Giant Nickel Project in Ontario, But is the Grade Enough for a Mine? | Canada Nickel CEO Interview

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This video is sponsored by Terrahutton, who makes the invisible, investible. Today on the CEO BBQ, Nickel Development in the Abitibi, together with Canada Nickel. But if you're short on time, subscribe to our free newsletter, and once a week, we'll send you a five-minute summary of all interviews we put out, resourcetalks.com for a free weekly newsletter. Now, although this company has not paid us for the production of this video, you should still understand that we are not financial advisors, and this is not intended as financial advice. It is a broad, general, and impersonal piece of information intended only for those who know and understand the risks of junior mining, of which there are many. Before moving on, read the company's official filings on SitterPlus.ca and do your own due diligence. Pause the screen and read all the disclaimers I've shown you because your capital is at risk. If this isn't clear, go to the last section of this video for a longer explanation of the risks and biases, and do not consume this content if you don't agree with everything said therein. Moving on, Canada Nickel's flagship project is called Crawford and it's located roughly 40 kilometers north of Timmins in the Abitibi. This is a classic moderate-grade ultramafic nickel sulfide system hosted in serpentine dunite and periodite. And don't mistake me for a geologist, I had to read these things off my list here, but they are important and we'll touch upon them later on. Most recent feasibility level numbers here put a reserve at about 1.7 billion tons, and that is billion would be grading 0.2% in nickel large enough to rank among the biggest undeveloped nickel sulfide inventories in the world.
Federal Impact Assessment Approval came through at the end of July this year, which was a pretty big deal and the company is now pushing detailed engineering with Osanko, chasing the remaining provincial permits as well, and trying to replace a series of expensive, short-term bridge loans with a proper construction financing package after recently having done $21 million financing, which of course will be part of the conversation here today.
There are other targets in the same district that they have right now, but as far as I could tell, they're seen as optionality and some of those properties have already delivered initial resources or encouraging intercepts, and they're definitely worth touching upon in the conversation as well. Some of them are also being advanced selectively with a little bit of drilling here and there, but in my opinion, at least they're clearly secondary. We'll hear from Mark and see if I'm right or wrong on that, but maybe just a brief update on them in the latter part of the conversation.
Now, for some of the numbers and a bit of the details here, Canada Nickel is listed as CNC on the TSX-V in Canada, where the average daily volume of the last three months has been about 537,000 units. 52-week high is $2.59 and a 52-week low is 81 cents. Again, they just closed in a $21 million financing, which means their number of shares outstanding, warrants and everything else is going to be a little bit different, but that's also going to become clear later on in this conversation. For this to actually become a conversation, though, I will have to shut up already and Mark will give you the word here, but first of all, thank you for sitting down with me today.

**Mark** (3:08)
No, great. Thanks for the opportunity.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:10)
The pleasure is mine. I'll be looking forward to hearing more about the story. Now, when I think of the Abitibi, I don't think of nickel, so I think that's going to be an interesting part of the story as well for me. Let's maybe set the stage, though, before we even kick it off.
Given where the company is already and it's developed, and you look at the share price performance and everything over the last couple of years, what's left here, essentially, is what I'm wondering. If I bought Canada Nickel today, how am I going to make money on the stock? What has to be true in order for me to make money on Canada Nickel?

**Mark** (3:39)
Yeah, so there's basically three key things that are going to unfold over the 12 months that will really unlock value for a shareholder coming in today. Number one is the Nickel market.
Nickel has been largely out of favor with most investors for the last decade. That's been driven by the huge ramp up in supply from Indonesia. But at the end of last year and something happened, which we had been saying was going to happen was Indonesia is two-thirds of global supply. OPEC at its peak in the oil market was only just over half of oil supply. So Indonesia from a market supply perspective is in the driver's seat in terms of being able to manage supply and manage prices. And at the end of December last year, they put in place, they limited the growth in ore quotas, which is effectively limiting the amount of supply that's going on. And the price of Nickel popped about $4,000 a ton. At that point in time, it's come off a little bit since, but we're kind of in the show me phase now with the Indonesian government. So that's number one in terms of the Nickel market. We can talk more about Indonesia because I think that's a key piece of the investment thesis here. Number two is in terms of financing milestones as we move through here. So the thing for investors, and I would encourage people to look not just at us, but other Canadian critical mineral stories.