Absolutely. Thank you, that's a very good question.
Right now in the supply chain, cobalt comes out of essentially nickel and copper mines. From the nickel operations, whether they are here in Canada, Australia, Russia or Indonesia, a lot of that ends up in the alloy market. When you're looking at batteries—just the way it's processed—it comes out of the African copper belts. That's the DRC. Seventy percent of the world's cobalt comes out of Congo. Almost all of the world's batteries require Congo. I'd liken it to the new Saudi Arabia of the EV world.
Most of that, through the belt and road initiative and direct investment, has found its way from the DRC into China where it gets refined. That's sort of where we're competing. There's Umicore out of Finland. There's soon to be First Cobalt out of Canada, and then there's China.
This is not just a geopolitical statement. It's also just the diversification of a supply chain and it's ESG, which I mentioned earlier. There are a lot of reasons why people would love to see cobalt out of Canada. We do have some assets around our refinery that we have explored. We have even more advanced assets in Idaho, but all of that could be seen as potentially a vertically integrated supply chain here on the continent.