He doesn't think of it as a strange nomination, because for most of his career he's been ‘behind the curtain', working in teams at some of the biggest names in the mining space.

 

That changed in early 2020, when he accepted a role as Pure Minerals' CEO, now QPM, to help push ahead a plan to transform laterite ore from New Caledonia into key battery inputs at its proposed Townsville Energy Chemicals Hub.

 

He was the first in his family to secure a tertiary degree, graduating with a PhD in physical and inorganic chemistry at the University of Western Australia in 1981.

 

It was while he completed student vacation work with Alcoa, quickly realising he preferred to work on "real world" applications, and was not suited to the austere halls of academia.

 

"Alumina refineries require some of the most complex metallurgy in the world," he told MNN.

 

"Everything else is a walk in the park. I liken it to neurosurgery, and you have got to be very good to get it right."

 

Over his career he's focussed on trouble-shooting and new process development, finding ways to "squeeze more blood out of a stone".

 

"When you have these big, capital intensive assets, every little bit you can pull out provides gains, so that's where I've tended to focus" he said.

 

After 17 years with Alcoa, and he decided he wanted to try something different and moved from the top tier aluminium concern to Comalco, which was "at the bottom of the pile".

 

"People asked why I was going over, and it was because I wanted a challenge, but unfortunately by the time I got there it was subject to a takeover, and was a basket-case."

 

After a stint at Worsley Alumina, he moved to BHP to head up a team of around 100 in the mineral processing and hydrometallurgy teams, working "across the periodic table".

 

However, the arrival of Marius Kloppers as CEO saw Grocott ‘cross the street' to arch-rival Rio Tinto, just in time for the Global Financial Crisis to scupper key projects.

 

"It was an interesting time, but I think it's an important grounding to go through boom and bust times, and enjoy successes and failures," he said. 

 

"If you go through enough booms and busts that you either come out broken down and worn out, or wise and resilient."

 

He was Rio's head of processing, running an elite team scattered around the world, with "some of the best calibre of people" solving all kinds of issues, but he left, largely due to Rio's "bureaucracy from hell".

 

He'd spent some time from the late 1990s trying to make Southern Pacific Petroleum's kerogen shale project in Queensland work, but it turned out to be an expensive, environmentally, and socially toxic folly, so in that spirit of adventure decided to tackle another "dud" technology: high pressure acid leaching.

 

He took a 40% pay cut to join Clean TeQ Holdings (now Sunset Energy Metals) as its chief technical development officer, trying to make the expensive and historically prone to failure HPAL work at the Sunrise project in New South Wales.

 

Just one of a dozen HPAL projects globally can really be considered a success.

 

It's a "horrible track record", but Grocott remains hopeful the Sunrise can ultimately become a success, with some novel technologies he thinks can reduce risk, for a more complex, but more reliable flow sheet.

 

"I hope Sunrise goes ahead, because the world needs every single nickel project on the books to meet demand," he said.

 

It was the mix of rising nickel demand and processing challenges that saw him join QPM, which is trying to make a go of the Direct Nickel process, which had been stomped on more than a decade earlier by a cheaper, Chinese-developed pig nickel process.

 

Direct Nickel uses nitric acid to recover nickel, iron ore, high purity alumina, with only silica as the tailings at atmospheric pressure.

 

"It's not rocket science. There's no fancy equipment, all the technology is used elsewhere, and because it recycles and regenerates the nitric acid, so it solves the fact that nitric acid is so expensive," he said.

 

He was won over by QPM's prefeasibility study, which showed the TECH project was essentially de-risked, and has all the "sustainability essentials" he's keen on.

 

There's still some degree of risk, the technology is well understood, and the process works.

 

"We know it won't fail. The process is not a fussy eater. It will take any ore as long as the grade is there. We just need to turn it on and see how well it works," he said.

 

Over the past year, one of his core jobs has also to bring in partners, specifically South Korea's LG Energy Solution and POSCO. Samsung is also on the edge as a potential offtaker.

 

They are fearful of failing to secure supplies of battery-grade nickel, so have conducted extensive due diligence on the project, subsequently agreeing to invest in what could be a larger development than original scoped.

 

LG and POSCO also have skin in the game, with a combined US$15M investment equity in QPM.

 

Grocott said there's no mine risk, and little technology or scale-up risk, in TECH's aim to reverse what usually happens in Australia.

 

"We are importing ore and value-adding," he said,

 

Grocott believes the clean energy revolution will reshape the world, and that the "battery metals tide may not go out for some time", with projections for demand for nickel soaring, but a "supply chain train wreck" coming.

 

"We're going to need 1Mtpa of quality nickel, and you can't convert the pig nickel into a suitable battery grade nickel sulphate. You'd would need nickel to be over US$20,000 per tonne to pay for it, and that ignores its horrendous sustainability issues," he said.

 

"You might be able to sell it to Chinese battery processors, but it is awful stuff in terms of greenhouse gases generated, deforestation, and dumping tailings into the ocean.

 

He believes people will care where nickel comes from their electric batteries.