4 April 2018
Fortune Minerals Limited is pleased to report that the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board has recommended that the Tlicho all-season road be approved subject to measures designed to mitigate potential environmental, social and cultural impacts. The Government of the Northwest Territories, Department of Transportation and Tlicho Government received this conditional approval on March 29, 2018, enabling construction of the 97-kilometre Tlicho Road to connect the community of Whatì to the territorial highway system. Fortune has already received environmental assessment approval to build a 49-kilometre spur road from Whati to its proposed NICO mine. Together, these roads will allow the Company to transport metal concentrates from the mine to its proposed refinery in Saskatchewan for downstream processing to cobalt sulphate, gold, bismuth ingots and oxide, and copper precipitate to support the growing green economy.
Fortune's NICO cobalt-gold-bismuth-copper project is a development stage primary cobalt asset consisting of a planned mine and concentrator in the Northwest Territories and refinery in Saskatchewan. As an emerging vertically integrated Canadian producer of environmentally responsible and ethical cobalt and bismuth, Fortune will be able to demonstrate supply chain transparency and custody control of metals from ores through to the production of value-added products. Development of the NICO Project will help alleviate supply chain concerns from the growing demand for cobalt in the rapidly expanding lithium-ion battery industry from automotive electrification and stationary storage of electricity for the grid. It will also mitigate geographic concentration of cobalt supply from the politically unstable Congo (~67% of mine supply) and China (~80% of refined cobalt chemical supply), as well as constraints on supply resulting from its production primarily as a by-product of copper and nickel mining (~98% of non-artisanal cobalt mine supply) where the primary metals determine production criteria.