Facility will produce enough battery-grade material to support manufacturing of 250,000 electric cars a year
The price tag to build a Temiskaming battery materials industrial park will be in the neighbourhood of $720 million to $850 million.
Electra Battery Materials announced the results of a scoping study this week that crunched the economic numbers of the proposed development situated between the town of Cobalt and Temiskaming Shores. The property hosts the former Yukon refinery, which is being upgraded and expanded.
Electra Battery Materials aims for spring 2023 plant startup
Inflation and supply chain issues are pumping up the price tag for Electra Battery Materials to bring a Temiskaming refinery back to life. It will delay the plant’s startup, originally scheduled for December, moving the commissioning to the spring of 2023.
Toronto-based Electra is feeling the domino effect of the industry-wide price and supply-chain pinch, especially coming out of Asia. The original capital budget of US$67 million to refurbish and expand the former Yukon refinery is now looking more in the range of US$76 million to US$80 million.
The word cobalt came from kobold, a variant of the German word kobalos, a satyr and shape-shifter of Greek mythology who mocked the work of humans. By the Middle Ages, miners in the dark depths reported that touching the metal burned their fingertips, a sure sign that demons were watching them. And so the “demon metal” it became.
Cobalt – with a capital C – is synonymous with the silver rush of over a hundred years ago in northern Ontario. The town of Cobalt got its start when silver was discovered in 1903, and that mining rush outshone any gold rush in the previous 200 years.
Back Roads Bill Steer is the founder and remains the GM of the Canadian Ecology Centre. He teaches part-time at Nipissing University (Schulich School of Education) and Canadore College. His features can be found across Village Media’s Northern Ontario sites.
With the help of the region’s scholars, Back Roads Bill recounts the struggles and horrific working conditions endured by early miners and the reason we should all remember them
It is part of a history lesson we know little about, so perhaps we need a little schooling. Envision hard rock miners, once toiling far underground in dark, cramped and dangerous conditions; it was arduous and risky work.
They emerged tired and dirty at the end of their shifts, walking back to small wood-sided homes and their immigrant families. Mining, along with forestry, created what was then called ‘New Ontario,’ — what we know as Northern Ontario.
Indigenous mining in the north began after the last period of glaciations, people of the Plano culture moved into the area and began quarrying quartzite at Sheguiandah on Manitoulin Island. Mining is an important economic activity in Northern Ontario. It has been since the first copper mines at Bruce Mines in 1846 and Silver Islet in 1868.
As work continues to create a greener, cleaner future for the planet, the rush to find critical minerals that will spearhead the transition away from fossil-fueled energy has taken on a greater urgency. Explorers and developers are actively seeking out new sources of nickel, copper and lithium throughout the globe.
And then there’s cobalt, a metal whose ability to store energy has already made it crucial for everything from laptops to smartphones, and gives it an even more important role in the green revolution. This has led to a renewed interest in securing sources of the metal across Canada, including around the namesake community of Cobalt, in northern Ontario.
Electra Battery Materials plans to flip the switch on international cobalt processing plant later this year
Electra Battery Materials has passed a major regulatory milestone toward restarting a Temiskaming metals refinery and is on a clear path to achieve another.
The aspiring Toronto-based chemical processor announced it has received its industrial sewage works permit from the province and has filed its closure plan on Jan. 19 for its proposed cobalt, nickel and manganese processing operation located outside the town of Cobalt.
“There’s something absolutely beguiling about these great mineral rushes,” Angus says.
There were the cockroach races that saw miners betting as much as a $1,000 on the outcome. There was the day vaudeville performer Daisy Primrose walked down the street in Harem pants, a new form of female apparel so scandalous that it had been condemned by the Pope. There’s even an appearance by a dog named Bobbie Burns who may well have been the inspiration for Hollywood’s most celebrated canine star.
So if Charlie Angus had wanted, he could easily have confined himself to delivering a robust history of Cobalt, the fabled Northern Ontario mining town in which the New Democrat MP has long lived. But although he is a born storyteller with a passion for popular history that matches the best of Pierre Berton and James H. Gray, Angus had a lot more on his mind when he set out to write his latest book, Cobalt.
Town was ‘somewhere between a squatter’s camp and elegant cosmopolitan power’ Angus says
The rich, colourful history of Cobalt, Ontario is the subject of Charlie Angus’ new book Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals, Birth of a Mining Superpower. In it, Angus traces Cobalt’s history– the community was one of Canada’s first boomtowns– and the eccentric characters who dotted its landscape .
“There was a great description of Cobalt in 1909,” Angus said. “It looked somewhat like a cross between a wild west town and a medieval slum.” The town had its own banks, theatres and bordellos, Angus said, and even had a stock exchange long before Vancouver or Toronto.
Charlie Angus looks at lessons from an early 20th-century mining rush. An excerpt from the new book by the New Democrat MP for Timmins—James Bay, “Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals, Birth of a Mining Superpower.”
The world is searching for cobalt, the miracle ingredient of the digital age. The metal’s capacity to store energy and stabilize conductors has made possible the proliferation of rechargeable batteries, smartphones and laptops. More crucially, in the face of catastrophic climate change, cobalt offers the hope of a clean-energy future.
Electra Battery Materials’ integrated metals processing complex could bring 200 to 300 jobs
Trent Mell and Electra Battery Materials are out to occupy some crucial middle ground in the growing North American electric vehicle industry.
The Toronto company is refurbishing a once-shuttered refinery outside the town of Cobalt that’s 12 months away from the start of production to process cobalt hydroxide coming from the Democratic Republic of Congo into cobalt sulfate, one of the critical materials needed for manufacturing rechargeable batteries for the automakers. But they’re not stopping there.
In early 2018, Trent Mell, chief executive of Toronto-based First Cobalt Corp., was riding high on hopes that his company would discover a motherlode of cobalt in North America — a key component in the cathodes of lithium-ion batteries.
Nearly three-quarters of the world’s cobalt is produced in the Democratic Republic of Congo, much of which comes from small-scale and artisanal mines, where the use of child labour, dangerous working conditions and other human rights abuses have been well-documented.
Kuya Silver takes a second, in-depth look near former Silver Centre mines
Vancouver silver explorer Kuya Silver is on its second round of deeper drilling in the historic Silver Centre mining camp, south of the town of Cobalt. The company announced recently it has started a 2,000-metre drill program at its Silver Kings Joint Venture.
Kuya has an option to acquire a 70 per cent interest in the land holdings of Electra Battery Materials (formerly known First Cobalt) in on a jointly held area known as the Silver Kings Project.
First Cobalt unveils ambitious expansion plans to create battery metals industrial park in northeastern Ontario
For Trent Mell, it makes little sense to mine the metals needed to power the coming electrical vehicle (EV) revolution here, ship it overseas to Asia refiners to make into battery-grade material, and then send it back to North America to use in car production.
If the president-CEO of First Cobalt has his way, the Temiskaming district will be this continent’s centre of production to deliver many of those key ingredients, shorten the logistics journey, and help create a secure home-grown supply chain for EV makers for the first time ever.
Refinery developer wants to supply battery-grade metals for North American car market
The Toronto company behind the refurbishment of a mothballed Temiskaming hydrometallurgical refinery said it’s going all in on creating a “battery park” to feed refined cobalt and nickel to the electric vehicle market.
First Cobalt announced it’s making a name change and other strategic moves toward providing North American automakers with a domestic source of raw material with a proposed industrial park outside the town of Cobalt in northeastern Ontario.
The upcoming construction picture for a Temiskaming-area cobalt refinery is beginning to take shape with the awarding of a major metals processing contract.
First Cobalt selected Metso Outotec for the design and manufacturing of the equipment for a new solvent extraction plant and its process controls. Metso Outotec is a leading global company in the field of sustainable mineral processing and metal refining equipment.
