Why Mining Giant Rio Tinto Is Benefitting From The EV Boom

Increasing demand of copper is not a just result of EV boom, its a result of increasing electrification in everything. That includes energy transition, industrialization, semiconductors and electricity consumption in general. It is very wrong to say the EV boom is the only reason responsible for the increased demand of copper. The EV industry is still very far from driving up the copper prices alone.

It's clean energy "excavates a whole ecosystem"

BHP is also benefiting in a huge way. They've bought all of the copper mines in South Australia and have many more already.

It is weird that the US doesn’t have any domestic large scale mining companies. They’re all foreign owned operating in the US.

The map at 2:06 misses the fact that Rio-Tinto is an Anglo-Australian company (only UK is highlighted), and has joint headquarters in London and Melbourne. It is the world’s second largest mining company behind BHP, which is also headquartered in Melbourne.

There is a beautiful trail behind kennecott copper mine in Utah, you can drive the entire way, this takes you to the top of the mine and gives you an amazing view to this installation and also mesmerizing views over the wasatch mountain's and adjacent cities

Rio Tinto is an Australian-British multinational corporation, not just British some of the best open cut mins in the world come form Australia

My current boss is a former employee at the largest mine in the US. The Morenci mine in Az. He was a new infrastructure engineer for 13 years out there, started as an intern while in college. He is the most intelligent, well versed professional I have ever met. He left the mine because of the harsh realities of living in the middle of nowhere as stated in the opening statements of this video.

I live just down the road from the Rio Tinto mine in Utah. Ironically they are one of the largest contributors to air and ground water pollution in the state. “green energy” my eye, you are just moving pollution somewhere else.

RIO would never consider paying employees more to attract new talent. You need more workers, pay more.

Wow, this is what "Green" looks like, I would never known.

There are engineering solutions that can drastically reduce copper requirements. If copper costs enough for long enough, companies will change their designs. For instance, communications throughout a vehicle can be multiplexed onto a single pair of wires. Need more power transmitted on less copper? Increase the voltage. Hell, communications can actually be multiplexed onto power lines too! There are practical limits of course, but we are nowhere near them. Even the issue of mining enough lithium is solvable. There is a lot of lithium available, but processing some of it is rather nasty and expensive. But there is a lot of R&D currenting working on sodium based batteries. Sodium has more free electrons in its outer valence, meaning one atom could theoretically store more power, offsetting it's higher mass by increasing energy density. Sodium is incredibly abundant and found in every drop of the ocean water. Switching to sodium could actually reduce cost and eliminate at least one of the mining bottlenecks in EV adoption.

Very good! Don't even mention the contamination factor, the humungus amount of clean water those mines use, that's not important at all, praising the company is the good journalism! As a journalist myself I feel like puking right now.

South African here, Rio Tinto has mining operations here as well. Damaging our prestine indigenous coastal environment. I thought it was an Australian company not British.

“Clean energy” lmao

Dear CNBC the UK is not the whole part island of Ireland as shown start your piece.

The mining area looks fantastic when filmed from a drone

I’m sure it’s an oversight but, the UK does not include Ireland. But I’m sure you knew that….

Makes more sense to build new generation nuclear power plants instead of Solar or Wind Turbines.

The Spanish name of Rio Tinto Company born in south Spain in the original mine Rio Tinto in Huelva/ Andalusia