{"id":930886,"date":"2026-10-13T01:10:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-13T01:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/930886\/"},"modified":"2026-10-13T01:10:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-13T01:10:11","slug":"site-near-batchawana-bay-could-become-massive-copper-mine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/930886\/","title":{"rendered":"Site near Batchawana Bay could become massive copper mine"},"content":{"rendered":"

At a site in Batchawana Bay, north of Sault Ste. Marie, Mat Wilson and his team at Sterling Metals are working to solve what he calls \u201ca copper conundrum\u201d in Canada.<\/p>\n

\u201cCopper is kind of the metal of the future,\u201d he told SooToday by phone.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s what you need every time you turn on the light . . . anytime you need green energy, if you want to control any of your own data, data centres, whatever it is that you’re doing, you need copper.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I didn’t know this, but despite all of the vast resources that Canada has, Canada only produces one per cent of the world’s copper.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut then, of the copper we consume, half of it actually comes from overseas,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don’t even make all of the copper we need and we don’t have enough of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the conundrum Wilson is trying to solve as the CEO of Sterling Metals<\/a>, which he founded in 2020.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a global shortage of copper, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey say we\u2019ll need more copper in the next 18 years than what\u2019s been mined in the history of humanity because of all the things that are happening.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2024, Sterling purchased a 35,000 hectare property from Copper Road Resources that\u2019s located near Batchawana Bay that many people aren\u2019t aware of.<\/p>\n

Wilson said Sterling has drilled around 100 test holes and he\u2019s hopeful it could eventually become the largest copper mine in Ontario, if not Canada.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the 60s and 70s, there were these two small mines about 30 km apart and they kind of got lost in history,\u201d Wilson said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou find people throughout the Sault whose parents worked there, who prospected. No one really put the pieces together to understand that this is one really big copper system.\u201d<\/p>\n

To put that site in context, that would be the size of some of the world\u2019s largest copper mines, Wilson said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhether you’re looking at giant mines in Arizona or in the mountains of Chile,\u201d he said, \u201cbut we’re in Ontario, so you’re not four\u00a0km up in the mountains.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilson said the Carp River Road site is much more accessible than some of the world\u2019s other copper mines.<\/p>\n

\u201cHere, the Trans Canada runs right up the road and then there’s a rail line that runs right into the deep water port of the Sault. And then there’s this workforce within the Sault, which has been built up on one industry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sterling Metals purchased a six-and-half-acre horse ranch in Goulais River to give the company’s 30 workers a place to\u00a0stay.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have workers coming up from the Sault, coming in from Goulais, coming down from Batchawana, and drillers coming in from Quebec,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re all kind of finding their way into this area as we start to expand the project.\u201d<\/p>\n

They began drilling in April with five cm cores, going down the equivalent of the height of the CN Tower.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re starting to see the formation of something very very interesting: a large footprint of copper that potentially could be something that matters for many decades,\u201d Wilson said.<\/p>\n

If everything goes smoothly, Sterling Metals could break ground in five or seven years, Wilson said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to stress the early nature of this because there’s no economic study . . . The more people support it and the more people understand it, the faster this can go.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At a site in Batchawana Bay, north of Sault Ste. Marie, Mat Wilson and his team at Sterling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":930887,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[45,49,48,319692],"class_list":["post-930886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sterling-metals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=930886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/930887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=930886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=930886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=930886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}