Canada Nickel acquires another property near Timmins

Canada Nickel is continuing its aggressive acquisitions of nickel properties in the Timmins area.

On Dec. 19, the company announced it has purchased the Texmont property, located between the company’s Deloro and Sothman properties, 36 kilometres south of Timmins.

Mark Selby, chair and CEO, said in a news release that Texmont is a property that can begin producing nickel quickly.

“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,” Selby said.

“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.”

Texmont operated as an open pit mine between 1971 and 1972. Early drilling has shown promising results, the company said. Many more test holes will be drilled this winter.

“The goal (is to produce) a current resource estimate using historic and new data, as the basis for an open pit mine plan to support a potential restart by 2025 or provide a source of higher-grade feed for the Crawford Nickel Sulphide project,” the company said.

The news comes more than a year after Canada Nickel announced it was acquiring 13 properties near the Crawford Nickel-Sulfide Project.

Combined, the 13 properties have a surface footprint of 37.7 square kilometres – 40 times larger than current Crawford Main Zone resource of 0.85 square kilometres.

Ten of the target properties have a larger footprint than Crawford and nine confirmed to contain the same host mineralization as Crawford.

Selby has been bullish on the company’s work, saying it could become a rival to Sudbury as a source of nickel needed as electric vehicle production ramps up.

"We're really talking about building one of the world's largest nickel sulfide districts, you know, potentially larger than Sudbury," Selby said in October.

"(We're) in a point in time where the market is desperate for large-scale, scalable low-carbon sources of nickel to be able to have a nickel for the electric vehicles that everybody would like to produce over the next few months."