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North of 60 Mining News - January 8, 2025
Fortune Minerals plans to repurpose this former steel fabrication plant in Alberta as a refinery to process concentrates from a future NICO mine and potentially recover bismuth and cobalt from a byproduct produced from a waste stream from the refinery at Rio Tinto's Kennecott copper mine.
Roughly 15 metric tons of previously stockpiled NICO ore is being used for metallurgical test work.
Fortune Minerals Ltd. Jan. 8 reported that the engineering and test work being supported by roughly $12 million (C$17 million) in funding from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), and Alberta Innovates is resulting in metals recovery and cost improvements that will be incorporated into an updated feasibility study for a mine at its NICO bismuth-cobalt-copper-gold project in Northwest Territories and associated 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.
Fortune's plans to establish a North American mine-to-metals supply chain that would deliver bismuth for various automotive and metallurgical applications, cobalt for lithium-ion batteries, copper for the energy transition, and gold that will bring down the costs of producing these critical metals has attracted interest from the Pentagon, Canadian government, and mining giant Rio Tinto.
"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 has been applying the funding provided by DOD, NRCan, and Alberta Innovates to complete the metallurgical and engineering work needed to update and improve upon the previous NICO feasibility study.
Worley Canada Services Ltd., which is leading the engineering for the feasibility study, is incorporating a number of improvements to the updated study. These Include:
• Fortune's securing of a previously developed industrial site in Alberta to build the hydrometallurgical processing plant.
• The new Tlicho Highway to Whati, NWT, brings surface transportation infrastructure within 30 miles (50 kilometers) of the NICO mine project.
• A new geological model that reduces dilution and better differentiates high-grade resource blocks for earlier mining.
• A new mine plan and production schedule with a stockpiling strategy to accelerate the processing of higher-margin ores.
• Mineral processing optimizations from recent test work.
Roughly 15 metric tons of previously stockpiled NICO ore is being used for metallurgical test work.
On the processing optimization front, Fortune reports that recent testing has identified several areas to increase bismuth, cobalt, and gold recoveries while also making the processing more efficient.
For the future mill at the NICO mine project, Worley found that adjusting the grind size and adding new flotation cells improved bismuth, cobalt, and gold recoveries. A carbon column is also being designed to capture additional gold that would have otherwise been dissolved in the process water and lost during bismuth and cobalt separation.
The test work is now focused on dialing in the recoveries for the future hydrometallurgical refinery in Alberta. Fortune says the early results from this work have exceeded its expectations. These early results include 97% bismuth recoveries in a cement grading up to 95% bismuth, with iron being the primary impurity.
The new circuit being designed is expected to significantly decrease process time and improve the recoveries of both bismuth and cobalt. The potential of producing a saleable gypsum byproduct at the Alberta refinery is also being studied.
Fortune also reported positive results from its collaboration with Rio Tinto to investigate the potential of using the future Alberta refinery to recover additional cobalt and bismuth from precipitates produced from smelter waste at the Kennecott copper mine in Utah.
Testing showed that blending the byproduct from Rio Tinto's Kennecott refinery with concentrates from NICO ore resulted in no material changes in bismuth recoveries in comparison to processing unblended NICO concentrates. Given these results, Rio Tinto is moving forward with additional testing of the potential to utilize Fortune's proposed Alberta refinery to enhance the recovery of critical minerals from its Utah copper mine.
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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