The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
North of 60 Mining News - October 8, 2024
A critical mineral-enriched boulder dug out of a pit excavated to provide aggregate for road work on Fortune Minerals' NICO cobalt-gold-bismuth-copper project in Northwest Territories.
Fortune Minerals has the option to acquire this steel fabrication plant in Alberta, which it plans to repurpose as a refinery to process concentrates from a future NICO mine and potentially recover bismuth and cobalt from Rio Tinto's Kennecott refinery.
Fortune Minerals Ltd. Oct. 7 reported that it has hired Worley Canada Services Ltd. to update a feasibility study for NICO, a vertically integrated critical minerals project that will include a mine in Northwest Territories and hydrometallurgical refinery in Alberta.
Located about 160 kilometers (100 miles) northwest of Yellowknife, NWT, and about 50 kilometers (31 miles) north of the newly built Tlicho Highway, the Fortunes NICO mine project hosts 33.1 million metric tons of proven and probable reserves containing 82.3 million pounds of cobalt, 102.1 million lb of bismuth, 27.2 million lb of copper, and 1.11 million ounces of gold.
According to a 2020 development plan based on optimizations of a 2014 feasibility study, a mine at NICO and an associated refinery in Alberta would produce an average of 1,800 metric tons of battery-grade cobalt sulfate, 1,700 metric tons of bismuth, 300 metric tons of copper, and 47,000 oz of gold annually over the first 14 years of mining.
This intriguing mix of cobalt for lithium-ion batteries, bismuth used in various automotive and metallurgical applications, copper for the energy transition, and gold to help improve the economics of producing the critical metalshas captured the attention of the United States and Canadian governments.
In May, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) awarded Fortune a combined C$16.2 million (US$12 million) to support the development of the planned NICO mine and refinery.
"As a planned vertically integrated development, the NICO project covers the entire mineral production process from mining and concentrating ores to refining metals to final cobalt sulfate and bismuth ingot products with copper and gold co-products," DOD penned in an announcement on its funding of the project.
Fortune Minerals has the option to acquire this steel fabrication plant in Alberta, which it plans to repurpose as a refinery to process concentrates from a future NICO mine and potentially recover bismuth and cobalt from Rio Tinto's Kennecott refinery.
Fortune is now applying the DOD and NRCan funding, along with nearly C$900,000 (US$660,000) in additional funding from Canada and Alberta, to complete the metallurgical and engineering work needed to update and expand upon the decade-old feasibility study.
The updated feasibility study to be completed by Worley Canada will include:
• Current market conditions, metals prices, and capital and operational costs.
• Improved transportation infrastructure that extends the NWT to within 50 kilometers of NICO.
• The securing of an industrial site in Alberta to build the hydrometallurgical processing plant.
• An upgraded and refined resource model for the NICO mine project.
• Analysis of processing third-party material at the Alberta refinery, including the recovery of bismuth and cobalt from a waste product produced at Rio Tinto's Kennecott smelter in Utah.
With the updated feasibility study, Fortune can further explore its option for financing a reliable North American supply of critical and precious metals at its vertically integrated NICO mine and refinery project in NWT and Alberta.
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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