“What fascinates me is the grade that came out of the Rottenstone deposit,” says Ian Fraser, the chief executive of Fathom Nickel (CSE:FNI) (Fathom Nickel (CSE:FNI)) Inc.
These days, Rottenstone is part of Fathom’s wider Albert Lake project in Saskatchewan, but once upon-a-time it stood alone as a notable outcrop of unusual rock.
Indigenous people referred to it as “the hill of rotten stone” because its gossans were orange in color, and because it was disintegrating.
And in the end, given that this is Canada we’re talking about, those characteristics were bound to attract the attention of miners.
What they found was truly startling.
The Rottenstone deposit was a uniquely high-grade sulphide that was eventually mined at 3% nickel, 1.8% copper and nine grams per tonne platinum group elements plus gold.
These days, grades like that in a nickel sulphide are unheard of anywhere in the world. Indeed, nickel sulphides themselves are rarely heard of, although they are by far and away the easiest and most profitable type of nickel deposit to mine.
The plain truth is that there just aren’t many of them left.
And even Rottenstone itself is mined out, emptied out of 30,000 metric tonnes of that high grade ore by a company with the same name in the 1960s.
Or is it?
No doubt that the remarkable orange outcrop is largely gone, and the true bonanza material with it. But questions remain. Where did it come from?
After all, you don’t usually get such a high grade occurrence in isolation. It must have a geological context, a sequence of mineralising events that led to its creation.
And it’s that context that Fathom Nickel (CSE:FNI) (Fathom Nickel (CSE:FNI)) is now beginning to track down.
Ian Fraser himself has been here before.
He brought the wider property known as Albert Lake into a company called Uravan Inc in the late 1990s and was significantly impressed by the work he did on it to return to it two decades later. In the meantime, Uravan had largely put the project on ice because its major source of funding was Cameco, and Cameco wanted uranium, not nickel.
There was a brief return, when the nickel price went up to US$50,000 per tonne in the mid-2000s, but after that Rottenstone, Albert Lake and all its intriguing potential lay dormant until Fraser formed Fathom Nickel (CSE:FNI) (Fathom Nickel (CSE:FNI)) in 2015 and set about orchestrating a return.
It wasn’t just the prospectivity of Albert Lake that tempted him back. It was also the wider economic context.
“We recognised the greening of the economy,” he says, “and that nickel was going to be in demand. There’d also been historic production of platinum group metals at Albert Lake, and these are used in the green economy for catalytic converters. We felt this was a good place to be.”
So after a period of time as a privately-listed company, Fathom went to the market in 2021. Any doubts that it was on the right track were quickly dispelled when the initial C$3mln-C$5mln that it set out to raise ended up at C$11mln.
The company was well on its way, and set about detailed exploration. It wasn’t long before new zones of mineralisation in the vicinity of Rottenstone had been identified – specifically, the Bay Island Trend. This trend has a strike length of 300 metres and has all the same characteristics as Rottenstone, except that the overall metal content is lower.
What it shows is that Rottenstone didn’t occur in isolation, and the thinking now is that there’s also got to be a feeder zone beneath.
“We’re making tremendous strides looking for the feeder zone,” says Fraser.
In particular, he points to recent soil surveys conducted immediately above the bedrock at the Tremblay-Olson claims area. These returned the most robust soil numbers to date from anywhere on the property, and included a showing of 743 parts per million (ppm) nickel, 547ppm copper, 946 parts per billion (ppb) palladium, 575ppb platinum, and 175ppb gold.
“That,” says Fraser, accurately enough, “is definitely indicative of something.”
Precisely what, remains to be seen.
But Fathom is keen to move fast at Albert Lake. The plan is to do a further round of ground geophysics in the summer, and then to set the drill rigs turning in the fall, or at the very least by next winter.
Meanwhile, logistical planning continues, and the company is keen to work out ways to keep down costs, which have thus far been quite high.
And all the while, work and newsflow is continuing to come out from Fathom’s second project, the Gochager Lake nickel-copper project, also in Saskatchewan.
This year, the company has already completed a round of drilling and significantly expanded its landholding at Gochager. What’s more, downhole electromagnetic surveys have been lighting up the surrounding rock, revealing new potential zones of massive and semi-massive sulphide rock.
Will it be ore?
Well, historically, grades have been good at Gochager, and maybe there’ll be more to see when the results of the recent drilling come in.