LLI General Discussion, page-297

There's a couple of things that struck me about this announcement. Firstly, the sheer size of the loan. Over $2 billion dwarfs many earlier loans to critical minerals companies and shows how serious the US is in building its own EV and battery supply chain.

The second point - and the one more relevant to Canadian hard rock projects - is the money is going to an upstream miner. Previous grants from the government have ALL gone to downstream processing facilities. No mining company has ever received government funding support. Until now. This is a very big shift in thinking in my view and the US government is clearly prepared to take on more risk in order to close the gap with China.

Some of this previous funding support has even gone to Australian companies with Syah, Novonix and Lynas all receiving loans and grants to build downstream processing facilities on US soil. This shows the US government is happy to give funding directly to foreign companies, but presumably only for building processing facilities on US soil. So could hard rock Quebec miners get some this support in the future?? I guess the answer is yes, but they'd have to be advanced enough to be ready to build the mine and happy enough to build the downstream chemical plant on US soil. I also imagine that funding of the scale provided to LAC is only going to go to very large projects.