It’s found in pencil leads, and also in vast quantities under the lakes and forest outside one small western Quebec town.
And in a familiar-sounding story, locals in the Outaouais region are against the massive disruption that’s needed for a mining company to dig it up.
Graphite is one of six minerals the Canadian government has identified as a priority on its list of 31 critical minerals. Some climate change experts say we’re going to need to dig up a whole lot more of it if we’re to have any chance of staving off catastrophic global warming.
The U.S. Defence department is interested too, having invested $8.4 million US — alongside $4.9 million from the Canadian government — in Montreal-based Lomiko Metals, which wants to mine graphite around Lac Bélanger just west Duhamel, Que.
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