13 June 2023
JUNE 13, 2023
Vancouver, British Columbia: FIREWEED METALS CORP. (“Fireweed” or the “Company”) (TSXV: FWZ; OTCQB: FWEDF) is pleased to announce a new mineral resource estimate for its Mactung Project located in Yukon and Northwest Territories, Canada (Map 1), within the Traditional Territories of the Kaska Dena Nation and First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun, and the Sahtú Settlement Area.
CEO Statement
Brandon Macdonald, CEO, stated “In one year we have gone from signing an initial Letter of Intent to a Definitive Asset Purchase Agreement to the publication of new mineral resource for Mactung. We have taken the historic resource through a process involving relogging, resampling, and a rigorous, modern estimation methodology, and confirmed an impressive and world-class tungsten resource at Mactung*. This not only reaffirms Mactung’s unmatched combination of grade and scale but establishes it as a truly strategic critical minerals project for the West with the underground resource alone able to supply much of North America’s expected demand for decades. Fireweed is looking forward to collaborating with federal, territorial, and Indigenous governments to advance Mactung through the permitting and detailed engineering stages of this unique project.”
Table 1: Mineral Resource Statement(1,2,3,4) for the Mactung Project.
For table footnotes 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 see page 9.
Mineral Resource Estimate
The current Mineral Resource at Mactung ranks it the largest high-grade tungsten resource in the world and it is a clear statistical outlier in terms of grade and contained metal*. It is a tungsten skarn deposit associated with Tombstone-Tungsten suite granitic intrusions that are more broadly linked to a variety of gold and tungsten deposits across Yukon-Northwest Territories. The Mactung deposit is sub-divided into an upper and lower zone that both occur at surface and extend to depths of approximately 400 m below surface.
A very high-grade portion of the resource was constrained by underground mining volumes at a 0.5% WO3 cut-off grade, within the gently to moderately dipping, roughly tabular, lower zone that is approximately 20-30 m thick, extending for a kilometre in strike and up to 380 m down-dip.
In the upper zone, a high-grade open pit resource was constrained by a conceptual pit shell at a 0.25% WO3 cut-off grade.
The Mineral Resource estimate considers and employs reasonable prospects for eventual economic extraction, is applied within classification domains that are continuous, and uses a classification scheme involving a drill spacing that was based on drill-spacing studies. Additional bulk density and assay data were collected during an extensive Fireweed campaign of re-sampling historic drill core in late 2022 and early 2023, and a new geological interpretation of the deposit has been made. These factors have resulted in a robust estimate of the Mineral Inventory at Mactung, providing a solid foundation for future mine development studies.
Copper and gold by-product reporting
Copper and gold were estimated as by-product metals for underground constrained resources only (Table 2). No metallurgical test work has been conducted to assess the recovery of copper or gold at Mactung. Based on historical production of small quantities of gold and of copper concentrate from the geologically similar Cantung mine†, it has been reasonably assumed that gravity separation and a copper circuit could be incorporated into the flowsheet to recover a portion of the gold and copper in the Current Mineral Resource to satisfy the reasonable prospects of eventual economic extraction. Fireweed and its consultants are currently completing metallurgical test programs to validate the recovery of tungsten and assess the recovery of gold and copper at Mactung. Grades of copper and gold were considered too low to include within the Mineral Resource Statement for open-pit constrained resources.
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