Thank you, Mr. Serré.
CanmetMINING is one of NRCan's science and technology laboratories. It's focused on mining and mining techniques and optimizing the approaches that reduce environmental impacts on mining. It also plays a particular role in regulating and certifying mining equipment that operates mostly underground to ensure the safety of the mining workplace.
We have a Canmet laboratory in Ottawa, one in Val-d'Or, one in Sudbury as well, and one that's co-located in Hamilton with our materials laboratory that does metals lightweight research.
Our programming in CanmetMINING has been focused for a number of years on a number of key deliverable areas. One is about mining value from waste: taking mining operations that exist where there are waste residuals and waste rock and trying to produce commercially viable processes that can then extract minerals from those. There are immense numbers of critical minerals that are available in waste materials. Those materials were previously not particularly useful or seen as commercial, yet now they're a source of potential value. That extends right into the tailings that we see in sectors, including the oil sands sector in Alberta and Saskatchewan and in the work we do across the country.
At the same time, CanmetMINING has been working on rare earths and chromite. We're just concluding a six-year research agenda, in which there was over some $40 million spent on developing mining techniques for rare earths and rare earth elements. These are particularly interesting now in the critical mineral space, in that they're in demand for batteries, magnets and other things that go into electric vehicles and advanced clean energy activities. We're now moving into areas around hydrogen and using hydrogen in the mining processes and looking at energy efficiency as well.
CanmetMINING is one of our jewels of our research community that does the science and tech. The research is generally done in partnership with industry. The industry usually has the research problems and the research challenges or a particular technique that they're trying to develop, and our scientists work directly with industry and with the university communities to develop those new techniques.