Parker Centre’s vital role

The crucial importance of research and industry-specific education to sustain Australia’s, and particularly Western Australia’s, booming resources sector has never been more vital.

Among those at the vanguard is world-leading, Perth-based Parker Cooperative Research Centre for Integrated Hydrometallurgy Solutions, outcomes from which have been applied internationally.

The centre brings together a world-class team of researchers with diverse yet complementary skills, who carry out fundamental and applied research on behalf of the minerals industry at laboratory and pilot scale levels, and at operating sites.

Hydrometallurgy is vitally important to the Australian economy as it plays an essential role in the production of around 50 per cent of the country’s $30 billion a year exports of metals and metallic compounds, including alumina, gold, nickel and copper.

Such is the esteem in which the Parker Cooperative Research Centre and its work is held that it recently received grants, commitments to invest cash and in-kind contributions worth nearly $76 million over seven years from its major federal and state government, university and mineral industry partners.

A total of $20 million of that funding has come from the federal government’s Cooperative Research Centres (CRC) Programme, under which the centre was established in 1992. A further $37 million in-kind has come from core research partners CSIRO Minerals, Curtin, Murdoch and Queensland universities, the WA Department of Industry and Resources.

A further $16.8 million in committed investments has come from from 22 minerals industry companies and state government partners.

The centre’s mineral sector partners include big hitters such as Alcan International, Alcoa World Alumina, AngloGold Ashanti Australia, BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Barrick Gold Australia, Ciba Specialty Chemicals, Hatch Associates, Minara Resources, Minerals Council of Australia, Outokumpu Technology, the WA Department of Industry and Resources and WorleyParsons Services.

“The operating companies participating in the centre produce around three-quarters of Australia’s exports of alumina and base metals,” Parker Centre CEO Mark Woffenden told WA Business News.

“These are exciting times for the minerals sector, particularly in WA and it’s wonderful to see the resources sector now getting the good financial return it deserves after a number of decades when returns were not so good.

“Instead of being written off, as it was not so long ago, as an old smokestack industry, the resources sector is now being recognised as underpinning WA’s and Australia’s economies,” he said.

The Parker Centre’s headq-uarters is scheduled to move to new facilities at the CSIRO’s Perth suburban Waterford facilities in the first half of 2007. Construction of the new facilities in Manning Road is currently under way.

Research activities will remain at the centre’s four core research participants – CSIRO Minerals and Curtin, Murdoch and Queensland universities.

From a small group of researchers working in different organisations with limited collaboration 14 years ago, the Parker Centre has grown to become the world’s leading hydrometallurgical research organisation.

The independently estimated value (delivered and expected) of the centre’s research outputs to its industry clients since its establishment now totals more than $500 million.

While continuing to work on understanding the fundamental science controlling hydrometallurgical processes to improve existing extraction processes, a new research focus is to develop innovative processing technologies to exploit low-grade ores or currently uneconomic, untapped mineral deposits.

The centre has a growing international client base and is active on-site at client locations within Australia, in North America, the Caribbean, South America, Africa and Europe.

The centre’s research projects with industry are carried out either on a one-to-one basis to address specific company issues or as collaborative, multi-client projects coordinated by AMIRA International, an industry association based in Australia which brokers collaborative research for project sponsors in the global minerals industry.

The centre is currently a research provider to six AMIRA projects and has 90 full-time equivalent staff members and 33 students (PhD, MSc and honours graduates).

The Parker Centre is one of eight CRCs in the mining and energy sector, and was named after the late Professor Jim Parker, Murdoch University’s first professor of chemistry and a leader in the field of metallurgy in Australia.