RAVIKUMAR, Mr Kumaraguru, Private capacity [11:24] CHAIR: Welcome. Although the committee does not require you to give evidence under oath, I should advise you that this hearing is a legal proceeding of the parliament and therefore has the same standing as the proceedings of the House. The giving of false or misleading evidence is a serious matter and may be regarded as a contempt of parliament. Evidence given today will be recorded by Hansard and attracts parliamentary privilege. Do you have any comments to make on the capacity in which you appear? Mr Ravikumar : I am a chemical engineering postgraduate student at the University of Queensland and I am currently working on rare earth process design and copper recovery. CHAIR: Thank you. I now invite you to make a brief opening statement before we continue to discussion and questions. Mr Ravikumar : Thank you, Chair and committee members. I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet and pay my respects to elders past and present. I made submission 98 because I wanted to contribute to the country, but, on review, I found some factual errors and references which I could not verify and proposals stated with more certainty than I can support. I take responsibility and apologise. I have prepared written corrections and clarifications for the committee, which have been shared. I withdraw the unsupported lithium value multipliers. My proposed wet tailings ban is not required by the global tailings standard. My claim that there was no coordination mechanism was wrong, and a critical minerals office already exists. My percentages for Indigenous equity, community contribution and water recycling were in my policy proposals, but I have not established that those exact levels suit every project. Please read my recommendations with the written corrections and qualifications. My central point remains. Public support should consider commercial viability, community outcomes and environmental risks together. A valuable deposit alone does not establish a viable processing business. I welcome the progress on the Queensland Resources Common User Facility, which was constructed in June 2026, and commissioning is underway. I also welcome the production tax incentive that's available from July 2027. But we should build on the existing work and identify specific gaps before proposing more facilities or agencies. With those qualifications, I ask the committee to consider four priorities. First, involve affected communities and traditional owners early while designs can still change. Record commitments clearly and report whether they are delivered. Co-ownership can be an option where communities choose it, with independent advice about financial risks, but it cannot replace consent or cultural heritage protection. I do not speak for traditional owners. Second, ask for access to processing trials before funding more facilities. A laboratory result does not establish reliable operations at larger scale or customer acceptance. Shared facilities can help test these questions where there is demonstrated demand. I cannot substantiate that five is the right number, and the existing capacity of the pilot plant, access costs and users needs should guide any additional investments. Third, we require independently reviewed water and tailings assessments for the actual site. I now favour comparing alternatives rather than assuming one technology or recycling percentage that fits everywhere. Water availability, energy use and long-term safety matter together. Regional assessments should also consider combined pressures from nearby projects while recognising existing reforms. Fourth, the government, employers and training providers should coordinate around the actual skills needed and employment outcomes supporting Indigenous participation beyond the construction. These are the proposals for consideration. I have not costed the full package or shown that every proposal should be adopted nationally. I ask for the revisions based on local needs, project economics and clear accountability for results. I welcome your questions. Thank you. CHAIR: Thanks, Mr Ravikumar. I note that you have supplied the committee with corrections and clarifications to your submission. We have a cut-off date of Monday 12 October. Would it be helpful for you to resubmit, with corrections? From listening to your opening statement today and looking at your corrections as opposed to your submission, there have been substantial changes. Is that a correct observation? Mr Ravikumar : Yes. CHAIR: So it may be helpful to the committee and the secretariat to allow you to make your corrections and then resubmit to the committee, if that is something that you would like to do. Mr Ravikumar : Yes. CHAIR: It just strikes me that it's going to be highly confusing for the secretariat and also for members of the committee to go back and look at, potentially, things that you've now redacted or changed. I commend you for doing that; I'm not being critical of that. It's just so that we can have a more fulsome understanding of what you really want to communicate to us. But I do note that you said that your central point still stands, without putting words in your mouth—that we need to get this right. Is that what you're really driving at, as someone who is young and a student in this and very interested? Do you want to talk through that a little with us? Mr Ravikumar : I wanted industries to follow a methodology that is taught in our uni. There is a strategy where you design, announce and then you defend. Basically, you decide on a plant in a closed environment and then you come to a land and you announce that 'these are mine structures and we're going to construct it', and then there will be Indigenous people—there will be some hurdles around constructing. Instead of that, I wanted to propose another methodology. It's called DAVE. Basically, you declare it, you co-design it with the Indigenous community and you acknowledge with them that 'we're going to do a plant here and the both of us can envision it and acknowledge what can be done', because it can reduce a lot of cost to the industries. If we do it in a closed environment and then we propose that we are going to build this thing, what happens is sometimes it can be a cultural heritage area, and you might have to redesign the whole plant and bear the costs. The lawsuits and other things will be very expensive. Instead of that, I wanted to propose that we need to engage with the Indigenous community whose land it is at the earlier stage of the project so that we can design it accordingly. That was my point. And there was a point on the wet tailings, in my last proposal. There have been deaths that happened due to the leakage of wet tailings. In my older proposal, I tried to propose a blanket ban on the wet tailings because, from my safety experience, the wet tailings have a possibility of leakages. If a flood comes there, and if there are any living people there, there will be toxic liquids that can leach, and things can happen. So I literally wanted the industries not to do that, but, when you design a plant, there are some technical difficulties where you cannot apply everywhere. We cannot ban the wet tailings. But, from my experience, if I am designing a plant, I wanted to reduce them as much as possible so that we can maintain it as dry tailings. We can put a pressure filter or a crystalliser so that, instead of wet tailings, we can produce solid waste. In the old proposal I wanted to do a complete ban, but that is not possible. So we might need to do it in an individual case-by-case basis. That was my communication of an idea. I also proposed five pilot plants, but there is already the QRCUF that's happening. I didn't do any calculations behind it, but it was just my ambition. I ambitiously told that. I wanted to tell that, based on the utilisation of those common user facilities and common shared pilot plants, and based on how the usage is and how the demand is, we can expand more plants like that. So that was the gist of my communication of the idea. CHAIR: Thank you. You've already talked us through the DAVE model, which starts with 'declare', which I think is quite important. Was there something that you wanted to investigate there, Trish? Dr TRISH COOK: I'd like to understand more about the tailings, how they currently work and what your suggestions might be for improvement of managing tailings—both existing tailings and future ones. Is that an area that you're familiar with? Mr Ravikumar : Yes, but I can't make a detailed explanation. Dr TRISH COOK: Broad strokes would be welcome. Mr Ravikumar : I can take that on notice, but, to my knowledge—basically, let's say we are doing a plant and we are designing it. There might be lots of brine water coming out of the plant, which will be having lots of vestiges of dissolved salts and stuff. There will also be tailings coming out of the flotation equipment, where you have a concentrator where your ore comes up, and that is tailings. Basically, what I wanted to tell is that these tailings are like a slurry, basically. It's basically like acid mine drainage. What happens is that, when they go down on the leak, there is formation of sulphuric acid because of the tailings. It is fine if nothing happens, but, when a flood or any event comes, there can be leakages, and that could lead to fatalities of people. I want to avoid that risk, but I'm not sure of the exact technology or methodology we can use. We should think about how we can reduce the wet tailings, but we can prioritise introducing dry tailings, instead of wet tailings. But the idea should be tested and based on the economics, profit and those kinds of assessments. Dr TRISH COOK: And, for wet tailings, presumably based on avoiding flood-prone areas. Mr Ravikumar : Yes. Dr TRISH COOK: Thank you. CHAIR: Mr Farley. Mr FARLEY: You've made mention in your submission of the recycling of batteries there. You've got a very expansive submission. Can you focus a little bit more on what I'd call the harvesting of used products—recycling. Mr Ravikumar : I'm not able to remember it, but the gist is that, for battery recycling, we use two kinds of technology. We use hydrometallurgy and pyrometallurgy. We try to recover as much of the metal as possible. For low-grade materials, we use hydrometallurgy processes. When the ore is high grade, we use pyrometallurgy processes. Basically, when the battery arrives, we turn it into a black mass. Then, with the black mass, we use our chemical metallurgy techniques so that we extract as much of the mineral as possible. But what I want to communicate is that I want to promote innovations on that. We have lots of research going that is based on that. That links to the idea of the shared pilot plants I was promoting. We need more pilot plants so that we can test it and we can increase the capacity of battery recycling. Mr FARLEY: Thank you. CHAIR: So you're advocating for the pilot plants where we might be able to— Mr Ravikumar : Yes. CHAIR: Mr Farley's line of questioning is—we're obviously very keen to extract the critical minerals from the ground, but, if there's capacity to recycle ones that have already been extracted and value added, then that's potentially something that we should be looking to recommend as a committee. And that's something that your submission did pick up on, which is really good. Ash. Ms AMBIHAIPAHAR: My question is on the submission about AI and digital transformation. Can you expand on it a little bit. I'm not really understanding what you've articulated. Are you able to talk about what it means in a practical sense for the industry itself? Mr Ravikumar : Yes. I want the government to motivate more machine-learning projects to optimise the plants for energy recovery. If we have machine learning and AI, we can use it to provide predictive maintenance. Instead of doing reactive maintenance, we can do preventive maintenance, and we can save energy. For example, I did a hackathon at UQ where we looked at heat-exchanger optimisation for a data centre. We tried to think of how we can do preventive maintenance. In industries, most of the time, this maintenance happens on a reactive basis, not on a proactive basis. If we apply machine-learning projects, we can make predictions based on the machines' behaviour. Based on their parameters, we can optimise the energy usage, because, if you predict and maintain early, there will be less energy utilisation. That's basically the idea I wanted to communicate. Ms AMBIHAIPAHAR: Thank you. CHAIR: Is there anything else that you want to add today? Mr Ravikumar : Nothing much—but I want to add a point on the zero-liquid-discharge plants. There are some areas that are very water scarce. My idea for those areas is to, if possible, mandate zero-liquid-discharge plants—that is, to not let any water out of the plant. Whatever water is there is circulated; you reuse and recycle it. There is still testing analysis that we would need to do. But, for mining projects or metallurgy projects, if we can motivate industries or maybe give incentives for zero-liquid-discharge plants—because the metallurgy process consumes a lot of water. If we can mandate these kinds of things, we can save a lot of water in those areas. Mandating is a dream, but we can still go towards it. CHAIR: Okay. Thank you. We appreciate your attending. Would you like to resubmit— Mr Ravikumar : Yes. CHAIR: by Monday 12 October. That way, you can look at the corrections that you want to make. I think that will be helpful for us, so thank you for that. You'll be sent a copy of the transcript of your evidence, and you'll be given the opportunity to make corrections to any transcription errors. Thank you very much for your attendance. Proceedings suspended from 11:47 to 12:58 .