Demand for electric batteries sparks Quebec cobalt rush
Before they put in a bypass in the early 1960s, automobiles passed through the town of Cobalt, near Lake Temiskaming in Northern Ontario, to get from here to there. The town - no offense to those who considered it paradise - was as bleak a rusting, broken-down and abandoned place as you’d find in any postapocalypse movie.
The town’s name, though not as distasteful as former Asbestos, Quebec, was ironically symbolic of an undesirable substance. Cobalt, the mineral, though prized since antiquity for use in jewelry, was at that time considered a nuisance contaminant in the ore that contained the real treasure, silver.
Silver mining in the Cobalt area died off and the town all but died with it. That was long before new uses were discovered for cobalt, specifically in the manufacture of batteries and electronic products.
Now, with the surge towards electric vehicles of all sorts (see my “Paul Blart” column a few weeks ago), cobalt and other minerals like lithium are in massive demand. The formerly forlorn burb of Cobalt is now a boom town swept up in a cobalt rush in full force with multiple exploration companies staking out the suddenly valuable mineral.
The same is happening in Quebec, where cobalt has been produced for years as a byproduct of nickel or copper extraction in two mines in Nunavik. Now, though, cobalt exploration and development is popping up in virtually all areas of the province, especially the Abitibi region, across the border from the aforementioned Cobalt, and in Northern Quebec and the North Shore.
A 2018 report on the potential of cobalt in Quebec by SIDEX, the Quebec government mining investment agency, lists literally dozens of zones where hundreds of promising deposits of cobalt have been identified.
This potential motherlode of cobalt in Quebec has attracted the attention of a bunch of business types whose names may be familiar to readers. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Ray Dalio, Richard Branson and Michael Bloomberg. These humble investors are the money behind a company called Kobold, which is essentially a green energy brain trust of geologists scouring the globe for electric battery minerals.
Kobold, according to various industry reports, has targeted territory in Nunavik, near the existing Raglan Lake nickel mine. CEO Kurt House told mining.com, “We own about 800 square km of exploration tenements in Northern Quebec. It’s a large holding, very prospective, very interesting terrain.”
We assume tenement is a mining term. And 800 square km is about the same area as New York City.
House, a bit of a visionary in the green energy universe, says: “To solve global warming, we have to fully electrify the entire economy, including the transportation fleet. There are currently 1.3 billion cars on the planet.. By mid-century, that will be close to 3 billion … To make all of those electric vehicles you’ll need more than $5 trillion worth of cobalt, nickel, lithium and copper.”
Kobold is also working on exploration projects in Ontario, Saskatchewan, Australia and Zambia. Currently, the Democratic Republic of Congo supplies more than half the world’s cobalt, through mostly appalling practices.
Hence the cobalt rush elsewhere, backed by, one assumes, the smart money. Kobold is but one player, albeit a significant one, in the race to prospect and mine profitable deposits of battery minerals.
Quebec aspires to be a leader in the transition to electric vehicles, and besides supplying the materials for batteries, it’s nurturing homegrown battery manufacturing plants, notably with its poster corporation for the green shift, Lion Electric.
The St. Jerome-based company succeeded in bringing Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau and Premier Francois Legault together last March to announce $100 million in funding for a battery assembly plant, the production of which will find its way into trucks and buses the company manufactures.
And for those concerned about what the heck we’re going to do with all those zillions of used batteries for electric vehicles, a Quebec company is already a step ahead. Montreal-based St. Georges Eco-mining announced last month it is moving ahead with plans for a huge battery recycling plant in Baie Comeau.
Meanwhile, in the town of Cobalt, while it’s booming in the outskirts, the historical society is concerned about the town’s last two remaining heritage mining sites, both at the point of hopeless deterioration.