Unearthing energy solutions

Savannah Rice MS ’21 has been fascinated with what’s in the ground since she was a kid. She grew up in a military family, which meant a lot of travel—including trips to national parks. 

“My mom would always talk about rock layers and how old they are,” she said. When it came time to choose a college major, geology stood out. “I loved the earth. I loved history. It was the perfect combination of both.”

Rice is now putting that geology background to work as a geoscience R&D lead at Fortescue, a global metal mining company. There, she spearheads different forward-thinking, clean energy-related projects, including how to get more value out of materials coming out of mines and how to maximize the resources already available in those developed mines themselves. 

With that focus, Rice hopes to continue to find resources to enable new kinds of energy creation through things like wind, solar and geothermal power. These projects often rely on critical elements and materials that the U.S. either does not mine on its own or would otherwise require often expensive new mining projects to obtain.

Rice chose to pursue a master’s degree at Mines after she was presented with the opportunity to do a field-based degree that looked at structural geology and salt tectonics. She did some “crazy hikes up road cuts along I-70 to look at these 250 million plus-year-old rocks that had been deformed by salt tectonics prior to the Rocky Mountains being formed,” she said. 

As a student, Rice completed two internships at oil and gas companies, but that work never quite felt like the right fit. So, after graduating from Mines, she became a policy fellow at the U.S. Department of Energy, where she worked on projects to look at potentially unconventional sources for critical minerals, like coal fly ash and waste from historic mines, that could be transformed into materials that could enable alternative energy. She also identified potential research projects and partnered with colleges and universities on that work. 

Her time with the U.S. Department of Energy was the perfect opportunity to “find those minerals we need for clean energy technology and also do it in a way where we can clean up mine waste and not have to go after new sources, which is environmentally intensive,” she said. 

That fellowship led her to Fortescue, which in many ways continues that work. There, she meets with people across the company’s business to see what projects they think have potential but may not have time to work on themselves. She also comes up with research ideas and identifies ways to carry those research projects out. That sometimes includes partnering with colleges and universities—including, of course, Mines.

Rice said her experience at Mines gave her a chance to grow as an independent researcher and challenged her. As a student, she had a “lot of creative freedom and space to independently develop a project to see it through.” 

Being at Mines also taught her how to work with people from other fields of study, which is critical at her job now. Rice is the only geologist at Fortescue’s Golden, Colorado, office, but she’s able to effectively work with people across disciplines. “Every day I’m interacting with chemical engineers, a former patent attorney, a physical scientist,” she said. “I was really prepared for being able to do that by being at Mines versus just having my head down in geology and going out into a company and only working with geologists.” 

Rice sees this work as matching her childhood fascination with rocks and the subsurface and wanting to protect those valuable resources. “I wanted to find ways to move the needle on using resources sustainably and helping with energy transition,” she said.