Creating a critical minerals advantage

Hey there,

Canada talks a lot about critical minerals: new mines, faster permits, nation-building projects. Extraction is important, but it’s not enough on it’s own - particularly if we’re still shipping raw materials overseas for processing.

China doesn't dominate rare earths, copper, or lithium because it owns the most mines. It dominates because it controls the processing infrastructure. Raw materials from Africa, South Asia, and North America flow to Chinese refineries because that's where processing capacity exists at scale.

I sat down with Mohammad Doostmohammadi, CEO of pH7 Technologies to talk about this bottleneck. His point was clear: the real leverage lies in processing and refining. Canada has an opportunity to build out this capacity - with a lighter environmental footprint.

Today, most metal processing relies on heat and chemicals. Smelters consume huge amounts of energy and emit CO2, NOx and SOx into the atmosphere. Liquid extraction methods use chemicals and produce wastewater that’s expensive, risky, and hard to permit. Those constraints are a big reason processing has concentrated in a few regions.

pH7’s approach flips that model.

Instead of consuming chemicals, they’ve developed a closed-loop process that uses electricity as the primary input. A closed-loop system means there’s very little waste, as they regenerate the chemistry using electricity rather than discarding it. The result is lower carbon intensity, but it also changes the entire equation for processing:

• No wastewater streams to manage or permit

• No SOx/NOx emissions from smelting

• Less impact on local communities

• Dramatically lower energy demand

• Modular systems that can be deployed close to mines or recycling streams

That matters for the planet and for Canada’s critical mineral ambitions. According to Mohammad, mining accounts for roughly 20–30% of the value chain, while processing is closer to 50%.

Building domestic processing - and using low-impact, electricity-driven technologies - maintains the value, know-how, and capacity onshore, while also positioning Canadian metals to command a premium in global markets that increasingly price carbon into supply chains.

This is one of the clearest cases where climate solutions aren’t a trade-off, but a source of competitive advantage.

Listen to the full conversation with Mohammad here → Apple | Spotify | Everywhere else.