Advanced Materials R&D
Ultra-high purity materials from non-traditional mineral sources. Developed with QUT.
Lava Blue converts Australian minerals into the high-purity materials needed to manufacture batteries, LEDs, semiconductors, and solar cells.
Our proprietary processes can turn unconventional sources like kaolin clay and mine waste into high-value products.
Synthetic sapphire made from High Purity Alumina
What we do
Building Australia's Next Generation of Advanced Materials
The clean energy transition depends on materials most people have never heard of.
High Purity Alumina is one. Lava Blue has developed the processing technology to produce HPA from unconventional sources.
High Purity Alumina (HPA) is a fundamental material for the 21st century, used in batteries, LED lighting, semiconductors.
Lava Blue produces HPA at 4N and 5N purity from sources that traditional producers cannot use, including kaolin and mine tailings. Lava Blue is licensing this process to industrial partners.
Technology
From clay and mine waste to 99.99% purity
Lava Blue’s process can use feedstocks, including kaolin, mine tailings and industrial waste.
Developed in collaboration with QUT the process has been validated from lab to pilot scale at our PRiSM facility in Brisbane.
Advanced high-purity alumina
Production & Applications Flowsheet
Feedstock
Kaolin clay, mine tailings, and industrial waste.
Digestion
Proprietary HCl leaching.
Recrystallization
Repeated recrystallisation drives off impurities.
Calcination
High-temperature calcination converts to alumina.
Milling
Milled and classified to the target particle size.
- HPA-Infused Pastes
- Coated Battery Separators
- HPA for Advanced Ceramics
- Sapphire Grade HPA
Science-driven approach
The research behind the process
Purity Matters
Analytical methods for 4N and 5N qualification. You can't produce high-purity materials without rigorous measurement.
Value from Waste
Critical materials recovered from mine tailings and industrial residues.
Zero Emissions Processing
Renewable energy inputs embedded across all processing technologies.
Materials by Design
Precise control over material properties for next-generation applications.
Where the Technology Becomes Real
Lava Blue's PRiSM facility (Centre for Predictive Research into Specialty Materials) in Brisbane brings research, development, and demonstration together in one location.
PRiSM produces high-purity material samples for licensee qualification, tests processing systems under industrial conditions, and derisks scale-up to industrial scale production.
The facility runs on 200kW of on-site solar and a 1.45MW containerised battery system.
Beyond HPA (growth)
Expanding Into Critical Metals
The same proprietary methods that produce HPA can be applied to production of other high-purity materials.
Lava Blue is already developing these methods, backed by machine learning tools that accelerate process optimisation and improve quality control across the production cycle.
Origin story
It Started in the Volcanic Soils of North Queensland
In the 1960s and 70s, Lava Plains supplied more than 10% of the world's blue sapphires, the crystal form of aluminium oxide.
Decades later, Lava Blue returned to that landscape. In 2018, we produced our first batch of 4N High Purity Alumina from the same volcanic clay. Today our subsidiary Mt Rosey Mining Company holds the original mining lease, sitting on a JORC-compliant deposit of more than 13 million tonnes of aluminium-rich clay.
Our commercial model
