Lithium is new resource in Kenora: electric car battery market recharges junior miner.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: Dryden/Sioux Lookout

Lithium is the new gold in the Kenora district.

With the price of the industrial metal going through the roof, the future demand for lithium has as much open-ended potential as Don Bubar's Separation Rapids project, near Kenora.

Exploration companies are scrambling around the globe to lock up sources of supply, but the president-CEO of Avalon Advanced Materials and his crew only had to dust off some old studies from their mothballed deposit in northwestern Ontario.

Avalon expects to release a preliminary economic assessment in July or August, which will include the details and numbers of designing an extraction process to make lithium hydroxide to meet the anticipated demand for the auto sector.

"That's obviously where the biggest growth is right now," said Bubar, whose company picked up the high-purity lithium property, 70 kilometres north of Kenora, in late 1996.

Avalon drilled off a 10-milliontonne lithium resource in the late 1990s and completed a prefeasibility study, but hadn't done much since.

"We really hadn't done a lot except try to monitor the lithium market, looking for an opportunity to advance it," said Bubar.

Back then, the rechargeable battery market was in its infancy and didn't represent much of an opportunity, since the market was served by other low-cost producers.

"Everything's changed since then," said Bubar.

For years, lithium-ion batteries have been used in all kinds of electronic gadgets, but the demand for this metal is expected to reach new heights as carmakers like Tesla look to mass produce electric vehicles.

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It prompted the company to ice its Nechalacho rare earth metals project in the Northwest Territories earlier this year to focus on Separation Rapids, and rebrand from Avalon Rare Metals to its current name.

Unlike other commodities where you mine it and convert it into a concentrate for a ready market, lithium is a specially engineered chemical product that must meet certain customers' specifications.

Bubar said determining that final product had been a moving target, as the technology in lithium-ion batteries is rapidly evolving.

"You could design a product based on today's needs, get into production three years from now and everything's changed again."

From the auto sector, there's a growing demand for lithium hydroxide, the ideal feed for the battery chemistries, said Bubar.

So the company's been working on designing a process to make it.

"We pretty much have to build it into the...