A former silver mining area in northern Ontario has been tapped to be the home of North America's first battery-grade cobalt refinery. The nearby town — aptly named Cobalt — may finally be living up to its name.
When completed, the facility will process mined cobalt rock — refining it into cobalt sulfate, an essential ingredient in lithium-ion batteries used in everything from electric vehicles and smartphones to fighter jets.
Electra Battery Materials, the company behind the project, says the plant will be fully operational by the end of 2027 and could produce 6,500 tonnes of battery-grade cobalt — enough to supply about one million electric vehicle batteries per year.
"Increasingly we need these critical minerals for our batteries and for our high-tech in order to function in modern society," said the company's founder and CEO Trent Mell. "So it's not just the cars, it's not just powering our grid with storage, it is also national security."
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In the refinery’s lab, Graham Kinsman, Electra's metallurgical lead, is busy tweaking chemical and physical processes to remove impurities like iron and copper from the cobalt.
"There's a lot of specificity involved, so at each stage of the process we're adjusting pHs, we're addressing temperatures to make sure that we are efficiently removing the material that we need to remove," he said.
The final product is a very pure form of cobalt that stabilizes the batteries so they don't overheat and helps them hold a charge for a longer period of time.
Despite the town of Cobalt's name hinting at an abundance of it in the area, the plant won't be sourcing mined rock locally — or even domestically. Instead, it will be imported from overseas.
The community got its name after cobalt was found during construction of the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway in 1903. But more important at the time was the discovery of silver.
The area immediately became the site of a major silver rush that lasted through the 1920s. At its height, it supplied 44 per cent of the world's silver production, according to the Cobalt Mining Museum.
In the last decade, mining companies have been prospecting for cobalt in the old silver mines, hoping to spot the tell-tale pink "cobalt bloom" that occurs when cobalt comes into contact with oxygen. But none so far have found a vein that could sustain a mine.
Mell's former company, First Cobalt Corp., was among those that were prospecting and coming up short. But in 2021, the company rebranded as Electra and began the work to re-tool a former metals refinery in the area.
The supply will come from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where about three quarters of the world's cobalt is mined, according to Natural Resources Canada.
From there it will be sent to the Port of Durban in South Africa, then shipped more than 20,000 km by sea to the Port of Montreal and finally trucked about 700 km northwest to Cobalt.