18 July 2019
Fortune Minerals Limited is pleased to report the discovery of a new zone of copper mineralization at its 100% owned NICO cobalt-gold-bismuth-copper project (“NICO Project”), located 160 km northwest of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. The new zone was identified in bedrock exposed in a pit excavated last spring to provide aggregate for road work and is located 1.6 km southeast along the projection of strike from the main NICO deposit. The new zone is located on the periphery of previously identified coincident magnetic, gravity and electrical resistivity geophysical anomalies at Peanut Lake that are similar to the ones associated with the main NICO deposit. Three of four representative grab samples collected from the pit returned grades of 1.66%, 1.55% and 0.78% copper from analyses carried out at ALS Canada Ltd. in North Vancouver.
Fortune’s NICO Project is one of the few cobalt development assets outside of the Democratic Republic of Congo to service demand growth in lithium-ion batteries used to power portable electronic devices, electric vehicles and energy stationary storage to make electricity use more efficient. Fortune’s NICO Project and its nearby Sue-Dianne copper-silver-gold deposit are the only known Canadian examples of the Iron Oxide Copper Gold (IOCG) mineral deposit class, also commonly referred to as Olympic Dam-type, after the ‘super giant’ deposit located in South Australia. IOCG deposits in Queensland and South Australia, Carajas, Brazil and Candelaria, Chile are typically associated with large magnetic, gravity and electrical resistivity geophysical anomalies.
Coincident magnetic, gravity and magnetotelluric geophysical anomalies approximately 1 km in diameter were previously identified west of Peanut Lake in the vicinity of the new copper showing in surveys carried out for Fortune and the Geological Survey of Canada. The magnetic anomaly identified in a 1995 helicopter survey for Fortune has peak amplitude of 10,000 nanoteslas (“nT”) and is the strongest magnetic anomaly recognized on the NICO property. Ground gravity surveys conducted for Fortune in 1995 and 1996 also identified a coincident Bouguer anomaly with peak amplitude of 2 milligals (“mGal”). The magnetic and gravity anomalies associated with the NICO deposit have peak amplitudes of 6,000 nT and 3 mGal, respectively. A magnetotelluric survey carried out by the Geological Survey of Canada in 2010 identified a coincident electrical resistivity low indicative of a potential sulphide conductive source.