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The Houston government says Nova Scotia will mine its way to prosperity, one day in the distant future
Nova Scotia has added four minerals to the province’s “critical minerals” list — high purity silica, silver, tellurium, and uranium.
That brings a total of 20 minerals on the list. The list was created in 2022 with 16 minerals: antimony, cobalt, copper, graphite, germanium, gallium, indium, lithium, manganese, molybdenum, niobium, rare earth elements, tantalum, tin, tungsten, and zinc.
Designating a mineral as “critical” doesn’t have any benefit for mining companies — a mineral being on the list doesn’t give a mining company any regulatory or tax advantage. It does, however, focus government resources toward exploration and mapping.
For example, Nova Scotia has received $1.5 million in federal funding for four projects meant to better understand the minerals and organize the regulatory oversight. The first simply creates an inventory of the minerals and looks at the supply chains for exploiting them. The second is a mapping exercise intended to identify the highest prospects for finding each mineral. The third looks specifically at graphite. And the fourth digitizes historic documents that aren’t now easily accessed.
The province’s critical mineral list aligns with a national list of 34 critical minerals, except the province’s list includes silver, which is not on the federal list. |Read more|