Canada Nickel Company is out to raise $10 million in exploration financing to expand the resources for its proposed open-pit mine project outside Timmins.
The Toronto exploration company is offering flow-through shares to fund exploration through the remainder of this year for its Crawford nickel sulphide project, 40 kilometres north of the city. The share offering is expected to close on July 27.
The company posted a preliminary economic assessment (PEA) for Crawford at the end of May, proposing a two-pit mining operation with a processing plant and enough resources in the ground for 25 years.
Canada Nickel expects Crawford to be one of the largest base metal mines in Canada.
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To build on the resource base, they're continuing to drill on the edges of Crawford's main zone, following mineralized extensions and assessing the property's platinum group metals potential. All those results will be included in a final mine feasibility study due out in mid-2022.
With the PEA out, the company is also spending this summer drilling some of its outlying properties on its massive 72,000-hectare property, targetting its Nesbitt, MacDiarmid, Mahaffy, Kingsmill and its recently acquired Dargavel/Bradburn properties.
At Nesbitt, eight kilometres north of the Crawford main zone, Canada Nickel management believes it has potential to be a new high-grade source of feed for its proposed milling facility.
The first two discovery holes at Nesbitt intersected visible disseminated nickel sulphides, which boosts the narrative that Crawford has district-scale mining potential.
“This financing allows us to remain well-funded through the end of the year and provides significant financial flexibility as we drive our successful exploration program forward and advance our discussions with potential strategic partners," said Mark Selby, First Nickel CEO and chair in a July 7 news release.
Selby said last May that only a "fraction" of Crawford's resource potential has been realized through the PEA, insisting that this project can be "one of the largest nickel sulphide operations globally," producing 1.9 billion pounds of nickel over that quarter-century span.
The company has made it no secret that it wouldn't mind having a manufacturing partner come to Timmins to take some of the nickel, iron and chrome discovered at Crawford and help make stainless steel and nickel pig iron through a downstream plant operation.
