FPX Nickel Corp (CVE:FPX) (OTCMKTS:FPOCF) (FRA:FP5) has outlined its planned drilling programs in June this year at its flagship Decar project in British Columbia, which includes 2,700 metres (m) at the Baptiste deposit in a bid to convert inferred resources into the higher confidence indicated category.
According to an NI 43-101 estimate in 2020, Baptiste already contains 1.996 billion tonnes of indicated resources at an average grade of 0.122% Davis Tube Recoverable (DTR) nickel and 593 million tonnes of inferred resources.
READ: FPX Nickel launches metallurgical pilot test program at Baptiste nickel project in British Columbia
The asset is projected to be among the world’s ten largest nickel mines by annual output and a preliminary economic assessment (PEA), also last year, showed a 35-year mine-life and a pre-tax net present (NPV) value of US$2.93 billion with a pre-tax pay-back period of 3.5 years.
Also planned this summer is an initial nine-hole, 3,000m drill program at the Van Target, which sits six km north of Baptiste at similar elevations.
"Having demonstrated the potential for the development of a low-cost, large-scale operation at Baptiste with last year's Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA), we now look forward to assessing the potential for a new discovery with a maiden drilling program at Van this summer," Martin Turenne, FPX's CEO told investors in a statement.
"Previous work, after logging activity exposed a number of outcrops, confirmed that the Van Target has outcropping bedrock with nickel grades very comparable to those initially encountered at Baptiste.
"Van is hosted in the same ophiolite host rocks and with similar apparent structural controls as Baptiste, making it a very promising drill-ready target."
At the Van target, Davis Tube magnetically-recovered (DTR) nickel analysis of 54 bedrock samples, taken at intervals of 50 to 350m has defined an area of around 2.9 square kilometers (sq km).
This compares very favorably with the area defined by outcrop sampling and subsequent drilling at Baptiste, which is 3.2km along strike with widths of 150 to 1,080m, noted FPX.
Meanwhile, the mine plan in the Baptiste PEA envisaged the mining of a total of around 1.5 billion tonnes of material for processing over the project's 35-year mine life, with around 89% of this mineralization classified in the indicated category and 11% in the inferred category.
This summer's drilling program is expected to convert the indicated resources to the indicated category to support an eventual Baptiste pre-feasibility study (PFS).
The Decar nickel district claims cover 245 sq km of the Mount Sidney Williams ultramafic/ophiolite complex, 90km northwest of Fort St. James in central British Columbia.
Of the four targets in the district, the Baptiste deposit, which was initially the most accessible and had the biggest known surface footprint, has been the main focus of diamond drilling since 2010, with a total of 82 holes and over 31,000m sunk.
Since 2010, around US$24 million has been spent on the exploration and development of Decar.
Contact the author at giles@proactiveinvestors.com