RE:RE:Lifting Sanctions Windsor is a battery manufacturing/assembly plant, Umicore at Kingston is a cathode active material plant (essentially blending of nickel, cobalt, manganese salts with Li hydroxide to produce precursor material). Ford is quite content with thier battery material partners in china. Chrysler and GM have partnered with LG Chem/En through out North America. SK innovation, BASF, Panasonic, are investing heavily in the US as well with Honda, BMW, Toyota, and GM and Ford......
Lots of capital flowing into ESG and traceability. Traceability is important because of the country of origin rules under NA free trade agreements, EV tax credits, etc. The 70% rule means something different for an EV because the battery accounts for 40%?? Of the total EV cost and the bill of sales through the mine, mill, smelter, refinery, cathode active material plant, battery assembly right on through to the vehicle assembly.
finland, Sweden, glencore, and a bunch of others are even working on fingerprinting metals at the atomic level. Class one nickel pellet from Thompson Manitoba will have a different fingerprint than Raglan nickel regardless of where it is in the supply chain. Raglan to falconbridge to Norway to Umicore Kingston to lordstown ohio to Michigan. The metal will have a finger print. GM can say unequivocally that the nickel in this battery came from a source with high ESG standards from the artic coast of Quebec and not from children hand baggin ore from a hole in the ground somewhere.This is just all for context.
Again, my guess for the time being is that Sherrit products out of Fort Saskatchewan will not be reporting into NA supply chains in the very near term. But, and this is the beauty of it, it doesn't really matter. Germany is utterly dependent on clean Russian and Finland nickel, which is really Russian nickel.
If we consider the Pierre Trudeau trip to Cuba. The US were at the time pushing INCO to deliver more clean nickel while Canada was trying to establish a globally significant oil sector in Alberta. Alberta needed lots of clean nickel for pipes, plants, processing facilities, etc. Quality steel that can stand up to corrosive and or high temperature. When all was said and done, Canada was able to deliver more Canadian nickel to meet US super alloy, aerospace, defence needs and a new innovative process to yield clean nickel out of saprolite/laterite ore was developed and built at Fort Saskatchewan. No Cuban nickel reported to the US and Canada solved the specialty steel issue for the oil sector.
Mixed hydroxide precipitate from Indonesia will feed the China battery sector. Germany may be interested in some clean nickel from Alberta.
Pure speculation and I could be way out to lunch. Also hope some of the text is informative and useful to readers.