General Motors’ new Canada-based critical-minerals expert says the automaker has the local battery-cell manufacturing capacity to supply all of the electric vehicles it will build in North America by 2030. Local sources of critical minerals, however, are proving difficult to come by.
Simon Thibault, who recently joined GM as EV critical-minerals leader for global purchasing and supply chain, said investment in and government support for the upstream and midstream parts of the supply chain — meaning mining and material processing — must accelerate to truly build its battery ecosystem in North America.
“If you don’t have the capacity to turn minerals into battery materials, all of [that] cell manufacturing capacity that you’re developing in North America will still be supplied with materials from Asia,” Thibault told attendees June 1 at the BEV In Depth: Mines to Mobility conference in Sudbury, Ont.
“This is not secure, this is not sustainable, this is not scalable, and this is not cost competitive,” he said.
In North America, Thibault said, cell production is shaping up to be entirely accounted for locally by 2030, but the same can’t be said for the underlying battery materials.
“If I start moving upstream in the battery chain, by 2030, we will have in North America the capacity to produce only four per cent of our cathode production… and three per cent of our anode needs.”
GOVERNMENT MUST STEP UP
GM sees resource-rich Canada “as a place where we can further develop upstream in the battery chain,” Thibault said, but more government support and consolidation within the mining sector is needed.
Thibault, who headed the battery supply-chain unit at Investissement Quebec — a provincial entity that lobbies for investment — before joining GM, pointed to the company’s decision to build a roughly $600 million cathode-active materials plant in Bécancour, Que., as a case in point.
Before GM’s arrival, he said, the Quebec government had already invested about $350 million in building out the local infrastructure to have the site shovel-ready. Similar local and provincial government steps were taken ahead of battery-cell plant decisions in Windsor and St. Thomas, Ont.
GM would never have undertaken the long-lead-time investments in Bécancour on its own, Thibault said, and Canada needs to broaden the set of “strategic objectives and policies” being advanced in Quebec to replicate the success in Bécancour.
A lack of large mining companies in the North American battery-minerals sector is also holding up mine and processing development, Thibault said. In Canada and beyond, about two thirds of the resources are in the hands of junior mining companies that lack the financial heft and talent to push all the necessary projects into production, he said.
MINING NEEDS GOVERNMENT
“We need to consolidate that industry,” Thibault said. “In order to do that, we need government. We need government support because it is impossible for the industry on its own to achieve this.”
As in Bécancour, the government’s role is to help take the risk out of mining and processing projects by spending on the roads and power infrastructure that companies will not tackle on their own, Thibault said. Once projects are sufficiently advanced, GM can then add a further vote of confidence with material supply agreements, such as the one it signed with mining giant Vale in November.
That agreement will see nickel that’s mined in Sudbury processed into battery-grade nickel sulfate in Bécancour. That will then be integrated into cathode-active material at GM and Posco Future M’s battery-materials plant, also in Bécancour, before it is shipped to GM’s Ultium Cells plants in the United States. The nickel-rich cells will ultimately be put on the road in the battery packs in GM’s EVs.
“It will be the first time … where you will get a mineral that will be extracted from the ground and going straight into an EV, all in North America,” Thibault said.
This level of integration is not simple but is necessary to bring the EV battery supply chain onshore, he said.
“The only way we can actually survive in this thing and become the world leader,” Thibault said, “is by being cost competitive with Asia.”