Thank you very much for the question, Mr. Cannings.
We hear a lot about the mining end of it. We hear a lot about the electric vehicles, charging and everything, but there's a lot of stuff that happens in between. That's all the value-added. You mine the ore and then it has to be refined into a useful metal. Then it has to be converted into a useful battery chemical, and all that comes together combined into a cathode material. The anode's a little bit simpler because it's just graphite. It might get mixed with silicone, but the same kind of thing happens on either of the electrodes. That's all before it ever gets into a battery cell, battery module or battery pack, and then into an electric vehicle. There are many transformation steps throughout this whole process.
I'm here as a witness to talk about critical minerals and the transformation of those critical minerals. My agenda, of course, is the transformation of those critical minerals into something useful in a battery. What I want to underscore is that we need to fix that middle supply chain. We need to be making cathode materials and anode materials for assembly into a battery cell here in North America, and preferably in Canada, if we're going to avoid shipping our raw materials overseas and having them come back in the form of a battery. I think, ultimately, that's critical.
What can the government do? The government is already supporting a company like Nano One through SDTC and a variety of other mechanisms to commercialize their technology, to pilot it and prove it. I believe we can do it with a pan-Canadian effort. We can bring together the nickel miners and the lithium miners, and the graphite miners for that matter on the other side of things, to form a completely integrated supply chain.
The value to integrating the supply chain is not only just creating the—