The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Work focused on completing PFS for nickel-cobalt mine in BC North of 60 Mining News – July 9, 2021
Boxes of core from the drilling that has outlined 10.7 billion pounds of nickel and 640 million lb of cobalt at Giga Metals' Turnagain project in Northern British Columbia.
Turnagain hosts large amounts of nickel and cobalt in rocks that contain minerals capable of absorbing carbon dioxide out of the air. Click on the photo for more information.
Giga Metals Corp. July 5 announced the start of a 2021 field program focused on upgrading the resource and collecting other data needed for a prefeasibility study for its Turnagain nickel-cobalt project in Northern British Columbia.
"This work program is designed to collect all necessary exploration, geotechnical and other data to advance project engineering to the pre-feasibility level," said Giga Metals CEO Mark Jarvis.
This PFS will build upon a preliminary economic assessment completed last October that outlines initial plans for a mine at Turnagain that would produce an average of 33,215 metric tons of nickel and 1,962 metric tons of cobalt annually over a 37-year mine life.
The cost to build this mine is estimated to be US$1.9 billion, which includes an initial capital investment of US$1.4 billion for phase-1 construction and US$500 million for phase-2 expansion scheduled to begin in the sixth year of operation.
The initial capital includes US$300 million needed for infrastructure to deliver hydropower to the project about 65 kilometers (40 kilometers) east of Dease Lake, BC. This hydropower is considered an important facet of Giga's goal to provide North American supply chains with a carbon-neutral supply of the nickel and cobalt needed for the lithium-ion batteries powering electric vehicles and storing renewable energy.
Toward this objective, studies by the University of British Columbia indicate the tailings from a mine at Turnagain has the potential to sequester carbon dioxide at rates that could make the mine carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative with an electrified mining fleet charged with hydroelectricity.
More information on the UBC studies into the potential CO2 sequestration at Turnagain can be read at Potential CO2 neutral nickel mine in BC in the June 2, 2021 edition of Metal Tech News; click on the photo below to read the article.
Looking to further advance and optimize the carbon-neutral battery metals mine envisioned by Giga, the 2021 field program at Turnagain is slated to include 6,900 meters of infill drilling aimed at upgrading the nickel and cobalt resources found there.
According to a resource calculation completed ahead of the PEA, Turnagain hosts 1.07 billion metric tons of measured and indicated resource averaging 0.22% (5.21 billion pounds) nickel and 0.13% (312.4 million lb) cobalt; plus 1.14 billion metric tons of inferred resource averaging 0.22% (5.47 billion lb) nickel and 0.013% (327.3 million lb) cobalt.
The program will also include 2,300 meters of geophysical drilling that will provide information for designing the pit walls of the proposed open pit mine.
The company will also be collecting more detailed information for the engineering of the Turnagain tailings facility. This is expected to include 800 meters of geotechnical drilling and 9,000 meters of seismic refraction surveying to characterize the subsurface geologic conditions and geologic structure below the proposed tailings impoundment.
Crews will also dig around 25 excavator test pits in areas proposed for stockpiling ore and storing waste materials produced while mining.
The archaeological and wildlife surveys needed for mine design and permitting are already underway at Turnagain.
Giga anticipates the Turnagain mine PFS, which will include the results from the 2021 program and other studies, to be completed in the third quarter of 2022.
Over his more than 16 years of covering mining and mineral exploration, Shane has become renowned for his ability to report on the sector in a way that is technically sound enough to inform industry insiders while being easy to understand by a wider audience.
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