Beyond the Battery: Inside Quebec’s Mine-to-Refine Transformation

As the world electrifies—from cars and buses to datacentres and defence—demand for battery materials is exploding. Today, China refines more than 90% of the world’s graphite into the material used in virtually all EV battery anodes— that level of concentration is a strategic vulnerability Canada, and its allies, can’t ignore. But Canada is starting to respond. The federal Major Projects Office has just referred Nouveau Monde Graphite’s Phase-2 Matawinie Mine as a “Major Project of National Interest” —a move aimed at helping Quebec and Canada shift from exporting ore to building a full mine-to-refine graphite value chain at home, and with it, an entirely new strand of economic and industrial capacity. In this episode of Disruptors: The Canada Project , host John Stackhouse takes listeners into that story. With former Quebec premier Jean Charest and Eric Desaulniers , founder & CEO of NMG , he lifts the hood on what it means for a critical-minerals project to be treated as a “major project” in Canada—and what this could mean for Canada’s role as a trusted critical-minerals supplier to its G7 allies. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You can listen to Beyond the Battery: Inside Quebec’s Mine-to-Refine Transformation online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Beyond the Battery: Inside Quebec’s Mine-to-Refine Transformation is an episode from Disruptors by Royal Bank of Canada.

This episode is 00:29:19 long.

This episode was published on Nov 25, 2025.

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