The Sothman Nickel Project
posted on
May 28, 2008 01:57AM
Producing Mines and "state-of-the-art" Mill
This is my interpretation on the project (for what its worth!)
The property size(including the staked claims) is about the same size as the Groves project and also the same size as combining the Redstone with the McWatters property.
Drilling appears quite significant to define the average width to be 17.8 meters and drilling to 500 feet (pod like maybe). The deposit is wide open at depth.
Ore resource is 350,000 tonnes grading 0.89% Ni (0.5% Ni cut-off) or 190,000 tons at 1.24% Ni( 1% Ni cut-off) Falconbridge 1971.
Overburden work in 2001 exposed the channel measuring 20 m along strike by up to 11m deep at the base of the host ultramafic flow.
Property already has a least. Timelines that had to be agreed upon is by Mar 1 2011 we have to have decided to put it into production.
Xstrata just happens to have a mine starting to wind down that has a mill on it hence there is an ability for the ore to be processed without us spending the money to build a mill. This means that our other properties can supply our mill and we can do this "mine" concurrently. Our mill can handle up to 2000 tpd (permitted for 1500 tpd currently) so this agreement could possibly allow us to grow our production to 3-4000 tpd. (Which happens to be around FNX's figure)
Our company has goals, we just have to allow it time. It will be interesting to see how the drilling goes on this project this year. Although the resource is non Ni43-101 compliant I suspect that our drilling could be very aggressive toward defining this resource.