(Fortune, 19.Aug.2024) — Fortune Minerals Limited has entered into a new option agreement with JFSL Field Services ULC (JFSL) to purchase the brownfield industrial site in Lamont County, Alberta where it plans to construct its hydrometallurgical refinery (Alberta Refinery). The Alberta Refinery would process metal concentrates from Fortune’s planned NICO cobalt-gold-bismuth-copper mine and concentrator in the Northwest Territories (NWT) (collectively, the “NICO Project”) and provide a reliable domestic supply of Critical Minerals for the energy transition and other new technologies.
The Alberta Refinery will produce cobalt sulphate for the North American lithium-ion battery industry, bismuth ingots (12% of global reserves) and copper cement – with more than one million ounces of in-situ gold as a countercyclical and highly liquid co-product. Fortune also has a process collaboration with Rio Tinto examining the feasibility of processing materials produced from Kennecott Smelter wastes in Utah at the Alberta Refinery to increase cobalt and bismuth production.
Pursuant to the new option agreement, Fortune can acquire the Lamont County site from JFSL for C$6,000,000 prior to the end of Nov. 2025, provided it makes monthly option payments of C$100,000. The monthly option payments and the C$1,437,500 previously paid by Fortune to JFSL, are deductible from the purchase price. JFSL will be entitled to list the Lamont County property for sale during the option period, subject to Fortune’s 90-day right of first refusal to match any third-party offer. JFSL will also be entitled to continue using the Lamont County property and facilities for the eighteen months following a sale to Fortune.
JFSL is a subsidiary of Worley Group, an international engineering, construction management and environmental services company listed for trading on the Australian Stock Exchange. Worley will be the preferred contractor for environmental, engineering, procurement, fabrication and construction work for the Alberta Refinery.
The JFSL site is comprised of 76.78 acres of lands adjacent to the Canadian National Railway in Alberta’s Industrial Heartland, an association of five municipalities northeast of Edmonton with planning approvals and tax incentives designed to attract heavy industry. The JFSL site is a former steel fabrication plant with more than 42,000 square feet of serviced shops and buildings situated near the services, sources of reagents, and commutable skilled worker pool already in place for the Alberta petrochemicals industry. These are expected to materially reduce capital and operating costs for the Alberta Refinery during construction and operations.
Fortune is also pleased to announce that Alex Mezei, M.Sc. P.Eng., has joined the company as Chief Metallurgist. Mr Mezei will supervise the test work and process and design engineering for the NICO Project, which the Company is advancing with the recently announced government contribution funding totalling approximately C$17mn (see news releases dated 16 May 2024 and 5 Dec. 2023). Mr. Mezei is a Chemical Engineer with a more than forty years of diverse experience in international process engineering, test and pilot work, and economic assessments for a broad range of commodities around the world. This includes 22 years at SGS Mineral Services in Lakefield, Ontario where he was Director, Engineering Technology Services, Metallurgical Operations, and Senior Metallurgist and notably, where he supervised the hydrometallurgical work for the NICO Project. Prior to SGS, Alex worked for Asea Brown Boveri as an instrumentation engineer, as a process research scientist at the Institute for Technological Engineering for Inorganic Chemistry and Nonferrous Metals in Romania, and as a production engineer at the Phoenix Metallurgical-Chemical Plant in Baia-Mare, Romania. Since retiring from SGS in 2016, Alex has worked as an Independent Consulting Metallurgist and Director of Metallurgy for Planetary Technologies.
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