Li-FT Power Ltd. is a Canadian mineral exploration company focused on advancing lithium pegmatite projects. Its flagship Yellowknife Lithium Project hosts a 50.4 Mt resource at ~1.0% Li₂O—one of Canada’s largest hard-rock deposits—and is progressing toward economic studies.
Yellowknife has long been shaped by mining, while Li-FT has continued to advance its assets and strategy since we last spoke in 2024. How does that history shape your work today, and what progress have you made at Yellowknife?
Yellowknife has been a mining town since the beginning, even in Indigenous times before settlers arrived. The Yellowknives were named for copper mining, trading copper up and down the Yellowknife River into the Barrenlands, so it’s been a mining town forever. There’s been 15 million ounces of gold mined there, and it’s also been a base for Canada’s diamond mining, so there’s a lot of history.
We’ve continued environmental work required for permitting and moving into environmental assessment, and completed a resource expansion drill program this winter—the last big piece of work aimed at showing there’s much more lithium in the ground. As we expand the resource, that’s what we communicate to the market—getting bigger and defining how large this could be, while continuing environmental work over at least two years to move into formal assessment. At the same time, we’re in the middle of a major M&A transaction in Quebec, and have engaged an engineering firm that has built about 60% of the world’s lithium refining capacity to study downstream refining in Canada, just outside Edmonton in Alberta.
As Canada looks to strengthen its position in critical minerals amid shifting geopolitical dynamics, you’ve highlighted the role of international partnerships, particularly with China. What will it take for Canada to compete globally in lithium?
Under the Carney government, the relationship between China and Canada is more nuanced and tactical, particularly around critical minerals. China is far ahead when it comes to downstream processing and refining, so our strategy is not to reinvent the wheel, but to work with Chinese companies that have done this many times before. Most lithium refineries attempted in the West have failed, so the approach is to give them a small, non-controlling project-level stake—sub-10%—so they’re there for execution and risk.
It comes down to technology, know-how, and experience. Much of chemical processing has been outsourced to China, but new processing technologies could be game changers. Another route is limiting market access unless there’s technology transfer, similar to how China required joint ventures—like what Volkswagen AG had to do when entering the market. That’s where we’re trying to position ourselves, to drive that transfer through collaboration.
You previously highlighted how unstable commodity pricing was constraining investment in Western lithium projects, but the market now appears to be shifting. What is materially different today, and how confident are you that pricing will stabilise?
The market has changed since we last spoke. Two recent off-take agreements have been signed with $1,000 per tonne spodumene price floors and no ceilings, with Chinese companies willing to structure deals that way, so even without government intervention the market is finding mechanisms to keep production from going offline.
If lithium carbonate drops to around $6,000 a tonne and wipes out 50% of production, that’s not good for anyone, so price floors are a really important development.
The turning point was July 2025, when the market bottomed. Spodumene moved from around $600 a tonne to about $2,400—roughly a 400% increase—and producers are now making money. Demand is also shifting: it’s less EV-centric and increasingly driven by battery storage, with demand from AI data centres, solar, wind and grid-scale systems up 80% in 2025 and expected to grow another 50–80% this year.
You’ve described volatility as the only constant in lithium over the next decade, but also as something that can work in your favour. What do you mean by that i?
Spodumene fell to around $600 over a year-and-a-half period, but demand was still there, growing at about 20% a year, and we were eating through supply. More supply would still be needed.
If you bought lithium equities or feedstock at that point, that’s where volatility becomes your friend. If you bought at $800 a tonne and prices move back toward $8,000, that’s a 10x increase in the underlying commodity—you buy when everyone hates it, and sell when everyone loves it.
Despite strong long-term fundamentals for lithium, investor capital has remained focused elsewhere. What is still holding investors back from lithium, and how do you compete for attention?
For mining investors, what’s stood out over the last year has been gold. It’s a massive, liquid, very developed market, and prices moved from $2,500 to $5,500 an ounce, with equities following, so to get attention you have to pull investors away from gold. It’s also a different trade—less about supply and demand, more about whether people want to own gold, especially when they’re worried about paper money losing value.
But commodities move in cycles. Gold was the standout, but it’s already hit all-time highs and pulled back from around $5,300–$5,400 an ounce, raising the question of profit-taking. With lithium, there’s a real supply-demand imbalance and a potential ~10% global supply deficit by year-end. As prices move, equities follow, and once investors see that momentum, buying builds on itself, which is likely to bring attention back over the next six months.
In a place like Yellowknife, where mining has a long and visible legacy, building trust with local communities is critical. How do you measure and maintain that trust?
A key metric at our stage is how many Indigenous people we’re employing, and we track that closely. We’ve had roughly 40–50% of our workforce being Indigenous, and we prioritise Indigenous contractors, supporting people in the community who are building their own businesses.
We also have exploration agreements with First Nations that include financial compensation, so we can see where that support is going. In one case, funding contributed to a new satellite for 5G networks, bringing internet access to a community that didn’t have it before. We’re still early, but we’ve been doing a decent job of inclusion and maintaining strong relationships.
As Li-FT moves from exploration toward development, the next phase will be critical in shaping its trajectory. When you look ahead, what does success look like for the company in 2026?
You can’t really speed up environmental work because the goal is to establish what the environment looked like before mining, and that requires a set amount of data. It’s highly regulated—we’ve been running 17 different surveys—and that’s simply the process in the Northwest Territories to move toward permitting.
Success also means advancing the PEA, including the lithium refinery study in Alberta. In Quebec, the Adina project—being acquired through Winsome Resources—will be the focus this summer, with significant drilling feeding into a feasibility study next year, while permitting continues to progress.
