Independent confidence to commit capital to the right processing technology and minerals projects, where rigorous economics decide the outcome.
“Damien brought a rare combination of deep technical expertise and commercial judgement to our critical materials work. Over an 18-month program he assessed a complex portfolio of global mining and processing projects, cutting through technical detail to give us a clear, risk-adjusted view of where the real supply risks and opportunities lay. His insight into novel processing and project ramp-up was invaluable — it gave us the confidence to make better-informed investment and sourcing decisions, and to build the right internal capability. I’d work with Damien again without hesitation.”Executive Director, Purchasing & Supply Chain, Global Automotive OEM
Over an 18-month program, we led the technical risk and ramp-up strategy for a global automotive OEM's EV critical-materials portfolio: the mining, refining and processing projects underpinning its battery supply. We mapped how critical minerals were being sourced, critically reviewed the technical evidence behind each contracted project — preliminary economic assessments, pre-feasibility and feasibility studies, and the due-diligence reviews carried out by other consulting firms — and built a project-by-project view of technical risk and realistic production ramp-up. The work spanned:
It shaped the OEM's investment staging, offtake timing and team design.
We led a structured technical due diligence of a novel nickel-cobalt processing project for a global automotive OEM weighing continued investment. We built a comprehensive diligence questionnaire of 147 questions spanning the full value chain and assessed the technology-maturity readiness of each of the 49-unit operations in the proposed metallurgical process, then tested the findings with an independent expert and a project-team workshop. The result was a clear, evidence-based investment recommendation and a defined path to bankable feasibility.
Working with Hatch, we led the desktop evaluation of step-change processing technologies for a tier-one miner targeting a 50% improvement in the energy, cost and recovery intensity of its copper and nickel operations. We screened and prioritised options with the asset teams — coarse-particle and in-grind flotation, ore sorting, novel comminution — and built tailored brownfield and greenfield flowsheets, modelling each for recovery, throughput, capex and opex. It identified integrated technology suites worth over a billion dollars in NPV at around three-year paybacks, with a prioritised roadmap of testwork to follow.
Same methodology, different problem: custom techno-economic models exposing the drivers behind complex, capital-intensive decisions. See value-led decarbonisation.