When the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran choked off the Strait of Hormuz, the cost of gas shot up, as all drivers know, but so did an obscure industrial commodity that fuels the global mining industry: sulphur.
The price of this stinky by-product of oil refining spiked almost overnight, says Olivier Dufresne, CEO of Exterra Technologies, a Quebec-based critical minerals processing startup. That escalation, he adds, drove up the cost of sulphur, a workhorse ingredient in one of several reagents used in most mining operations. “When reagent prices go 500 per cent in the wrong way, the project just dies,” Dufresne says.
