‘This has the potential to be another Diavik’

Yellowknife and the NWT are busy wrestling with the notion that the age of big mines is ending. One company says that might not be true.

Part of it depends on how you define “big.”

Francis MacDonald says in terms of money in the ground, he could be sitting on a mine east of Yellowknife worth as much as the Diavik diamond mine has generated over its existence.

MacDonald runs Li-FT (pronounced “lift”), a lithium exploration and development company. He wants to open a major lithium mine along the Ingraham Trail by 2030.

“I’ve been trying to put this in context for myself, as well as to relate it to people in the Northwest Territories in terms that are going to make sense. So I went back to look at the gross amount of diamonds in the ground or the gross metal value for Diavik, before it started. In today’s dollars, that would be about $20 billion of gross metal value,” he told Cabin Radio.

According to MacDonald, big lithium projects like James Bay in Quebec are about 100 million tonnes of ore and similarly valued at around $20 billion.

“And that’s what we think is around the Yellowknife district … it’s at least another Diavik.”

MacDonald is obliged to add disclaimers to that. He doesn’t know exactly what’s under the ground at 13 deposits owned by Li-FT – some along the Ingraham Trail as little as 30 minutes from Yellowknife by car, others farther from the city and the road.

But he can see lithium-bearing rock everywhere, and early drilling results are good.

“Based on the results we’ve seen so far – and also just the outcrops, the actual rock sticking out of the ground on the surface – it’s fairly easy to imagine we have enough tonnage to build a mine here,” he says.

Clock is ticking

If MacDonald is correct, his lithium mine could help to plug a big economic gap with which the NWT is wrestling.

Within the past month, an economist has warned the territory has no vision to replace its ageing diamond mines. There are no new diamond mines in the hopper and every other project being talked about in the NWT is much smaller than a Diavik, Ekati or Gahcho Kué, the three diamond mines that collectively power thousands of jobs and a big chunk of the territory’s economy.

A lithium mine might not bring in Diavik-level jobs, even if it’s a Diavik-sized deposit.

James Bay, the Quebec lithium mine recently given the federal green light after an environmental assessment, is forecast to create 170 jobs annually according to data published by Ottawa. Diavik at its peak (it’ll close in 2026) accounted for the equivalent of well over a thousand jobs a year.

MacDonald says he hasn’t figured out the jobs side of the plan yet, but he thinks the mine would last for at least 20 years.

In the past week, he has held public meetings in Fort Resolution, Yellowknife and Łútsël K’é to explain what Li-FT thinks it has. And if you’re taken by surprise to discover a lithium firm thinks it can develop a new Diavik a short drive from Yellowknife, there’s a reason it feels sudden – things are happening very fast and, MacDonald says, need to keep happening very fast.

Firstly, lithium has rocketed in popularity because it’s needed to produce electric cars. Secondly, companies are now shovelling billions of dollars into finding new ways to produce lithium, like dragging it out of old oil wells.

MacDonald says that means there’s a finite window during which a hard-rock lithium mine – the kind Li-FT would have – can open and operate before it’s overtaken by other, cheaper ways to get lithium that haven’t been perfected yet but will be figured out soon.

He’s saying 2030 is the go date. He wants the mine to be under construction by then, and if it’s not close at that point, he thinks it may not be worth doing.

On average, a new mine in Canada takes 15 to 17 years to go from discovery to production. Li-FT only arrived in the NWT last year. Let’s be generous and say production doesn’t actually start till 2031 – that would mean halving the average gestation period for a mine, while getting it through the territory’s regulatory system and convincing Indigenous peoples and northerners as a whole of the project’s merits.

“There’s a recognition that in the Northwest Territories, there does need to be more mining,” MacDonald says, making his pitch.

“Here we have a project just outside Yellowknife. The spodumene you mine [to get lithium by crushing it] is non-toxic, non-reactive. You can just put it on a road as road crush afterward. In terms of environmental impacts, compared to other mining operations? This is very low.

“We have a project that’s ready to go and can potentially replace some of the impacts of diamond mining closing down.”

What’s next?

The next steps for Li-FT are to spend a couple of years – precious years – gathering the baseline data needed for an environmental assessment.

Work to track aquatics, air quality, wildlife and other metrics, as well as draw up studies related to socio-economics, is under way. Li-FT is shooting for a two-year environmental assessment process, which would be speedy by NWT standards but is not impossible.

The company seems extremely confident that mine-worthy quantities of lithium exist. Drilling to confirm that is ongoing.

The next steps if you live in Yellowknife? Maybe if you really like hiking at Bighill Lake, go make some memories there, just in case.

The most promising deposit Li-FT has drilled so far is called Big East, a site located about a kilometre and a half southeast of Bighill Lake. Granted, it’s not on the lake, but if a new Diavik opens a kilometre and a half from your favourite lake, you are going to know about it.

“A big challenge is going to be that this is close to Yellowknife itself,” MacDonald says. “A lot of the time, mines are out in far-flung places that no one actually sees.”

That proximity is a blessing and a curse. Li-FT says the infrastructure of Yellowknife is what makes the mine possible, either driving or barging the material to Hay River then getting it out to the Pacific coast by rail, bound for China, which is currently pretty-much the only place you can have lithium refined. (Li-FT says it’s all for diverting to North American refineries if such things eventually exist.)

That’s a quicker route to the Pacific than other mines like James Bay have, so this works in Li-FT’s favour.

But it’s also going to mean convincing Yellowknife residents to accept a new, nearby mine. Rarely are the senior government officials working on these things confronted with projects they’d be able to hear from their weekend cabin.

“People are going to be asking questions and there’s more of a human impact when you’re close to a city like this,” says MacDonald.

“Part of it is having the communities on board and people really believing in this, that we need this in the Yellowknife area and the territory.”

One way to sell the project locally is to promise improved infrastructure. Li-FT says it’s working to acquire federal funding so it can design a renewable energy project that would power its mine and offer a new supply of cheap, green power to a city that’s partly reliant on a hydro dam built in 1948.

As the company begins a campaign to win over the city, you can expect a Li-FT office to open in Yellowknife some time soon.

“It’s getting time,” MacDonald said when asked at Li-FT’s Yellowknife public meeting if an office was coming.

“We’ve only been really doing anything here for 10 months, but we are advancing the project quickly. It’s getting to the time, I think, when we will have more of a local presence here.”