14 July 2022
07/14/2022: LONDON, Ontario--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Fortune Minerals Limited (TSX: FT) (OTCQB: FTMDF) (“Fortune” or the “Company”) (www.fortuneminerals.com) is pleased to announce that it has secured a two-month extension to the option period to purchase the JFSL Field Services ULC (“JFSL”) brownfield site in Lamont County, Alberta where it plans to construct the NICO hydrometallurgical refinery. Fortune can acquire the JFSL site and facilities for C$5.5 million before the end of September 2022 by paying C$15,000 per month to extend the option. The JFSL site is comprised of 76.78 acres of lands in Alberta’s Industrial Heartland northeast of Edmonton, a consortium of five municipalities with the planning approvals already in place to attract heavy industry. The JFSL facility is a former steel fabrication plant with 42,000 square feet of serviced shops and buildings adjacent to the Canadian National Railway. It is also situated close to sources of reagents and a commutable pool of engineers and skilled chemical plant workers to materially reduce capital and operating costs for the planned NICO development.
The NICO refinery would process metal concentrates from the planned NICO cobalt-gold-bismuth-copper mine and concentrator in the Northwest Territories (“NWT”) enabling Fortune to become a vertically integrated producer of cobalt sulphate needed to make the cathodes of lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles, portable electronics and stationary storage cells. The refinery would also produce bismuth ingots and oxide, an ‘Eco-metal’ used in the automotive and pharmaceutical industries with growing demand as an environmentally safe and non-toxic replacement for lead in free-machining steels and aluminum, lead-free brasses and solders for the plumbing and electronics industries, ceramic glazes, radiation shielding, glass, plugs for decommissioned oil and gas wells, ammunition, and fishing weights. The Mineral Reserves for the NICO deposit in the NWT also contain more than one million ounces of gold, and copper as a minor by-product. The vertically integrated NICO Project is an advanced development stage Critical Minerals development asset that has already received environmental assessment approval and the major mine permits for the facilities in the NWT. The project has also been assessed in positive feasibility and front-end engineering and design (“FEED”) studies that will be updated to reflect the new refinery site.
For more detailed information about the NICO Mineral Reserves and certain technical information in this news release, please refer to the Technical Report on the NICO Project, entitled "Technical Report on the Feasibility Study for the NICO-Gold-Cobalt-Bismuth-Copper Project, Northwest Territories, Canada", dated April 2, 2014 and prepared by Micon International Limited which has been filed on SEDAR and is available under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com. The disclosure of scientific and technical information contained in this news release has been approved by Robin Goad, M.Sc., P.Geo., President and Chief Executive Officer of Fortune, who is a "Qualified Person" under National Instrument 43-101.