Steve Charest looked at 65 Canal Bank Street, a sprawling former industrial property in Welland, Ont., that had long since ceased operating, and saw an opportunity where most everyone else only saw pollution. Like a real-life Canadian version of the Beverly Hillbillies, he bought the property and discovered it was more valuable than anyone imagined. There wasn’t any oil, like in the show about the backwoods family who struck it rich, but there was a refined byproduct of fossil fuels: synthetic graphite. The man-made material had been produced onsite at a plant that opened a century ago during an industrial boom following construction of the Niagara Falls hydroelectric dam. For decades, workers there threw scraps of graphite into a landfill adjacent to their plant until it finally closed in the late 1990s. Charest said the landfill contains 340,000 tonnes of high-grade synthetic graphite, a key material in lithium-ion batteries . At reported prices as high as US$20,000 per tonne for battery-grade synthetic graphite, the onsite stockpile could be worth US$6.8 billion. As Canada and its allies look to build a graphite supply chain independent from China amid rising geopolitical tensions, Charest is hoping he can turn yesterday’s garbage into a critical mineral bounty today. “It’s a little bit of a surreal time,” he said. “People say every once in a while, if you’re lucky, you get an opportunity to participate in something that really has an opportunity to make change. I’m excited and grateful for that opportunity.” Standing atop the landfill in March, a nearby digger pulled up earth, revealing jet-black cylinders the size of telephone poles and boulders the size of pillows — clear evidence of the graphite that Charest wants to turn into anodes for electric vehicles or grid-scale batteries. Land transfer documents say Charest only paid $2 for the property, but he said the actual price was higher because it was part of a larger deal that has not been publicly disclosed. He also said he’s invested tens of millions of dollars to prove that the decades-old graphite is viable for use in modern batteries. If it proves viable, it could have far-reaching consequences. Annual global demand for battery-grade graphite is expected to roughly double to 10.1 million tonnes by 2030 from 5.4 million tonnes in 2025, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence Ltd. The research firm also said China controls an estimated 90 per cent of battery anode manufacturing capacity, 80 per cent of synthetic graphite production and 75 per cent of mined graphite. In 2023, Beijing introduced restrictions that required specialized licences on exports of high-purity graphite, although it rolled back some of those rules in 2025 to ease shipments abroad. “It’s not that we can’t mine graphite or make anodes,” Max Yerrill, an analyst at Bank of Montreal who covers graphite mining companies, said. “It’s just that the prices have been so low for so long. It didn’t make any sense for an investor to put capital in a graphite mine when prices were so low you’d barely break even.” In an effort to build a domestic graphite supply chain, Canadian federal and provincial governments have committed hundreds of millions of dollars to loans, investments and even agreeing to buy thousands of tonnes of the grey-black critical mineral. Against this backdrop, Charest said his model — excavating old synthetic graphite plant landfills — is faster and requires less government support than either building a new mine or a new synthetic graphite plant. The beauty of his idea, he said, is it pays tribute to the workers who lost jobs when plants closed as globalization took root in the 1990s, and manufacturing operations largely left North America for cheaper jurisdictions, such as China. “They went from being the best in the world to, ‘I’m sorry, you’re fired. We’re moving to China,’” he said. In March, his company, Regen Resources Recovery Corp., announced a strategic alliance with Guelph-based Linamar Corp. , one of Canada’s largest auto-parts suppliers, to bring graphite to market for electric vehicles and grid-scale batteries. So far, Regen hasn’t announced any deals with automakers, but Charest said the company’s just ramping up after years of research, testing and investment. This year, it aims to produce 25,000 tonnes of battery-grade graphite, he said. That’s enough for about 375,000 EVs, or 21 per cent of the EVs sold in the U.S. and Canada in 2025. “Not everybody would have the stomach or the appetite for something as unknown as this,” he said. “It’s never been done before.” ‘Ambulance chaser’ Charest, 61, a former real estate developer, forged a specialty in buying derelict industrial properties, cleaning them up and then developing houses or offices. He likened his work to being an “ambulance chaser” of deindustrialization. It started in the 1990s, when he was in his late 20s and borrowed money from his father to buy an old factory, he said. “I remember picking up my wife, taking her for a drive and saying, ‘Come on, I want to show you what I did today,’ and I peeled back some plywood that was over a door and brought her through this massive industrial building,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Look, isn’t this fantastic?’ It had been empty and derelict, and she started bawling.” This line of work comes with risks. Old factories may sell at discounted prices compared to other properties, but buying them comes with liabilities, such as taxes and maintenance costs, and the cleanup costs can be significant if there is pollution. Ben Haythornthwaite, director of market analytics at Costar Group Inc., a real estate research firm, said he’s heard “horror stories” of cleanups that cost millions of dollars or more. “Sometimes, you get a bit of land that is just absolutely dreadful,” he said. “You realize there’s an underwater channel and (the property) actually has been leaching (toxins) into it, and it’s been spreading to neighbouring lands. Then they’ve got a legal case against you and there’s all sorts of liabilities.” Still, Charest would have understood these risks by the time he purchased the Welland property in 2017, having completed around 30 projects, known as brownfield remediations. Typically, he said he would enter a shutdown factory and encounter something akin to a ghost town: pictures of people’s children would still be pinned up in places and lockers would be full of personal effects like shoes, hats, name tags and thermoses. “I was part of this creeping normalcy of watching our industrial base erode to China,” he said. “I saw that firsthand and got to participate in that without really even thinking about it.” Charest thought the Welland property could be a candidate for new housing, given it was situated along an old canal, and possibly for industry, which the city has historically attracted. But the property had an “environmental stigma” attached to it, he said, adding he had agreed to indemnify the sellers against any environmental liability as part of the deal to acquire the property. What confused him was the soil was dark black, but his company took groundwater samples that came back almost clean enough to drink. “We went in there knowing that we needed to be eyes wide open,” he said. “And so when we were doing our due diligence, the first thing we saw with the groundwater was that it was clean. It was unbelievable. We were like, how the hell is this possible?” Eventually, he realized the graphite in the landfill had been acting like a carbon filter in a water pitcher — purifying rainfall as it percolated down to the aquifer. But it took Charest a while to figure all this out. He didn’t know any of the property’s history. Fortunately, there was a caretaker onsite, who mentioned that some of the former workers from the plant still met for coffee. He invited them to lunch at the site. ‘Kicked between the legs’ For years, Al Burattini said he couldn’t drive anywhere near the former graphite plant in Welland. Now 69, he spent 18 years working for Union Carbide Corp., the U.S.-based company that owned it, starting a bit after he graduated university. One morning, his boss told him to drop everything he was doing for an all-hands meeting where he learned the plant was closing — immediately. “It was like getting kicked between the legs and then not getting up,” he said. “It was tough.” It was similar for Tom Sibbald, who said he learned of the all-hands meeting while at a crucial point in a two-day operation that he couldn’t walk away from without starting over. He said he was totally blindsided by the news the plant was closing. For years, the men said they had been under pressure to cut costs, find new efficiencies and reduce headcount. It was stressful because they were working with extreme heat and people’s lives were at stake, they said, but the plant maintained a strong safety record and always found a way to eke out a win. Burattini said the company’s U.S. management even used to send engineers from other plants to study the one in Welland and learn best practices. Then, suddenly, everything ended. “Basically, there was an excess supply, globally, of graphite,” Burratini said about his understanding of why the plant abruptly closed around 1998. The closure bothered him so much that he avoided driving anywhere near the plant until he heard there was a new owner of the property who wanted to speak to former workers. Charest said he expected just a few former workers to show up to his offer of a free lunch. Instead, dozens of old-timers — some using walkers, many wearing their old company uniforms — marched through his doors. Having walked through so many shutdown factories earlier in his career, but never having interacted with the former workers, Charest said he asked them what it was like when the plant closed down. “Eighty-five-year-old, 90-year-old men started weeping,” he said. “They got all emotional and they said, ‘Steve, it was so hard. It was so devastating. It was so hard. It’s hard to find a new job.’” They were pounding the tables while talking about the pride they took in their work and how unfair it had felt when the jobs moved overseas, he said. Charest said he felt deeply moved and began to view the entirety of his earlier career, remediating and redeveloping brownfield sites, in a different light. As he heard about the history of the property, how the plant had opened around 1907, operated until the late 1990s and the soil tests confirmed the landfill was high in graphite, he scrapped his idea to build houses and instead started to look at the property as a commodity play. ‘Not a market where you push a product’ Graphite represents the heaviest component by weight of a lithium-ion battery and is prized for its electrochemical stability and conductivity. “You can heat graphite to a very high temperature without the substance changing shape,” Yerrill at BMO said. He was unaware of Regen and its project in Welland, but said auto supply chains are among the most difficult to enter because automakers want to test the reliability of a product and whether a company can deliver it at scale over a long period of time. “It’s one thing to have (the graphite),” he said. “But especially in the graphite market, it can take years to qualify your product.” One company that has a deal is Nouveau Monde Graphite Inc ., which earlier in April finished raising approximately $600 million to build a graphite mine in Quebec and has an agreement to supply graphite to Panasonic Energy Co. Ltd. for its batteries. “It’s not a market where you push a product and the customers will have to buy it,” chief executive Eric Desaulniers said. “It’s a market where the customers will tell you exactly what they want, and after four or five years of qualifying your product, they will decide if they want to do an offtake agreement.” Battery-grade graphite needs to be 99.95 per cent pure, he said, and even the slightest traces of iron, silica or other materials must be removed. Desaulniers said Regen will likely find someone to buy its graphite, but if it’s not an automaker, the price may be significantly lower than US$20,000 per tonne. That’s in part why Regen struck a deal with Linamar, a multibillion-dollar auto-parts company that has longstanding relationships with automakers. The companies plan to work together to crush the graphite down to a powder and heat-treat it so it can be marketed to automakers and other industrial users. “We know customers love the idea” of a local source, Linamar’s chief executive Jim Jarrell said. The only issue, he said, is that EV adoption is not happening as quickly as anyone anticipated. “It doesn’t change the long game in my view,” he said. “You’re going to need critical mineral resources here and governments are committed to making sure we’re not reliant on global trade … so this will have legs.” One risk is that as EV sales slow down, scientists who are researching ways to reduce the costs of EVs will stumble upon a new battery chemistry that eliminates graphite altogether. Flavio Volpe , a Regen board member and president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association of Canada, said this is a risk, but pointed out that Energy Minister Tim Hodgson in March included Regen’s project on a list of critical minerals projects that are reducing “strategic vulnerabilities” for Canada and its allies. “The fact is Regen is the only player outside China with supply,” he said. “It’s got to catch it; you can’t miss out on becoming the supplier of choice over the next year or two. (Charest) found something by accident that changed everything.” ‘Industry left and went to China’ Excavating a landfill for its graphite isn’t a straightforward idea. The mining sector has developed industry-accepted methods for estimating the size of a mineral deposit. Geologists and engineers work together to drill out core samples of the deposit and then model what would be economically feasible to extract based on market prices and the removal costs. But a landfill provided a completely new problem. There are laws in place that prevent people from digging up old waste for one thing, and Regen didn’t know exactly how much graphite was onsite. Charest said the Welland plant also produced different products containing various metals, including vanadium and titanium. “I wanted to develop a DNA for the material,” he said. “I wanted to figure out how we take what was done 100 years ago and interface that with today and tomorrow and years to come.” In collaboration with a group of former workers, including Burattini and Sibbold, Regen started in 2020 to slowly devise a method to estimate the graphite in the landfill. That involved taking core samples, measuring voids and bulk density in the landfill and cross-checking against historical records of what was produced at the plant, among other things. Ultimately, the company estimated the landfill contains 340,000 tonnes of graphite. Jarrell at Linamar said he was skeptical at first, but decided it was an accurate estimate. “We did our due diligence, had some discussions with third parties and there’s 340,000 tonnes of graphite, plus or minus 10 to 20 per cent,” he said. “We know it’s there and we know we can process it to get it to end-customer requirements.” Meanwhile, Charest said provincial authorities in Ontario passed legislation that allowed Regen to recover the graphite. He said he believes there are many other opportunities for “urban recycling” in Ontario that could boost the fortune of cities such as Welland, once a thriving industry hub that experienced an exodus of companies in the aftermath of free trade with the U.S. As Charest grew confident in the idea of repurposing the graphite for batteries, he said his team scoured the Earth for other former graphite plants that could have landfills and purchased sites in Europe, the U.S. and Puerto Rico. “Nobody’s ever done any of this before, and we figured it out and now we’re coming out,” he said. “This is a story about the circular economy and resource recovery, and there is no circular economy and resource recovery unless you’re in communities that suffered when industry left and went to China.” • Email: gfriedman@postmedia.com