Canada Nickel expands its exploration footprint, acquires former Texmont Mine property
Winter and frozen ground mean exploration shifts into high gear in mining camps like Timmins where some companies are working to transition advanced projects into the next generation of gold and nickel producers.
Canada Nickel Company continues to grab a bigger slice of the prospective ground around the city.
The Toronto company’s year-long regional acquisition spree continues in recently picking up the former Texmont nickel mine, 36 kilometres south of the city.
The property is sandwiched between Canada Nickel’s Deloro and Sothman exploration properties. Even though the announcement was made Dec. 19, the company is already drilling on the property and is talking up its mine potential.
Canada Nickel is known in the Timmins area for its flagship Crawford nickel sulphide project, a potential open-pit operation, 40 kilometres north of the city.
But it’s made some deft moves in 2022 to pick up a raft of properties through acquisition and earn-in agreements around Timmins, Cochrane, Iroquois Falls and Matachewan. The company is promoting the area as a new nickel district, producing ‘green’ metals for the critical minerals market.
Texmont contains an historic nickel resource from the early 1970s, calculated to be 3.2 million ounces at 0.9 per cent nickel. The mine and mill operated briefly from July 1971 to December 1972. There are no details on the amount of material milled but the mine operators back then were said to be chasing narrow nickel mineralization of 1.0 per cent.
Canada Nickel thinks Texmont can be revived as an open-pit mine that can potentially restart in 2025.
This looks to be a low-grade, big-tonnage deposit extending to surface, but Canada Nickel believes there is high-grade material there based on early results from a drilling program now underway. Assay returns on four drill holes show “significant intervals” of mineralization, the company said.
Several drill holes are planned for this winter with the goal of releasing an updated nickel resource estimate using new and historic data.
The company is also drilling at its Sothman property, 70 kilometres south of Timmins, targeting high-grade nickel mineralization.
“The acquisition of the Texmont property provides near-term smaller scale production potential and is highly complementary to our large-scale Crawford and regional nickel sulphide projects,” said company chair-CEO Mark Selby in a statement.
“In our discussions with nickel consumers for the battery market, many of them are keen to have new nickel production that could come to market by 2025. Similarly, a number of investors have expressed interest in financing near-term production.”
On financing the development of the Crawford open-pit mine, Selby said they’ve turned to Scotiabank and Deutsche Bank for advice. He added they’ve also passed another permitting milestone in filing a detailed project description of the proposed mine to Impact.