Canada Nickel took the wraps off the company’s long-awaited feasibility study, describing the details behind proposed a 41 year open-pit mine life for its Crawford Mine Project, located 40 kilometres north of a northeastern Ontario city.
With an average grade of 0.22 per cent nickel, Crawford will be a low-grade, big tonnage open-pit operation that will ramp up production in three phases and physically expand twice over four decades.
Crawford and its larger land package in the Timmins district appears to be a base metals and critical minerals grocery store for the North American battery manufacturing and automotive companies.
Besides containing a nickel reserve of 3.8 million tonnes, the proposed USD 1.7 bn mine and mill project also contains a useful mix of other market-desirable minerals.
Over its operational life, Crawford will produce 1.6 million tonnes of nickel, 24,000 tonnes of cobalt, 490 million ounces of platinum and palladium, 58 million tonnes of iron, and 2.8 million tonnes of chromium.
Crawford will also bring more processing capacity to the Timmins area. The company intends to make an iron-nickel-chrome product for the North American stainless steel and ferro-alloy sector.
