Businesses today must be purposeful, competitive, resilient and agile. Read about how, together with our customers, we are creating value, with sustainability at the heart of our decision-making.
The mining industry is integral to modern life and, as the world’s population grows and societal expectations evolve, demand for our minerals and metals – core components of the products and services that are essential to human progress and the fight against climate change – will increase.
It is vital that, in providing these high-quality products, we also seek to reduce our environmental footprint, support biodiversity and create value for all our stakeholders.
Part ofFutureSmart Mining™, Anglo American’sSustainable Mining Planis designed to foster innovation and deliver step change results across the entire mining value chain, from mineral discovery right through to marketing. This includes our commitment to achieve carbon neutrality across our operations for Scopes 1 and 2 by 2040, and our ambition to reduce our Scope 3 emissions by 50% by 2040.
Industry-wide engagement and co-operation spanning our customers and other stakeholder groups is fundamental to our efforts – especially when looking at reducing emissions across our value chain. Part of our efforts focus on forging wide-ranging, long-term collaborations that connect the resources in the ground to the people who need and value them, while accelerating society’s transition to a carbon neutral future.
We spoke toPeter Whitcutt, CEO of Anglo American’s Marketing business, to ask his thoughts on the need to accelerate society’s shift to a carbon neutral future, and how the Marketing team is helping to get there.
- In your role you supervise Anglo American’s commercial activities. How is your team contributing to fulfilling the Group’s sustainability goals?
We are proud to be custodians of resources that support the climate change agenda, in particular decarbonisation, and have a clear set of goals and a proactive agenda that spans our entire business. We know that, to shape a truly sustainable business, we must stay ahead of evolving trends – providing the solutions to societal expectations, whilst also solving the physical challenges of mining and constantly searching for more responsible ways to do business.
As the link between the customers who buy and appreciate our high-quality products, and our mines, we make it our priority to understand, anticipate and address their needs across the value chain, with a Marketing model that is focused on shaping customised solutions around our customers’ objectives.
By doing this, we ensure the reliable supply of essential resources that fulfil customer requirements; that are responsibly produced, sourced and delivered; and that are complemented by our high-quality service support.
- Scope 3 emissions are key to Anglo American’s ability to reach net zero. Given that they are linked to activities outside our direct control, how do we tackle them?
In October last year,Anglo American published its first climate changereport, setting out our plans to achieve operational carbon neutrality, and outlining our ambition to reduce our Scope 3 emissions by 50%, both by 2040.
The report frames a series of priority areas for our marketing activities, with a specific focus on decarbonising the steel value chain, which is accountable for the majority of our Scope 3 emissions.
Steelmakers must set-up and deliver on a clear decarbonisation pathway, aided by a consistent and supportive global policy environment. The high-quality products we provide and that feed into more efficient, less carbon-intensive processes, will play an important role in supporting these efforts, as will our continued efforts to unlock the hydrogen value chain to enable a swift and just transition to a more sustainable energy mix.
Looking beyond how we market our products and satisfy customer demand, achieving our climate goals also depends heavily on our success in collaborating effectively with our customers and other industry participants - including industry bodies - across our value chain, providing the opportunity to fully shape decarbonisation strategies and to inform debate around key areas of interest.
The work our Shipping team has been doing is also of great importance, with a focus on driving carbon neutrality across our controlled ocean freight activity by 2040 and contributing to the shipping sector’s long-term sustainability. As well as adopting a standard reporting framework to measure and align our emissions, we have made important headway in trialling and adopting alternative marine fuels, and investing in technology innovation, work that will continue through 2022 and that will set us on the right path to deliver on our ambition to achieve carbon neutrality for ourcontrolled ocean freight by 2040.
- Hydrogen is enjoying unprecedented momentum, with the market anticipated to scale significantly in the next decade. What do you make of its growing popularity?
Anglo American has been a long-time advocate for the green hydrogen economy, so this growth in popularity comes as no surprise, and is very-much welcome.
Through our long-standing PGM market development activities, we have invested in a wide-range of promising new technologies, and in companies in the fuel cell, hydrogen and energy-storage value chain, as well as supporting the development of the hydrogen economy through several partnerships, including as a founding member of the Hydrogen Council.
Successfully embedding a hydrogen economy is one of the measures we have identified to help us to balance our residual emissions – one of the five decarbonisation pathways outlined in our Climate Change report last year, with the development of integrated green hydrogen production a key enabler for fuel switching at our major opencast mines.
We also take the view that low carbon hydrogen is pivotal to replacing fossil fuels in the chemicals and steel sectors, and have done a lot of work to explore the potential for hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs); an important lever for the decarbonisation of heavy-duty vehicles and the commercial freight sector.
We are getting set to formally welcome our new hydrogen-powered fuel cell haul truck – the first 290 tonne capacity mine haul truck to run on hydrogen to date – to our Mogalakwena mine in South Africa. This marks the first step on our journey to introducing hydrogen mobility to our mines and the longer-term replacement of our global diesel truck fleet, also providing a platform from which to prove the commercial and technical viability of green hydrogen and its performance capabilities more broadly – steps which will support the fuel’s ability to gain traction more broadly in a wide variety of heavy-duty applications.
We are firm supporters for hydrogen to be used to drive less carbon-intensive steelmaking, with hydrogen-based, direct reduced iron (DRI-EAF) having the potential to be the lowest-carbon primary steelmaking method, especially with the use of green hydrogen.
The widespread adoption of hydrogen continues to be an exercise in technology advancement, commercial viability and global collaboration. Society will need to be taken on this journey too – with governments and industry working together to showcase the opportunities and advantages of a hydrogen-fuelled future.
What is positive, is that we have most definitely made it out of the starting gate, the momentum is there, support is growing, and hydrogen’s potential has not waned.
- What do you see as being the most important consideration when it comes to delivering a more resilient, sustainable future – technology, innovation, behavioural change – and why?
Given the pace of change today, and the complexity of the challenge that lies ahead, there is not one silver bullet, but a suite of comprehensive measures, that we will need to lean on as we work to shape the foundations of our activities and influence the direction of travel.
创新是关键,我们的团队正在做的事情a lot of work to screen, select and fund opportunities that leverage the properties of platinum group metals (PGMs), in order to bridge the gap between R&D and the commercialisation of technologies that support the hydrogen economy. Pursuing projects with the potential to be transformed into commercially viable technologies and businesses is also a part of our toolkit and extends into broader decarbonisation opportunities.
As I mentioned before, collaboration and driving towards a common goal is also an imperative. Our participation in key groups and industry associations provides us with an opportunity to initiate and facilitate industry collaboration, and engage in conversations about the necessary regulatory frameworks. Strategic and targeted communications programmes are helping reach the right audiences and drive awareness around specific technologies with a potential for innovation breakthroughs.
至关重要的,是我们的高质量的持续供应products - such as iron ore from our Minas Rio operation in Brazil - that support less carbon-intensive steelmaking processes and critical components of the steel industry’s transition period.
Our growing focus on future-enabling metals and minerals (i.e., copper, PGMs and nickel) that are important for renewable electricity generation and distribution, transport electrification, and for other innovative and emerging technologies, will also be important.