Dr Mark Cooksey secures permanent position in ALCORE; Key responsibility includes AlF3 production process

Dr Mark Cooksey has permanently joined Australian Bauxite Limited’s technology subsidiary ALCORE Limited (Alcore). The news came on Wednesday, January 13, after ABx announced officially.

Dr Cooksey first joined Alcore in January 2020 as a General Manager and became CEO in the next seven months on August 24, 2020, on a leave arrangement from Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO. However, his current position in Alcore is permanent, with the key responsibility of leading the development and commercialisation of a new process for aluminium fluoride (AlF3) production.

Dr Cooksey has vast experience in research, development, and commercialisation of new processes in the minerals and metals industry. He started his career as a Research Engineer in aluminium smelting with Comalco (now Rio Tinto Alcan) in 1997 and became a Senior Research Engineer in 2000. In 2004, he joined CSIRO as a Senior Research Engineer and became a Senior Principal Research Leader in 2016.

His doctorate degree in Chemical and Materials Engineering, along with impressive experience in commercialising new technologies and processes, are expected to take Alcore to the next phase of development.

Welcoming Dr Cooksey to the new permanent position, Ian Levy, ABx's CEO, commented: "In the last 12 months Mark has been instrumental in accelerating Alcore's technical and commercial development, and we deeply appreciate CSIRO for facilitating this arrangement. Alcore is now beginning to scale-up the technology to larger scale production and needs the highly skilled and experienced leadership that Mark can provide. This is an important step in the delivery of value from the Alcore initiative to all shareholders."

Under Dr Cooksey’s guidance in the last 1 year, Alcore achieved repeated recovery of fluorine from aluminium waste provided by multiple suppliers. In addition, the company consistently produced AlF3 with composition meeting commercial chemical and physical specifications. The chemical analysis was performed by CSIRO.