The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Mining Explorers 2024 - January 15, 2025
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 has the option to acquire this steel fabrication plant in Alberta, which it plans to repurpose as a refinery to process NICO mine concentrates and potentially recover bismuth and cobalt from Rio Tinto's Kennecott refinery.
Fortune Minerals Ltd.'s efforts to establish a North American supply of metals critical to the energy transition at its NICO project in Northwest Territories received a $11.9 million (C$16.2 million) boost from federal grants awarded by both Canada and the United States.
Located about 100 miles (160 kilometers) northwest of Yellowknife, NICO is a near-development stage project that includes an intriguing mix of critical and precious metals.
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.
The cobalt that would be produced at the vertically integrated NICO project is in high demand due to its use in lithium-ion batteries powering electric vehicles, storing renewable energy, and powering a growing array of electronic and household devices.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, roughly 74% of the world's cobalt comes from mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country known for being politically unstable and which has come under global scrutiny for human rights and safety issues related to the mining of cobalt there.
China controls more than half of the cobalt mined in DRC and currently accounts for roughly 76% of the global refined cobalt.
NICO also happens to host 10% of the world's reserves of bismuth, a critical mineral used in a wide variety of automotive and metallurgical applications.
Adding to the potential commercial uses of bismuth, U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories have made breakthroughs on powerful manganese-bismuth permanent magnets that could serve as an alternative to rare earth magnets in EV motors, wind turbines, military hardware, and other applications.
Much like cobalt, however, the production of bismuth is dominated by China, which accounted for roughly 80% of global production during 2023, according to the USGS.
What makes NICO even more intriguing is the proposed mine in Northwest Territories and refinery in Alberta would also produce appreciable quantities of the copper critical to the clean energy transition and gold that offers a built-in hedge against inflation.
"The demand for critical minerals needed for the energy transition requires new vertically integrated domestic production from non-traditional ores and concentrates," said Fortune Minerals President and CEO Robin Goad.
To help develop an updated feasibility study for the vertically integrated critical minerals project, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) awarded Fortune a combined $12 million to support the development of the planned NICO mine and refinery.
"Through our work with the United States and other allies, we are developing secure critical minerals value chains that will power a prosperous and sustainable future," said Canada Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Jonathan Wilkinson.
Fortune is using 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.
In September, Fortune announced that it had retained Worley Canada Services Ltd. to complete an updated feasibility study that will consider:
• 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.
Fortune has the option to acquire this steel fabrication plant in Alberta, which it plans to repurpose as a refinery to process NICO mine concentrates and potentially recover bismuth and cobalt from Rio Tinto's Kennecott refinery.
This includes ongoing studies being carried out in partnership with Rio Tinto to assess the potential of recovering cobalt and bismuth from intermediate products from Rio Tinto's Kennecott refinery in Utah by blending them with NICO concentrates before processing through the Alberta refinery.
"We are enthusiastic about this partnership with Fortune Minerals as we continue looking at our waste streams to develop new, sustainable sources of critical minerals here in North America," said Rio Tinto Kennecott Managing Director Nate Foster.
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.
Reader Comments(0)