Saskatchewan Brines, BC Brains, One Big Battery Play

EMP Metals and Saltworks Technologies win $1M to refine Saskatchewan lithium brines into battery-grade materials via a new BC testbed

10 Jun 2026

Saskatchewan sits atop some of the world's cleaner lithium brines. For years, the limiting factor was not the resource but what happened after extraction: Canada shipped its raw material abroad for refining, then bought it back at a premium. Project Aurora intends to fix that.

Backed by C$1m from British Columbia's Integrated Marketplace programme, delivered by Innovate BC, the project pairs EMP Metals with Saltworks Technologies. Saltworks is finishing a Generation-II refining system at its Richmond facility before deploying it to EMP's live lithium well in Saskatchewan. The system is designed to produce battery-grade chemicals at lower capital cost and higher recovery rates than conventional methods.

The prize is closing Canada's midstream gap. China still refines the majority of the world's battery-ready lithium, and Canada's exposure to that bottleneck has grown uncomfortably visible as electric-vehicle demand rises. Domestic refining capacity would shorten the supply chain and reduce strategic risk, though the gap between a demonstration plant and industrial-scale output remains wide.

Innovate BC expects the project to create 18 new jobs and sustain 24 existing ones in British Columbia. Those numbers are modest. What matters more is whether the model replicates. The testbed programme accepts projects across mineral processing, AI-enabled productivity tools, and digital supply-chain credentialing, matching developers with paying customers early enough to reduce adoption risk.

Proof-of-concept funding is necessary, but insufficient alone. A single pilot in Saskatchewan does not resolve the capital intensity of commercial lithium refining, nor the long permitting timelines that slow Canadian resource projects broadly. Project Aurora is a data point worth watching. Whether it becomes a template depends less on the chemistry than on the policy will to back what follows.