Anglo American Sets an Industry Leading Sustainable Mining Strategy

This global mining company is taking action to become carbon neutral globally by 2040.

For mining companies, climate change is an immediate and severe challenge. Companies are facing operational risk from water stress and floods that endanger their assets. At the same time, their GHG emissions continue to climb, with Scope 3 emissions accounting for up to 95% of the industry’s overall output.

Mining companies need to find ways to become more sustainable to not only remain competitive, but also to retain their social license to operate. Companies have the opportunity to leverage new technologies to optimize operations while looking to new financing models and adapting to new ways of working.

With support from ENGIE Impact, Anglo American is implementing a robust carbon-neutral strategy for its' Copper business unit in Chile.

Tailoring Geographic Strategies to Company-wide Targets

Led by the recently-appointed Group Head of Carbon Neutrality, the company developed a group-level strategy that identified hydrogen and green supply as the main decarbonization levers. A persistent challenge is tailoring implementation strategies to each geography while ensuring alignment with the organization’s broader guidelines.

Enabling Three-Dimensional Transformation

A number of solutions are available to the mining industry, but it is not always obvious which ones are the best. Setting and achieving decarbonization goals requires a custom approach for each organization. 

ENGIE Impact offers a common framework, with three dimensions, that can help any organization map out and make rapid progress toward its transformation.

These dimensions are the decarbonization levers the company deploys, the scale at which it transforms operations, and the enablers that serve as the foundation for unlocking opportunities and accelerating decarbonization. 

Scales

Anglo American is starting by focusing on its three Copper sites in Chile. This is helping it launch its decarbonization strategy at the group level, with the potential to be implemented in other geographic regions.

Levers

The company chose its decarbonization levers following a deep analysis of its emissions data to project decarbonization scenarios, create business cases for different technologies, and evaluate the readiness of partners in implementing the levers. It has decided to prioritize two levers, green supply and hydrogen fuel replacement for hauling trucks. It is developing a comprehensive view of the benefits and local implementation challenges related to these two levers, while also considering the next set of levers that will be required to meet the decarbonization goal. These include battery electric vehicles (BEV) and GHG emissions compensation using nature-based solutions (high-quality carbon offsetting projects).

Enablers

Leadership buy-in from the start has laid a strong foundation for the decarbonization journey. A dedicated Carbon Neutrality Steering Committee drives the strategy and provides a governance framework, aligning all stakeholders, including local business unit representatives and group-level leadership.

The team is building a common understanding of the decarbonization challenge and a set of carbon neutrality fundamentals by assessing knowledge gaps, implementing executive training sessions, and developing internal capability.

Together, ENGIE Impact and Anglo American are demonstrating the effectiveness of crafting a tailored carbon neutral pathway to address even the hardest-to-decarbonize sectors. 

While the path to decarbonization may look different for each industry, it’s imperative that global stakeholders are aligned with local, site-level operations as companies move along the three dimensions of scale, levers, and enablers that deliver Net Zero transformation.