By Michael Stimpson

Governments the world over have been trying to reduce carbon emissions by getting people to burn less fossil fuel in their daily lives. One component of that push is a switch from internal-combustion engines to electric motors in passenger vehicles.

One in 20 new passenger vehicles sold in Canada nowadays is electric, and the ratio is projected to grow to one in 10 by 2025. The federal government’s goal is 100% electric by 2040, and other industrialized countries have similar targets.

It follows, then, that demand for the batteries used by those cars and trucks will grow at a rapid pace in the coming decades. An accompanying challenge with that will be the sourcing of materials necessary for supplying millions of new vehicles every year with sizable batteries. Luckily, Canada has all those ingredients in present and potential mines.

Nickel and Cobalt

According to a 2021 article at
www.nature.com, the NMC532 lithium-ion battery pack used in many EVs contains about 35 kilograms (kg) of nickel. Canada, luckily, is one of the world’s leading suppliers of nickel; in fact, the Sudbury area produces more nickel ore than almost any other region of the globe.

Canada’s major nickel miners are Vale Canada and Glencore, which both have significant operations in northern Ontario. Vale also has mines in the area of Thompson in northern Manitoba and Voisey’s Bay in Labrador. Glencore’s nickel assets include the Raglan mines in Quebec as well as its Sudbury Integrated Nickel Operations. In addition, nickel is one of the minerals Noront Resources hopes to pull out of the ground someday in northern Ontario’s Ring of Fire.

That EV battery pack will also contain 14 kg of cobalt, which is often mined with nickel. Ontario mines shipped 1,100 tonnes of it in 2021, according to the province’s Ministry of Northern Development, Mines, Natural Resources and Forestry. Larger volumes of cobalt are produced in Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador. A lesser volume comes from Manitoba.

Farther north, in the Northwest Territories, Fortune Minerals’ hopes of starting Canada’s first primary cobalt mine were buoyed last year by the opening of a 97-kilometre all-season road to Whati, an Indigenous community near Fortune’s NICO project. The company’s website declares that “NICO is positioned to stand out as a North American asset dedicated to the production of cobalt chemicals needed to manufacture rechargeable batteries used in electric vehicles.”

 Lithium Dreams

An NMC532 battery pack has about 8 kg of lithium, an element mined primarily in Australia, China, and Chile. Canada currently has no lithium mines, but there are many ongoing exploration projects and surely at least one of them will lead to a producing mine in the not-too-distant future.

Winnipeg-headquartered Snow Lake Lithium is one possible future miner. It has ambitious plans for a mine somewhere on the tens of thousands of acres of northern Manitoba land it has been exploring.

“Our ambition is to become the first fully integrated, carbon-neutral lithium hydroxide provider to the North American electric vehicle industry,” says Philip Gross, Snow Lake’s Chief Executive Officer. “We are developing the world’s first all-electric lithium mine, operated by renewable power, and are currently looking for a joint venture partner to create a lithium hydroxide processing plant in the region.”

The area was first explored in the 1930s and “kept coming up lithium,” Gross explains. Lithium wasn’t highly valued back then, but it is in today’s market. Recent drilling has yielded good results, he says, “and we’ve only explored about 1% [of the land] so far!”

From what they’ve found, the folks at Snow Lake Lithium estimate a 10-year mine life. Gross hopes and expects further exploration will extend that estimate to 20 years or more.

New Age Metals, meanwhile, has hopes for its lithium properties in southeast Manitoba. Past drilling results in the Winnipeg River pegmatite field have been continuously promising, and more drilling is in the works for 2022 with the eventual goal of opening a lithium mine near the Tanco mine where caesium and tantalum are extracted.

New Age signed an “earn-in” agreement with Australian lithium producer Mineral Resources last year, so “all the pieces are there” for a producing mine as long as exploration continues to be successful, says Cody Hunt, New Age’s Vice President, Business Development until recently.

And there’s a lot more lithium exploration going on. Avalon Advanced Materials is exploring at its Separation Rapids property near Kenora, ON, and working toward establishing a refinery in Thunder Bay. 92 Resources is exploring in the Northwest Territories. Prairie Lithium recently reported results in southeast Saskatchewan. Frontier Lithium has been exploring at multiple sites in northwestern Ontario. There’s potential for Canada to eventually become a world leader in lithium.

Avalon took a step closer to building a lithium refinery when it reached a letter of intent with an Essar Group company this spring – a development of critical importance, according to Avalon President and CEO Don Bubar.

“We needed an investing partner that had capacity to provide some of the financial support, because it’s a big expenditure to build a facility like this refinery,” Bubar remarks from Toronto. He added that Avalon aims to finalize the details of its arrangement with Essar Group’s RenJoules International by the end of June and have a refinery up and running in Thunder Bay by 2025 or 2026.

In Development

EV batteries also contain manganese, a silvery or greyish-white metal that is not presently mined in Canada. There are, however, promising properties in New Brunswick where Canadian Manganese Company and Manganese X Energy hope to start mining in the coming years.

Also essential to lithium-ion EV batteries is graphite, presently produced mostly in China. Canada has one graphite mine, in Quebec. Northern Graphite Corporation has acquired that mine and aspires to build one in Ontario as well. On its website the company describes the Bissett Creek property near North Bay as “a very advanced stage project.”

Rising gasoline prices (more than
$2/litre in some Canadian cities on May 10, 2022) have added to demand for electric cars, and consumers are on wait lists to get them. With a $5,000 federal rebate for many EV models, some provinces topping up the incentive, and EV prices forecast to shrink, we can expect demand to continue growing rapidly not just in Canada but around the world.

That means an ever-growing demand for batteries. Canada, happily, has the ingredients to make those batteries. Getting them out of the ground and to market, however, will take time, capital, and a whole lot of work.