International Trade committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. I would like to thank the members of the Standing Committee on International Trade for undertaking a study on Canada's exports of environmental and clean technology goods and services. Our presentation will focus on the export of batteries, specifically

International Trade committee  The rare earth work going on in Saskatchewan right now is fascinating. The Department of Defense in the U.S. is funding a rare earth plant in California, a project in California. That asset in particular, that initiative in Saskatchewan, should be viewed as a potential national

International Trade committee  Thank you for that question, Mr. Sheehan. It's good to see you again. If I go back to the day of that announcement, as a start-up in the Canadian market, it's hard. Capital formation is difficult. That's why I said, “Pick winners”, because there are a lot of wannabes. When I sta

International Trade committee  Thank you, and I'll be brief. The answer, really, is no. With our mining sector, and the process experience we have in Sudbury, along with a lot of gold mills, we have the millwrights, the electricians, and the maintenance personnel that we need. We have a lot of the foundations

International Trade committee  When I originally thought of this joint program, we were looking at a loan guarantee. As a taxpayer, I said, “I don't need a handout; I'm happy to pay it back.” There wasn't an envelope. There wasn't a practice. The hardest thing for me was where do I go? In the government, every

International Trade committee  Thank you. That was an excellent summary, by the way, of the industry I'm in. I can't disagree with anything you said. I've had the pleasure of going to the White House a couple of times to discuss some of these very issues on cobalt and national security. What I find fascinatin

International Trade committee  Thank you for that excellent question, Mr. Blaikie. It's an excellent question. For our refinery work, we're taking cobalt.... In fact, cobalt is not even produced in North America yet. That will come. We're taking cobalt from abroad, bringing it into Canada and creating the fi

International Trade committee  NRCAN has done a really good job at doing that. The auto supply chain that I'm talking with, the battery makers and the OEMs, are really focused on it. COVID really underlined the dangers of a global supply chain interruption and what that could mean. Onshoring is real. It's no

International Trade committee  I believe so, yes.

International Trade committee  That's an excellent question. I would say in many respects it does happen. I haven't talked about this yet for lack of time, but one of our really important competitive advantages in Canada is our energy grid. Our stated mandate is to produce the cleanest source of cobalt in the

International Trade committee  We're going to see less of it. The prevalent cathode is the nickel-cobalt manganese cathode. Where at one time, going back five years, about a third of the material was cobalt, now we're down to a point where we're somewhere closer to 10%. Tesla would be down to 5%. You might see

International Trade committee  We did a life-cycle assessment of our environment. On water consumption, in fact we return more to the environment than we take. Obviously, we're meeting provincial guidelines. There are no tailings. We're not capturing this water anywhere. We're using it in our process. We're re

International Trade committee  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. Wh

International Trade committee  From an extraction perspective, first we have to find it in decent quantities. Although Ontario certainly has some prospects, as do the north and the territories, we're just not there yet. Coming out of the mining sector, we invest with the commodity cycle. When the cobalt price

International Trade committee  We're not yet exporting, but that's very topical right now. In fact, just this morning we were looking at some of the tax rules to import the material into Canada and then to process it. The nature of the chemical conversion and whether it's exempt or not going into various marke