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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
