Thunder Bay’s historic working waterfront could be repurposed to serve northwestern Ontario’s booming lithium industry and Ontario’s budding electric vehicle manufacturing base.
There are no operating lithium mines in the region, but three out of four of the leading exploration players have either selected or are considering placing lithium hydroxide converters in the city.
“The whole world is looking at northwestern Ontario,” said Andrew Kane, Thunder Bay Community Economic Development Commission’s natural resources business development manager. And Thunder Bay is nicely positioned to take advantage.
“We’re the talk of the lithium industry,” said Kane, who assists incoming companies in searching for suitable sites.
Vacant paper mill properties and other industrial brownfields are much sought-after properties for companies like Toronto’s Avalon Advanced Materials and Green Technology Metals of Australia.
Kane said he wouldn’t be surprised to see a major government investment announcement within the next 12 to 18 months to place, initially, two lithium refineries in Thunder Bay.
These processors, which are largely chemical refineries, would make lithium hydroxide. This battery-grade material is needed to feed the battery manufacturing plants under construction in Windsor and St. Thomas, the downstream end of a larger made-in-Ontario supply chain.
There’s going to be an insatiable demand,” said Kane.
Avalon Advanced Materials has selected the former Abitibi pulp and paper mill in Thunder Bay’s north end as a processing site. The company recently hosted federal Industry Minister Franois-Philippe Champagne for a photo-op walkabout.
Green Technology Metals said last week it has an option to buy the old Cascades Fine Papers property.
This week, a third company, Rock Tech Lithium, announced Thunder Bay is on its radar to site a processor.
A fourth company, Frontier Lithium of Sudbury, operators of one of the North America’s largest and richest lithium deposits north of Red Lake, is keeping its cards covered on where its plant will go. Kane said they could opt to set up shop closer to home.
Rock Tech’s decision to process lithium in Ontario was a change in strategy. The company, with Canadian and German ties, had planned to mine and crush lithium at its Georgia Lake pit near Beardmore, then ship the concentrate overseas to Germany for final processing.
But Kane, a former analyst with the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines, said that’s allowed to happen only on rare occasions.
Section 91 of Ontario’s Mining Act stipulates that ore mined in Ontario shall be refined in Canada.
“I think the province is saying, if you’re going to mine it here, you’re going to process it here, and you’re going to sell it to the battery plants here.”
In Quebec, the federal and provincial government there are investing heavily to attract multinationals like Ford, GM, nickel miner Vale and chemical producer BASF to a mammoth battery metals processing hub at the port city of Bcancour.
Thunder Bay can carve out a niche of its own in the electric vehicle supply chain.
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It’s close to an abundant and untapped supply of world-class lithium resources in the northwest. The city has great transportation infrastructure and ample industrial land on the Lake Superior waterfront with access to the Seaway system.
According to the city’s land strategy, Thunder Bay has 770 hectares of vacant industrial land, 200 hectares of that in the heavy industrial category located mostly on the waterfront. There are power, natural gas, water and sewer connections with rail and port access. And brownfield sites are easier to obtain approval for a refinery.
*All of it is considered premium ground,” said Kane, and is of great interest to a myriad of door-knocking companies. Some want to do large-scale energy storage, shotcrete for the mining industry, and set up a distribution centre for phosphate headed for Western Canada.
Some properties have environmental legacy issues that will need remediation, but that’s part of the due diligence process by the prospective owners, Kane said.