focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions in steelmaking.
Commencing in January 2023 (and ending in June 2026), the partnerships are based on a shared commitment to develop environmentally responsible practices for sustainable development to the benefit of both nations.
Dr Joanne Loh is manager of the India-Australia Critical Minerals Research Partnership.
“India is booming and there’s a lot we can do to help each other,” Joanne says.
“A common goal of both India and Australia, for instance, is to decarbonise.”
Potential India-Australia Partnership collaborator, Dr Kali Sanjay is Chief Scientist at India’s Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) and Head of Hydro & Electrometallurgy at the Department Institute of Minerals & Materials Technology (IMMT). Sanjay agrees that the collaboration will help accelerate progress to decarbonise.
He says India presents significant advantages to research partnerships in its skilled workforce and expertise in the development of processes, scaling up and engineering.
“India has a robust engineering ecosystem characterised by a network of commercial equipment manufacturers and researchers. This ecosystem facilitates the commercial adoption of laboratory-developed technologies,” Sanjay says.
Ensuring sustainable supplies of critical minerals and materials
The India-Australia Critical Minerals Research Partnership is centred around seven resource commodities: lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, titanium, vanadium and the rare earth elements. India needs to almost wholly import these and there is a potential risk to supply.
The Australian Government has recently committed to a Future Made in Australia to increase the supply of Australian resources into the value chain beyond mining to processing and production of critical minerals and materials.
Joanne says the Partnership focuses on strengthening supply chains for battery materials, in particular.
“Our collaborative research projects are contributing to diversified, resilient and responsible sources of critical minerals. In turn, this could support new local jobs and industries for India and Australia,” Joanne says.
There are four main project areas being explored under the Critical Minerals Partnership.
We have expertise in exploration which is helping India identify and assess its own critical minerals resources.
“We have well-developed capabilities for identifying and improving the prospects of finding critical minerals. Using these techniques in India, which has similar geology, we can support their exploration activities and provide more comprehensive data sets,” Joanne says.
Discovering rare earths
Dr Erick Ramanaidou is our Commodity Research Leader for Iron Ore and Lateritic Nickel and Basin Ore Genesis. In collaboration with ITB Mumbai and the Geological Survey of India, Erick and his team are conducting a project in Meghalaya, Northeast India, to study the distribution of rare earth elements in carbonatites.
If successful, this could lead to the establishment of a new rare earth mine, providing India with a valuable source of these critical minerals, which are primarily used in magnets for electric vehicles and are currently mostly mined in China.
Sanjay says India holds significant potential in developing separation techniques for recovering rare earth elements from secondary resources with extremely low concentrations, including red mud, fly ash, and industrial residues.
New sources of rare earth elements could enhance India's supply security and diversify the global distribution of rare earths, which are essential for the energy transition.
Titanium and vanadium can be difficult to extract, but there are potential solutions
Titanium and vanadium are examples of critical minerals used in alloys for their strength and anti-corrosiveness. Vanadium is also used in redox flow batteries, a rechargeable, large scale energy storage alternative.
India has abundant vanadium and titanium resources but they are minerals that are not easy to extract.
“Titanium and vanadium generally occur together, and using conventional technology only one or the other can be extracted, not both at once,” Joanne says.
“Our flagship project is focussed on the development of the CSIRO Titanium-Vanadium process, a novel extraction technique for these elements.”
Our new process can extract both metals as well as iron, and at atmospheric pressure and temperatures less than 100 °C, which should demand less energy.
“We are optimising this process at the moment,” Joanne says.
Another project is looking at alternatives to the difficult and energy-intensive processes for producing rare earth metals. Such metals typically go on to be used to make alloys and magnets for electric motors.
Finally, we are developing capability and capacity to produce Cathode Active Materials (CAM) for batteries, which require critical minerals such as nickel, cobalt and manganese. This project will investigate sustainable production techniques of existing and new CAMs for the present lithium-ion batteries as well as supporting the next generation of batteries based on sodium ions.
Towards greener steel
India will continue to be the world's fastest-growing large economy in 2024. This is forecast to expand to 6.6 per cent according to the World Bank’s global Economic Prospects released in June.
That growth is driven in part by steel production which is expected to double to 300 million tonnes per annum by 2030. This increase in production will come with an environmental cost, given the steel industry generates about 8 per cent of global emissions.
Fast tracking renewable energy infrastructure, including green hydrogen-based steel manufacturing (direct reduction) and carbon capture and storage, will play a key role in reducing emissions from steel production, says The Economic Times.
Keith Vining is our Group Leader for Carbon Steel Materials and manages the India-Australia Green Steel Partnership. Keith says the Partnership is already working on this.
Australia provides more than half of India's coking coal imports used in steelmaking.
The challenge is how to reduce emissions associated with the coal. At the same time, alternative processes such as direct reduction using hydrogen or natural gas and an electric arc furnace are being developed
The Partnership has a suite of research and development projects focussed on reducing emissions in the short-term. It is also developing alternative pathways towards decarbonisation in the medium and longer-term.
Increasing the quality of ore by removing small amounts of gangue, material not wanted in the blast furnace, can have a large impact on energy efficiency. Reducing carbon emissions is a key focus of the research partnership.
Tata Steel is an industry partner in the India-Australia Green Steel Partnership. As one of India’s (and the world’s) largest steel makers, they are keen to see results.
“We are aware of the expertise that is available in CSIRO, especially in this area of iron ore beneficiation (improving the value of the ore by removing the gangue),” says Dr Debashish Bhattacharjee, Vice-President Technology and R&D at Tata Steel.
“Australian iron ores are similar to India’s in terms of increasing impurities, particularly alumina (aluminium oxide).”
Research is also taking place to partially replace low-grade coal with biochar, a form of carbon which can be made from bamboo grown in India.
Carbon capture technologies, which have already been demonstrated to work in coal combustion applications, to trap blast furnace waste gases are also in the mix. Some of the gas could then be recycled into the blast furnace or used for other purposes. The rest could be sequestered underground.
“CSIRO is strong in looking at multiple routes for CO2 capture and utilisation,” Debashish says.
In the medium term, researchers are studying the potential for preparing ores in such a way that they can be used in the direct reduction process with electric arc smelting powered by renewable energy.
And finally, hydrogen plasma smelting, which would eliminate carbon dioxide almost entirely, is being investigated as a longer-term alternative process.
Developing researchers of the future
The two partnerships are also jointly funding the India-Australia Minerals Scholar Network. Through it, Indian and Australian students and researchers are provided with opportunities to visit and work in each other’s country, and to study and collaborate, through scholarships, travel grants, postgraduate degree programs, visits to institutes, and in-person and virtual symposiums.
“There are many potentially ripe areas for collaboration,” Debashish says.
Sanjay calls it a collaborative strategy.
“Funding initiatives and policy frameworks encourage collaboration and innovation, ensuring joint projects are equipped with the necessary resources and regulatory support to succeed,” Sanjay says
A major aim of the partnerships is to develop networks which will endure and form the basis for collaboration to address issues of importance to both nations far beyond the life of the programs.