How do you mine critical minerals in Canada? Very slowly, according to one of the largest miners in Ontario’s Ring of Fire.
Driving the news: Canada’s effort to ramp up its critical mineral sector is falling behind, an Australian mining magnate has recently warned in a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
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Andrew Forrest’s company, Ring of Fire Metals, controls the Eagle’s Nest mine—one of the most important deposits of critical minerals in Ontario’s Ring of Fire region.
Why it’s happening: It can take up to 25 years for a mining project to get greenlit, according to government estimates, much longer than in Australia and other mining-focused countries.
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Resources were first discovered in the Ring of Fire in 2006, and the area is still undergoing several environmental studies by different levels of government.
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By contrast, when nickel and copper resources were discovered in Western Australia in 2012, it took only four years to open the Nova mine.
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Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson has promised to speed up Canada’s approval process, but changes are still in the planning stage.
Why it matters: Critical minerals mining is a key part of the government’s master plan to build a clean energy supply chain in Canada.
- “If we’re going to bring supply online at the pace that the world needs to electrify, we need to shorten those timelines,” Teck CEO Jonathan Price told Bloomberg.
Zoom out: Both federal and provincial governments have made massive commitments to the clean energy sector—like the $13 billion set aside to help build a Volkswagen EV battery plant—but they may be getting a bit ahead of themselves. Without a way to supply minerals that those plants will need, the full potential of these investments won't be realized.—TS