Western #Canada holds potential to become a ‘critical minerals processing behemoth,’ expert says
A group of battery metal exploration companies and startups says it has a plan to turbocharge Canada’s critical minerals sector by building out “midstream” mineral processing facilities in Western Canada.
Two reports published by the Battery Metals Association of Canada, which hired analysts at the Transition Accelerator to consult with their members, identified nine critical minerals — copper, graphite, iron, nickel, lithium, phosphate, rare earths and vanadium — and five regions where they see big opportunities for major projects.
For example, British Columbia has at least four producing copper mines, which all ship their copper concentrate overseas, primarily to China, because there are no smelters in Western Canada. Building a copper smelter could encourage copper production and exploration while also creating higher-value products to sell, the reports said.
“If you wanted to put together a critical minerals processing behemoth anywhere in the world, the assets that we have in Alberta to do that are just phenomenal,” Bentley Allan, a professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins University and a principal at Transition Accelerator, said. “It has the chemical processing expertise, the clean power resources, other kinds of machining and precision instruments, which make Alberta a really incredible place to do this.”
Read more at: https://financialpost.com/commodities/mining/western-canada-critical-minerals-processing-behemoth
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