22 December 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 an additional extension to the option to purchase the JFSL Field Services ULC (“JFSL”) brownfield site in Lamont County, Alberta (see news releases, dated January 24, 2022, July 14, 2022, and October 3, 2022). Fortune plans to construct a hydrometallurgical refinery at this site for its vertically integrated NICO cobalt-gold-bismuth-copper critical minerals project (“NICO Project”). The JFSL facility is a former steel fabrication plant located on 76.78 acres of lands in Alberta’s Industrial Heartland northeast of Edmonton and has 42,000 square feet of serviced shops and buildings adjacent to the Canadian National Railway. The JFSL site is also close to services, 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 Project development.
Pursuant to the option agreement, Fortune can acquire the JFSL site and facilities for C$5.5 million. The term of the option can be extended for up to six months by Fortune paying JFSL C$15,000 per month. JFSL’s has the right to solicit competing offers for the facility, subject to Fortune’s right to complete its purchase on the agreed terms by the end of the month for any extension period and/or Fortune’s right of first refusal to match the competing offer.
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 and with growing demand as an environmentally safe and non-toxic replacement for lead in free-machining steels and aluminum, brasses and solders used in potable drinking water sources and electronics, ceramic glazes, radiation shielding, glass, ammunition, and fishing weights, and environmentally safe plugs to decommission oil and gas wells. The Mineral Reserves for the NICO deposit 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 and recent project optimizations.
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.
Fortune is a Canadian mining company focused on developing the NICO cobalt-gold-bismuth-copper critical minerals project in the NWT and Alberta. Fortune also owns the satellite Sue-Dianne copper-silver-gold deposit located 25 km north of the NICO Deposit and is a potential future source of incremental mill feed to extend the life of the NICO mill and concentrator.