Thank you very much for the invitation to be a witness here today.
I'll give you a little bit of my background information. I'm a geologist. I've been involved in mineral exploration and development in northern Canada for 45 years now. For the last 26 years, I've been president and CEO of Avalon. For most of those years, we have been looking at opportunities to start these critical minerals supply chains in Canada—notably, lithium, rare earths, cesium, tantalum, tin, indium and others. It's been very challenging. It's not simple getting these non-traditional commodities started into production, but now there is certainly interest, and we're delighted to see that new opportunity is there.
One opportunity I'm particularly excited about is that this will create enormous new economic development opportunities for indigenous businesses and communities in the north. I have been an advocate for this for many, many years. Some of you who read The Globe and Mail may have seen that I got an opinion piece published two weeks ago in the report on business. It was co-authored by my good friend and former national chief Phil Fontaine. We pointed out how these new critical minerals supply chains offer a tremendous opportunity for active involvement by indigenous communities in the north in building these new supply chains.
I'm keen to be able to create some positive examples of that myself. With our lithium project, we're now at the stage of trying to get a lithium process refinery to make the battery material products from the mineral concentrates that are your feedstock at a location in Thunder Bay, Ontario. We think it's ideal because of its location with respect to existing transportation infrastructure and the proximity to new markets emerging in eastern Canada.
Part of the dialogue there is that there's lots of interest in Thunder Bay in having that facility there, including with the Fort William First Nation. They are keen to partner with us, to work with us on getting this refinery established on their land and at the same time create many new opportunities for other first nations to begin to create the supply of lithium minerals as feed for that refinery going forward. That will allow us to increase production over time, because we know that there will be an increase in demand over time. That's our vision for getting that supply chain started in that sector.
The other thing I would like to mention briefly is that there are many other circumstances where you can look at trying to recover these critical minerals from unconventional situations. You're going to hear about one from E3 Metals later, I guess, on the recovery of lithium from the oil field brines in Alberta. Another very unappreciated opportunity is going back to historic mine wastes that are closed mine sites. They were developed decades ago to produce a traditional exchange-traded commodity, but the resource may have had many other elements in it that had no value or interest decades ago [Technical difficulty—Editor]. Many of these sites now offer opportunities to go back and create a new plan, reprocess the tailings that track critical minerals, and fully remediate the long-term environmental liability while you do it.
There are lots of opportunities, including some for lithium. We had a project in southwestern Nova Scotia, a past-producing tin mine called East Kemptville. Tin mines are not just tin deposits. There's lot of stuff in them, including lithium, tin, indium, gallium and germanium. Lots of potentially important critical minerals are there in the wastes and the tailings. There are new opportunities to recover them and remediate the site, but it's never easy to do. There are always issues in terms of access and managing the liabilities from the historically poor understanding of what sort of opportunities are available there now.
Plus, there are a lot of innovative new technologies being created now to allow for more efficient extraction processes that just don't generate the waste that traditional mining operations used to.
All of those things are possible, and I would love to be able to get some of these situations started, create a positive precedent and show the rest of the world how we can provide real leadership on recovering these critical minerals in these non-traditional circumstances. Plus, I'm looking at one for rare earth.
In northern Ontario, we just disclosed last week a really interesting opportunity to get the rare earth supply chain started quickly and easily, just by processing historic mine waste.