Beside Rio Tinto’s Bell Bay aluminium smelter in Tasmania, ABX Group is building a pilot plant that converts smelter waste into hydrogen fluoride (HF) for aluminium fluoride (AlF₃), opening a new pathway into rare earths. Managing Director of ABX Group, Mark Cooksey outlines how the project turns a costly liability into a high-value, multi-market opportunity.
Rather than starting from scratch, ABX has leased and repurposed an existing Rio Tinto facility adjacent to the Bell Bay smelter. The first months were spent stripping out legacy equipment and completing safety-critical civil works so that the pilot plant can be installed cleanly.
Cooksey stresses that the execution is tracking to plan – “In fact, some of the minor equipment has already been manufactured, is ready to be shipped to us. We're actually just waiting until our building here is ready to receive it and the major equipment's either going to be finished late this year or early next year. So yeah, everything's proceeding on schedule.”
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Aluminium fluoride one of the most essential elements for aluminium smelting, and Australia has a significant smelter base that relies on it. The real pivot, however, is ABX’s ability to produce hydrogen fluoride from aluminium smelter waste.
That capability shifts the company from a single-product reagent maker to a platform fluorochemicals business. Hydrogen fluoride is a gateway feedstock into multiple value chains, from AlF₃ to specialty fluorides. One of the most strategically important of these is rare earths: producing rare earth metals typically requires rare earth fluorides, directly linking ABX’s HF to critical minerals supply chains.
According to Cooksey, ABX is already in active discussions with industrial users of Hydrogen fluoride and with rare-earth stakeholders who need reliable fluoride inputs. Engagement with the global fluorine community is also ramping up. Cooksey is slated to present at a fluorine conference in Italy, where the company expects heightened interest. Taken together, these touchpoints suggest that ABX’s chemistry route has resonance beyond the aluminium sector and could command multi-industry demand.
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“Aluminium fluoride is a major application and very topical in Australia because of our huge aluminium smelter industry. But hydrogen fluoride is used in a lot of other applications and we're getting quite a lot of interest in those from other companies. For example, interestingly enough, hydrogen fluoride is needed in the production of rare earth metals. You actually need rare earth fluorides and so obviously rare earths is of huge interest to the globe and including to ABX and so we're having discussions with companies about that,” added Managing Director of ABX Group, Mark Cooksey.
The upcoming pilot plant will reframe a persistent industrial waste problem as a local source of strategic chemistry. By extracting Hydrogen fluoride from smelter waste, ABX upgrades a disposal liability into high-value reagents while creating the option to supply domestic smelters with AlF₃ enhancing supply security and reducing import exposure.
At the same time, the rare-earths adjacency widens the company’s relevance from aluminium into defence, electronics and clean-energy technologies that depend on rare-earth metals. Locating the pilot next to a major smelter reduces logistics complexity, tightens feedback loops between waste supply and reagent demand, and helps validate commercial assumptions at an industrial cadence.
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