RHI Magensita (headquartered in Vienna, Austria) and MCi Carbon (headquartered in Canberra, Australia; hereinafter “MCi”) have today signed a long-term strategic cooperation agreement, advancing a partnership to decarbonise components of RHI Magnesita’s operations. The global market leader of the refractories industry has made a multi-million-dollar investment into MCi’s carbon capture and utilisation technology.
RHI Magnesita is the world's leading manufacturer of refractory materials, which are used in all high temperature industrial processes. As MCi’s first global commercial customer, RHI Magnesita intends to explore the deployment pathway of MCi’s decarbonisation solution to significantly reduce their Scope 1 emissions, supporting an industrial scale-up of the technology on Kooragang Island in Newcastle, NSW. This long-term commitment aligns with the priorities of Mission Innovation’s Net Zero Industries initiative, co-led by Austria and Australia.
“MCi Carbon and RHI Magnesita have formed a values-led collaboration to accelerate the scaling of MCi's ‘Circular Carbon Platform’. After a year of successful pilot studies, RHI Magnesita will be MCi's first commercial customer and a shareholder, helping advance the technology and decarbonise the global refractories industry. This is a positive step towards hard-to-abate emission reductions and a circular economy."
- Marcus Dawe, MCi Carbon co-founder and CEO
MCi Carbon captures emissions from global industries, like steel, cement, fertilisers, and mining, unlocking the value of carbon by creating products and materials for the circular carbon economy. The chemical process, called mineral carbonation, creates a range of materials, including calcium and magnesium carbonate by carbonating minerals in by-products of industrial processes. The company has grown exponentially in recent years, following the award of a $14.6m Australian Federal government grant to build a world-first demonstration plant at Orica's Kooragang Island manufacturing site, using mineral carbonation to prevent emissions from entering into the atmosphere.
Pictured: Stefan Borgas, CEO RHI Magnesita with Marcus Dawe, co-founder and CEO MCi Carbon
MCi and RHI Magnesita have in recent years been exploring the potential deployment of MCi’s technology for both the abatement of CO2 emissions and subsequent generation of magnesium carbonate with a lower emissions profile for use in select RHI Magnesita refractory production facilities. Activities between RHI Magnesita and MCi to date have included CO2 abatement studies, mineral carbonation feedstock assessments and techno-economic analysis across RHI Magnesita’s worldwide sites.
These key activities have been conducted at MCi’s pilot plant facility in Newcastle, Australia. Commissioned in 2016, the pilot plant is located at the Newcastle Institute for Energy and Resources (NIER).
"This partnership could become a breakthrough towards decarbonising the industry. It fits seamlessly with RHI Magnesita’s ambitious sustainability strategy. We still have a long way to go but our early-stage investment and the clear intention of a long-term collaboration make this day so memorable. Together with the like-minded team from MCi we will pave the way for a greener industry.”
- RHI Magnesita CEO Stefan Borgas
Results to date have been extremely encouraging, and both RHI Magnesita and MCi are confident in the value of further collaboration. Both companies see potential for broader deployment of MCi’s technology across RHI Magnesita’s refractory facilities globally as the partnership progresses.
“MCi is emerging from an assessment window where our technical team has been working with customers to apply our decarbonisation technology."
- Martin Murphy, MCi Carbon Chief Commercial Officer
Recently featured in Bloomberg, Forbes, and the Australian Financial Review, MCi CEO Marcus Dawe and COO Sophia Hamblin Wang were named in the Top 100 Australian Green Power Players, published in The Australian. MCi Carbon was awarded the NSW Clean Technology Award, presented at the 2022 Banksia
Foundation Sustainability Awards.
For more information
Todd McHenry, Head of Communications | MCi Carbon
Email: comms@mineralcarbonation.com
Phone: +61 422 488 512
About MCi Carbon
MCi Carbon (MCi) is a world-leading Australian based clean technology company transforming carbon dioxide into building products and materials for the circular carbon economy. The company is based in Canberra with a technical headquarters in Newcastle and a global reference pilot plant at the Newcastle Institute for Energy and Resources (NIER). Founded in 2013, the company has developed a low-cost, low-pressure, low-energy chemical engineering process to transform CO2 emissions from industrial sources into solid materials which can be used to create a range of products.
MCi has received global recognition for its R&D and was recently awarded the Clean Technology Award as part of the 2022 NSW Sustainability Awards, presented by the Banksia Foundation. In 2021, MCi won first prize at the Clean Energy Start-up Pitch Battle at COP26 in Glasgow. Other international accolades include the 2018 Resource Innovator of the Year award at the New Materials Summit in Berlin and being featured at the World Economic Forum Pioneers of Change Summit, building momentum as a global brand and a leader in carbon capture and utilisation (CCU).
For more information, please visit mcicarbon.com
About RHI Magnesia
RHI Magnesita is the leading global supplier of high‐grade refractory products, systems and solutions which are critical for high‐temperature processes exceeding 1,200°C in a wide range of industries, including steel, cement, non‐ferrousmetals and glass. With a vertically integrated value chain, from raw materials to refractory products and full performance‐based solutions, RHI Magnesita serves customers around the world, with around 13,500 employees in 33 main production sites and more than 70 sales offices. RHI Magnesita intends to build on its leadership in revenue, scale, product portfolio and diversified geographic presence to expand further in high growth markets.
The Group maintains a premium listing on the Official list of the London Stock Exchange (symbol: RHIM LN) and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 index, with a secondary listing on the Vienna Stock Exchange (Wiener Börse).
For more information please visit: rhimagnesita.com
About Mission Innovation
Mission Innovation is a global initiative to catalyse action and investment in research, development, and demonstration to make clean energy affordable, attractive and accessible to all this decade. This will accelerate progress towards the Paris Agreement goals and pathways to net zero. The goal of the Net Zero Industries Mission is to catalyse the development and demonstration of cost competitive solutions for the efficient decarbonization of hard to abate energy intensive industries worldwide by 2030. Heavy industries like steel, cement, and chemicals, require extremely high temperatures and use massive amounts of energy. These sectors also encounter high investment costs for process equipment with long payback periods and a lifetime of more than 20 years. Unlocking emissions reductions at the end of their next refurbishment cycles could prevent nearly 60Gt CO2and help put industrial sectors on a pathway to net zero emissions by 2050.
The Net Zero Industries Mission is co-led by Australia, Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water and Austria, Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology.
For more information, please visit: mission-innovation.net