Thank you.
I'm actually here to represent IEP, which is a small company operating out of Timmins, Ontario. They have an interesting prospect called Lackner Lake. It was explored back in the 1950s. A resource of something like 150 million tonnes of niobium, Nb2O5, at a grade of about 0.2 weight per cent, was identified, and then basically abandoned. The prospect also has tremendous potential for the rare earth elements.
When I say I'm representing them...I'm obviously a professor at McGill University. I don't have a consulting relationship with the company. In fact, our relationship is entirely a research relationship funded by NSERC—in other words, funded by the federal government—in a company-industry partnership. They wanted me to represent them here to basically answer questions about the geology of the deposit.
I focus on the processes that concentrate metals, and particularly critical metals, to economically extractable levels. That's where we're coming from.
Our research group pioneered the field of rare earth element ore deposit or ore genesis. For example, our work led to the discovery of Strange Lake, which I'm sure you're all aware of because of Torngat Metals. We were also involved in the discovery of Nechalacho, another rare earth element deposit in the Northwest Territories, and most recently the scandium deposit at Crater Lake. We have also worked on Ashram. We've worked on some of the major deposits.
That's the background. Why are we interested in Lackner Lake? The reason is quite simple. The deposits I've been talking about have a huge infrastructure problem: They're all in the Far North. Your challenge, really, is to basically provide the infrastructure you need to extract the metals. I think this is a huge challenge. What I notice is there has been comparatively little exploration of systems that could be really exciting close to major centres. In the case of Lackner Lake, the deposit we're interested in is something like 100 kilometres from Timmins, so it's sitting in a major mining district. There are no infrastructure issues there at all.
I'll just close with the observation that if we're looking for rare elements or if we're looking for niobium, what we want to look for is carbonatite complexes, and what you have there is a carbonatite complex. If you looked at the whole story globally, what you would actually find is that carbonatite complexes are responsible for over 90% of the world's niobium and over 60% of the world's rare earth elements. If you want to find a deposit, go and look at carbonatites, but they're under-explored, particularly in the south of the country. For some damn reason, we geologists love to go north. It's fun.