Electric cars, wearable tech, smart speakers and facial recognition technology are among the many inventions that started with an idea and, today, form an integral part of our daily lives. This is the great thing about innovation – with the right ingredients, ideas can flourish and become reality.
That’s the mission of our Market Development team, to deliver a holistic ecosystem of programmes that explore and expand on opportunities to innovate within the Platinum Group Metals (PGMs) arena, by taking ideas and concepts, before nurturing them through commercialisation to engineering and sustained scale.
The unique physical and chemical properties of PGMs – platinum, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium and osmium – mean they are hugely versatile and can be used in various applications, spanning multiple industries. As well as their appeal in jewellery and established role in catalytic converters for transportation, they have an important job to do when it comes to enabling the development of pioneering technologies behind key global shifts such as the clean energy transition.
As one of the world’s leading PGMs producers, we are well-versed in the potential of these metals, including in new applications such as medical diagnostics, computing, artificial intelligence and even food preservation.
We have been dedicated to exploring their potential further in response to changing societal expectations, consumer demand and the need to support our customers in meeting their evolving sustainability aspirations. Our approach focuses on creating programmes to develop and operationalise PGM-based innovations, and to form commercially viable technologies, and businesses.
We are building on a track record of success in this area. In 2018, as cornerstone investors together with South Africa’s Public Investment Corporation, we launched AP Ventures, an independent fund stemming from our in-house PGM investment programme, with $100M of capital. Today, AP Ventures has several high-profile investors and a $395M fund under management. Its investment portfolio, which focuses on clean energy technology, currently features 17 companies, spanning the fuel cell, hydrogen and energy-storage value chain.
Venture Building
Our work to explore the full potential of PGMs does not end there. We recently introduced a new venture building programme designed to build on our market experience and drive more sustainable, diversified and innovation-led demand growth for PGMs. Unlike venture capital, which invests in start-ups and small businesses with growth potential, venture building is about taking impactful ideas and creating enterprises around them, before developing the strategy, brand, team and growth capital they need to succeed.
The two workstreams are highly complementary. With venture building taking place at the point at which inventions are in their early stages – almost ready to be translated into meaningful products and services, or where talent and capital are needed to take the next step – we can build and launch businesses with the potential for high growth and commercial traction that will, over time, unlock the full potential of PGM-enabled innovations; both in existing markets and across new areas of application.
In addition to pursuing inbound opportunities, where entrepreneurs and inventors approach Anglo American directly, we are also forging collaborations with players that have proven experience in commercialising applied science, and in implementing repeatable and scalable business models to drive innovation at pace.
Opportunity areas: Carbon Neutral Feedstock
One area of focus is Carbon Neutral Feedstocks (CNFs). CNFs go by many different names – including zero carbon fuels, low carbon solutions, CO2 upcycling and synthetic carbon-based fuels – but their purpose is the same; to give CO2 a second life, one with the potential to reduce the environmental impact of the entire supply chain by replacing traditional carbon carriers such as coal, oil and natural gas.
Our ability to supply these feedstocks at scale depends on an industry ecosystem that, first and foremost, is commercially viable. To enable this, progress needs to be made across three main areas:
- The supply of affordable CO2 – sustainably sourced via direct air capture from the atmosphere, or point-source capture from industrial CO2 waste emissions, through capturing and recycling CO2, or carbon capture and utilisation (CCU).
- The supply of affordable green hydrogen – with renewable electricity or waste heat used to generate green hydrogen through processes such as electrolysis.
- New conversion processes and alternative business models to convert these feedstocks into high value products.
Through our development work, we are paving the way, using CNFs and PGM-containing processes to produce chemicals, fuels and other materials that are cost competitive with more traditional options.
To date, our holistic approach has resulted in a partnership with Deep Science Ventures, a company that is on a mission to turn scientific knowledge into high-impact ventures, and the subsequent launch of two businesses – Mission Zero Technologies and Supercritical Solutions.
Mission Zero Technologies is developing a direct air capture (DAC) technology that reduces energy consumption and cost of capture by over four times compared to today’s commercial offerings. By using a bio-inspired, catalytic process, their technology will drive viability in a process that has typically required the capital-intensive use of significant amounts of heat and electricity; critical to close the carbon loop.
This tackles the first aspect of the equation, the supply of affordable CO2. When the CO2 captured is utilised rather than sequestrated – to manufacture products such as synthetic fuels, for example – this helps close the carbon loop.
Supercritical Solutions is developing the world’s first high pressure, ultra-efficient electrolyser, for the production of hydrogen and oxygen from water with zero emissions. By using heat and pressure, their technology exploits the benefits of supercritical water1, delivering gases at over 200 bar of pressure, without the expense or challenges of hydrogen compressors. This directly tackles the second part of the equation, lowering the cost of pressurised green hydrogen; critical to the decarbonisation of the energy system.
The work of these two companies complements and augments the work of Infinium, an AP Ventures portfolio company with a proprietary technology that converts renewable power into green hydrogen; before using this green hydrogen and waste carbon dioxide to produce net-zero carbon fuels. These fuels can be readily deployed in today’s plane, ship and truck fleets, pipelines or tanks without the need for infrastructure or equipment changes.
That’s where Anglo American’s Market Development team and venture building programme is adding value. Constructing an environment in which customers are created, and where innovators and entrepreneurs can create products and services customers want or need, while proving the viability of their ideas in a low-risk environment, is key to unlocking barriers to a more sustainable future, while increasing demand for PGMs.
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1 At 373°C and 220 bar, normal water becomes supercritical water. ‘Supercritical’ can be thought of as the ‘fourth state’ of a material. Not a solid, a liquid or a gas, it appears as something like a vapor and is completely compressible.