Dialogue and transparency.
Those words have served Kristan Straub well over his 22-year career with Glencore and the postings that have sent him across Canada and around the globe.
Earlier this year, the Sudbury-born Straub, the now-former vice-president of exploration with Glencore’s nickel team, was offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to advance one of the world’s new and untapped sources of critical minerals.
As the new CEO of Ring of Fire Metals, a Canadian subsidiary of Australia’s Wyloo Metals, Straub was drawn to the position to develop a “generational” mining project that would bring about “meaningful change” to the Indigenous communities in the James Bay region, a vast area of wetlands that has never seen industrial development.
“What enticed me was the quality of this project and the opportunity to actually build something from the ground up,” said Straub, a member of the Henvey Inlet First Nation in northeastern Ontario.
The company’s first mine in the batting order is the Eagle’s Nest nickel, copper, platinum group metals project. The start of construction and production is undetermined, pending the completion and approvals of the federal road and mine environmental assessments.
