Mag One Products (MDD.C) is out to make the world a cleaner, better place. Magnesium may be an integral part of the EV revolution, but the company isn’t just satisfied with pumping out battery metals.
With their new and novel way of sourcing magnesium, Mag One aims to lead the charge towards a brighter and more sustainable future. One tailing pond at a time.
Listen in!
Transcription
Before queuing up this podcast, you probably haven’t given much thought to magnesium.
But you should. It’s a metal that’s going to play an increasing role in our industries from this point on. Everything from electric vehicle batteries to car frames to medicine involves magnesium, though there isn’t a lot known about it.
And that’s the problem: magnesium isn’t easy to produce, and the traditional methods of producing this metal are usually either expensive or costly to the environment, if not both.
That’s where Mag One Products comes in. Except Mag One isn’t your traditional mining company. It’s actually not a mining company at all.
If Mag One has its way, it won’t be putting other magnesium producers out of business, it’ll actually be helping them increase production, making them more money. That’s because it’s a tech play operating within the world of mining.
And if Mag One isn’t your usual run-of-the-mill explorerco., Gillian Holcroft isn’t your traditional mining CEO. Here she is explaining her company’s mission statement.
“Our mission statement such as is to be the most environmentally friendly lowest cost producer of magnesium metal products…so what’s interesting you know environmentally you know it’s a great thing to do. Take you take a waste and you’re actually making bunch of products.”
Here’s the elevator pitch: No matter how much they clean up after themselves, mines leave behind tailings, basically piles of waste rock and debris. Everything that isn’t the metal the miners are looking for gets piled up at the side.
These tailings had been considered useless… until now. Mag One goes to old mining sites, mostly in Quebec for now, and gets to work extracting the magnesium in the tailings.
Since the metal is already above-ground, there’s no need to drill for it. There’s a joke Mag One likes to make about these tailings being visible from space. This makes the process inexpensive, and since there’s no drilling required, it’s almost waste free.
Mag One just has to set up an extraction plant next to an old mine tailing pond and they’re home free. No feasibility studies required, just plug and play. According to Holcroft, her company’s goal is to start up this process…
“in a modular fashion meaning that we can actually cost effectively build the first module, show the world that we can actually make money and we know what we’re doing and our technology works. And so building subsequent modules is going to be a copy paste if you will. So we help to reduce the risk and the financial requirement to build that first module and what could happen for investors is that we become the largest magnesium metal producer in the world and the lowest cost, just because we have enough tailings or someone larger buys us out.”
The International Magnesium Association says, “Magnesium is highly recyclable and therefore requires only 5-10 percent of the energy necessary for the manufacture of the primary material.”
“In the past, it would be cheaper to put things in a pond or blow things up a stack. And if you have a lot of gas cleaning or things like that, it’s always more expensive. So it’s environmental regulations that are forcing us to do our job better and to be smarter.”
“The Show Must Be Go” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)