Saturday, September 28, 2024 
Saturday, September 28, 2024
May 5, 2020
The Toronto owners of a northeastern Ontario cobalt refinery are talking about a physical expansion of their dormant plant to be the exclusive supplier to the North American electric vehicle market.
First Cobalt released its much-anticipated feasibility study of the former Yukon refinery that they bought three years ago, just outside the town of Cobalt.
“This is a mining story that’s turned into a chemical story,” said company president-CEO Trent Mell in a May 4 conference call to analysts and investors.
The junior miner-turned-refiner startup has the only permitted facility in North America capable of processing cobalt hydroxide feed shipped in from offshore into a highly pure cobalt sulfate, used in manufacturing lithium-ion batteries.
Mell and his management team mapped out the road ahead for 2020 in what stands to be a pivotal year for the company as they seek to position the hydrometallurgical refinery as a toll processing operation for global mining companies.
Chinese refiners currently control almost 80 per cent of the world’s finished cobalt product, followed by Japan and Finland. First Cobalt believes they can cut a five per cent slice of that refined market.
Mell said Western car manufacturers have a strong appetite to see a domestic processor to shorten their supply chains.
The key to moving the project forward in 2020 is wrapping up a commercial agreement with Glencore to start supplying the refinery with raw cobalt feed from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The international base metal mining giant funded the refinery restart study.
First Cobalt also needs an amendment to their provincial closure plan permit and three environmental approvals that will allow them to increase production from 12 tonnes per day to 55 tonnes per day by late 2021.
It would allow them to expand the refinery over a 12-month construction period. Work could begin by this fall.
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