This article is a sponsored feature from Mining.com.au partner St-Georges Eco-Mining. It is not financial advice. Talk to a registered financial expert before making investment decisions.
A Canadian explorer is entertaining the launch of a research and development initiative for a super-conductor material found in one of its main mineral exploration projects. The material, which if successfully recovered in its natural state, could be a game-changing compound used to speed up connections in computer chips.
St-Georges Metallurgy Corp, which is a subsidiary of parent company St-Georges Eco-Mining (CSE:SX), is in early talks about a potential super-conductor material that is still controversial but might have an interesting propriety if the purity and organisation of the crystals can be recurrent.
The material, insizwaite, is a naturally occurring mineral which is essentially a bismuth-platinum compound.
In an interview with Mining.com.au, St-Georges Eco-Mining CEO Herb Duerr says they are in “evaluation talks” with academia and defence sectors into what could be an unexpected development.
“It’s a naturally occurring mineral [that could end up being a super conductor material] that allows energy to flow from one part to another”, Duerr says.
“If it works, you could find this material will provide a new conductor that you can use in computer chips manufacturing for quantum applications.
“We have limited understanding of the range of potential application and the size of the availability of this material on our project, but there is a current push for foundational quantum materials research — although not for production — for the foreseeable future. Defence sector research on niche applications like quantum radar might accelerate this timeline.
“This is so new on the front burner right now, I couldn’t really say that’s what ultimately it would be used for. But if you look up super conductors, there’s a lot of uses for them…
“These kinds of things can be transformative in so many ways.”
Values and projects
St-Georges Eco-Mining went public in late 2009 and touts itself as specialising in critical and strategic minerals (CSMs), such as nickel, copper, niobium, and platinum group elements.
Its four key pillars are best-in-class eco-mining with a smaller footprint than traditional mining; multi-chemistry battery recycling to optimise mineral recovery; cutting-edge metallurgy using less energy, water, chemicals, and space; and transforming hydrocarbon, plastics, or organic waste into hydrogen and a range of solid carbons.
It currently boasts 11 active projects spanning critical minerals exploration, technological innovation, and renewable energy sources.
Québec projects include the Manicouagan Project — located 70km north of the Manicouagan Crater, about 700km northeast of Québec City — which contains platinum, palladium, rhodium, and nickel; The Julie Project — 150km from Québec’s deep seaport town of Baie-Comeau — a prospective for nickel, copper, cobalt, palladium, silver, zinc, and magnesium; and the Notre Dame Project — in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region of Québec — prospective mainly for niobium, gallium, titanium, and scandium.
A discovery out of the ordinary
Duerr says the company has discovered a group of elements at the Manicouagan Project which might be worth more than gold. The suite of platinum group elements — including platinum, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium, and osmium minerals — found at the project are significant in quantity.
“We have a corridor that’s about 8km long and 1.5km wide of these various elements. We’ve got a higher-grade portion of that’s been significantly drilled and that has quite high grades of up to 1 gram or more of rhodium, which is selling for $10,000 an ounce right now… twice as much as gold”, he says.
“Rhodium is used in automobile catalytic converters and is a highly corrosive-resistant material. In the US they [catalytic converters] are part of the muffler system which cleans the emissions.
“We intend to start another round of exploration. The work that was done last fall has identified where we were getting platinum in stream samples, which is pretty rare in the regional context. So, we plan to go back out there and follow that up.”
Another subsidiary of the parent company, Iceland Resources, has the Thormodsdalur (Thor) Project for gold exploration about 20km from Reykjavik.
Duerr says the Iceland company is currently looking at monetising this subsidiary via different scenarios.
“The company’s subsidiary has several attractive projects with significant gold grades”, he says.
“We are also researching geothermal wells scalings. We are looking at the water that comes out with the minerals and seeing if we can scavenge those metals out of the water.”
Transforming old batteries into profit
The company also owns EVSX Corp, which extracts the value of used domestic, commercial, and electric vehicle batteries and is leading development in battery recycling in Thorold, Niagara, Ontario.
Duerr says EVSX has upgraded several components in the battery recycling unit which have increased the efficiency and throughput of used batteries, “creating a more economic scenario for us”.
“Adjusting to the landscape as it changes, competitors have dropped out, giving us potential for additional acquisitions of the batteries and units that can process those batteries”, he says.
“We should be in a good position, now that we’ve got our processing plant up and running more efficiently, to accelerate the growth of revenues.
“We made a little bit of money in a previous quarter. We are still in the early stages, but we are expecting to see some important revenue increases in 2026 from different subsidiaries of the company. We are still an exploration and development company.
“Most other miners in this space are looking only for lithium batteries where they get the most bang for their buck. We are breaking ground there. We are definitely out there on the curve, where most groups aren’t even looking.”
St-Georges Eco-Mining’s H2SX works with microwave plasma technology to transform natural gas, biogas, and plastic into clean and cheap hydrogen and solid carbon without the use of water.
Duerr says H2SX is in “advanced discussions” for the evolution of its ownership in this subsidiary through an investment by third parties that will move the project forward but will allow St-Georges to retain an important interest.
Lean and green
In December, at its annual AGM in Montreal, company Founder and Chairman Frank Dumas cryptically said the “company’s operations are undergoing meaningful changes” but did not elaborate beyond saying the transitions were “complex” and, “in certain cases”, confidential.
Duerr says the company is looking at prioritising projects and finding partners for other operations amid forecasting about potential competitors and threats.
“Nobody is doing what we are doing. If they are doing something similar, it is in a singular form, in their own niche area, but they are not doing it in all the niches we are involved in”, he says.
“In some respects, I think China may be implementing some similar technologies, but they are generally government supported and may not have the regulations that are imposed on our part of the world. I’ve heard there is quite a bit of toxicity which is overlooked from their operations.
“Even if they are doing what we are doing, I’m not sure they are doing it to the level that we are doing it.
“Within the US Government, which has been recently undermining the idea of global wellness and are just going back to square one, even they have considered the technologies we are working on as essential.”
Duerr says the endgame for St-Georges Eco-Mining is to look for new ways to solve problems “that seem to confound society or are just completely overlooked”.
“We are figuring out ways to use that waste in new and hopefully economically successful ways.”
Write to Christine Retschlag at Mining.com.au
Images: St-Georges Eco-Mining
