Jason Jessup CEO MAGNA MINING
Could you outline the news of your recent acquisition and updates from your other projects?
In September 2024, we announced the acquisition of eight properties in Sudbury from KGHM International. The most notable of which is the producing McCreedy West mine, along with the Levack and Podolsky mines, both of which are currently on care and maintenance, plus five other exploration properties. These assets have been on our radar for a long time, and our team has extensive experience with them. The acquisition complements our Crean Hill and Shakespeare projects, and we plan to close the deal in Q1 2025.
We have agreements to sell ore from Crean Hill to Vale’s Clarabelle mill and have already processed bulk samples through Glencore’s mill. McCreedy West also has agreements with both Vale and Glencore. Even though we have permits to build a mill and produce our own concentrate at the Shakespeare project, we are deferring that construction until we have sufficient cash flow from other operations, and we will likely revisit it around 2027. For the time being, we will rely on the two existing mills in Sudbury.
What is your strategy for securing funding?
We secured two debt facilities with Desjardins Capital Markets: a 3-year term debt facility for C$10 million and a C$10 million letter of credit for closure liabilities. This financing will help us close the acquisition, and we expect to generate cash flow from McCreedy West. While we may consider royalties or streams to fund Levack or Crean Hill, we are not looking at off-take agreements or bringing in partners at this time.
Do you have a final message?
2025 is going to be an exciting year for us. We will become a producing company primarily focused on copper, with significant nickel and precious metal by-products.
Mark Selby CEO CANADA NICKEL
What have been the main highlights of 2024 at Canada Nickel?
Canada Nickel started 2024 with two significant cornerstone investments from Agnico Eagle and Samsung SDI. Agnico Eagle provided the backstop for C$35 million of exploration funding, which allowed us to successfully execute testing on our 20-plus regional properties, and we expect to publish seven additional resources to our flagship Crawford nickel sulphide project by the spring of 2025. Samsung SDI came in not only as a shareholder but with the option to buy 10% of the project for US$100 million. Having one of the world’s largest battery makers partner with us is a great endorsement.
In 2024, Canada Nickel also announced the receipt of a Letter of Interest from Export Development Canada and another leading financial institution that provided a Support Letter for approximately C$500 million in potential debt financing. We launched our front-end engineering design process, which will position us to move towards a construction decision. We also completed the second stage of the federal permitting process with the filing of our environmental impact statement at the end of November 2024.
Do you think the Canadian government is focusing too much on the downstream in its critical mineral strategy?
Making the initial investments to anchor one end of the supply chain in terms of EV manufacturing and battery plants was a good decision, but the opportunity that should not be missed is to also anchor the other end of the supply chain to have each of the process steps in between also filled in. There are several steps in the process, and it would be wise for the government to make selective investments in terms of mine capacity, as once you anchor both ends of the supply chain, it will make it easy to fill in the rest to have the end-to-end supply chain the government is trying to achieve.