Sudbury’s newest and boldest miner, Magna Mining, continues to expand its footprint in the Sudbury basin.
The junior mine developer has signed an asset acquisition agreement with NorthX Nickel to pick up a raft of former mine and exploration properties that hold some promising base metal potential.
And it’s a pretty sweet cash deal for Magna. One dollar.
The properties, scattered all over the corners of the Sudbury basin, amount to about 30,000 hectares that Magna believes have significant upside based on the geology and the record of high-grade hits from drilling programs carried out by previous companies.
The deal is expected to close by March 2025.
Magna is best known in Sudbury for its redevelopment of the former Crean Hill mine, once operated by Inco.
This is the second land acquisition transaction by Magna this year. In September, Magna swung a major $33-millon deal with KGHM to land the operating McCreedy West copper mine and a stable of exploration properties that the Magna team is quite familiar with. That deal will be finalized in the first quarter of next year.
The seven properties from NorthX involve Wisner, Parkin, Frost Lake, Blezard, Creighton South, Trill and Windy Lake.
The Parkin property, northeast of Magna’s shuttered Podolsky Mine, contains the Milnet Mine, once a producer of nickel, copper, platinum group metals and some gold.
Wisner produced 295,000 tonnes of copper and platinum group metals from an open-pit operation at the Broken Hammer Zone. The Blezard and Creighton South properties have combined measured and indicated nickel and copper resources of 13.4 million tonnes.
In a Dec. 18 news release, Magna said they’ll sift through all the historical data for these properties and put together a list of exploration targets.
“We are certainly excited to get our hands on them,” Magna said in a Dec. 18 note to shareholders.
“We have always taken pride in our ability to identify, negotiate and execute transactions in the Sudbury Basin that offer incredibly attractive risk / reward profiles, and we believe that we have achieved that once again with this transaction.”
The seller, NorthX, once known as Archer Exploration, appeared on the scene in 2022, acquiring a slew of Sudbury properties from Wallbridge Mining. But there was very little news flow on any advancement of these properties. NorthX devoted much of its attention to its Grasset nickel project in western Quebec. That’s where its focus will now reside, the company said.
Magna, which is led by CEO Jason Jessup, and is staffed with former employees of legendary Sudbury mining upstart FNX Mining, brings a ton of experience and a fresh approach to these previously explored and mined properties.
Jessup said, geologically, these latest acquisitions fit their big picture of what Magna is looking for in its plans for the Sudbury camp.
“Many of these properties are located in the footwall of known Sudbury deposits, within prospective geological environments, and have not been thoroughly explored. This acquisition is another example of how we continue to execute our growth strategy in a capital efficient manner with minimal dilution to shareholders.”
In a year-end note to shareholders to cap off what has been an “incredibly busy, exciting, and transformational” 12 months for Magna, Jessup delivered an update this week on their upcoming flurry of activity.
For 2025, Jessup said they’re fine-tuning operations at McCreedy West to boost production numbers to “set ourselves up for a strong production year in 2026 and beyond.”
“We see opportunity within McCreedy West everywhere we look. There is still resource expansion potential, massive chalcopyrite (copper) rich veins within the 700 FW Complex and high-grade PGM mineralization in the footwall. I look forward to providing more information and details on our plans for McCreedy post-closing of the acquisition.”
Jessup said to expect a restart plan soon for the shuttered Levack Mine, involving a surface and underground exploration drilling program where he said there’s “some of the best exploration potential of any near mine property I know.”
Exploration programs at both McCreedy and Levack will be ramped up in 2025 to drill into high-grade copper and platinum group metal targets.
At Crean Hill, the company started selling ore this year, mined from a starter pit, to Vale’s Clarabelle mill and expects to put out a pre-feasibility study at some point on what an underground mining operation will look like.
