North America's first battery-grade cobalt refinery opening in Cobalt, Ont.

A former silver mining area in northern Ontario has been tapped to be the home of North America's first battery-grade cobalt refinery. 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 annually—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."

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 batteries so they don't overheat and helps them hold a charge for longer.

Despite the town of Cobalt's name hinting at abundance, the plant won't be sourcing mined rock locally—or domestically. Instead, it will be imported from overseas, primarily from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where about three quarters of the world's cobalt is mined. The supply will be shipped from the Port of Durban in South Africa, more than 20,000 km by sea to the Port of Montreal, and then trucked about 700 km northwest to Cobalt.

Human rights groups and academics have long reported concerns about mining practices in the DRC, including the use of child labour, exploitative working conditions, and poor environmental practices. Mell says the company is taking steps to address these concerns through annual audits of its supply chain.

The community got its name after cobalt was found during construction of the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway in 1903. More important at the time was the discovery of silver—the area 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. In the last decade, mining companies have been prospecting for cobalt in the old silver mines, but none have found a vein that could sustain a mine. Mell's former company, First Cobalt Corp., was among those prospecting without success. In 2021, the company rebranded as Electra and began retooling a former metals refinery in the area.