Canada Nickel could play a major role in new auto manufacturing industry

being dependant on the Chinese supply from Indonesia. Ontario could help produce the nickel the world requires to meet the auto manufacturers demand for EV batteries. Canada Nickel Company (CNC) is one company that is actively exploring for nickel in northern Ontario. The company is located in Timmins, Ontario with its Crawford Project which is currently in the permitting stages. The Crawford discovery in just four years is delineated as the fourth largest nickel resource supply globally and if they were mining today it would be the fifth largest nickel sulphide producer globally.

Nickel is a key component of Lithium-Ion batteries, with the current electric vehicle (EV) boom the demand for nickel is on the rise. With the demand comes the threat to automakers, will there be enough nickel supply?

Nickel is a chemical element and a transition metal. It is mostly used for high-grade steel manufacturing, and increasingly so, in batteries. Global production of nickel from mines was estimated to amount to a total of 2.5 million metric tons in 2020. The major countries in nickel mining include Indonesia, Philippines, Russia, and New Caledonia.

100% of the current supply growth is coming from countries such as Indonesia.

There are two big issues with this:

1)These mines are established by Chinese companies.

2)The carbon footprint for these operations are huge.

Russia has a lot of the nickel and with its unexpected war against the Ukraine, prices of nickel have soared. The London Metal Exchange even had to suspend nickel trading in March after a 250% price hike.

The United States itself is short on nickel resources. The Eagle Mine in Michigan is USA’s primary nickel mine and is expected to close in 2025. With the project pipeline for nickel mining drying up the auto industry is reaching out and begging for help. The world needs to figure out how it is going to acquire a whole lot more nickel if it is going to achieve their ambitious EV targets. The majority of Nickel has been used in the stainless steel manufacturing process with just shy of 10% of the metal being used in the battery market. That is all about to change. If we look forward 10-15 years the demand could rise to 40-50% which will allow for that much more pressure on the demand for nickel. With a wake-up call and the lesson we are learning with the Russian invasion on the Ukraine, North American car manufacturers don’t want to place their bet with their companies

What differentiates Canada Nickels Crawford project to those in Indonesia?

“The Carbon footprint for those operations is very large. What is being done in the processing of their nickel is they are taking a ton of soggy dirt that has about 1% nickel in it and using a huge amount of electricity and in their case coal to be able to turn that dirt out into metal. Therefore, the nickel that is being produced there has about a 50-80 ton CO2 footprint per ton of nickel produced. This is not great for decarbonizing our planet, said Mark Selby, Chairman, CEO and Director of Canada Nickel Company. The ultramafic discovery which is the host rock for the Crawford mine project spontaneously absorbs CO2. CNC is designing a processing plant that will have the ability to capture and store nearly 20 tons of per ton of nickel produced. This will make CNC one of the largest capture and storage facilities in Canada and one of the largest nickel

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