Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the rest of the committee.
Just on point from Jeff's very detailed presentation, I have provided a detailed PowerPoint. It was sent to you on Friday. I understand that it's in translation and you probably have not received that, but I couldn't possibly deliver in five minutes all the recommendations I would have. Right now, I'm going to concentrate on just telling you a little bit about who we are and also will concentrate on the high notes.
My name is Robin Goad. I'm the president and CEO of Fortune Minerals Limited. We're a Toronto Stock Exchange listed company that owns the vertically integrated NICO cobalt-gold-bismuth-copper project, which comprises a planned mine and concentrator up in the Northwest Territories and a hydrometallurgical refinery just outside Edmonton, Alberta, which will process our concentrates through to value-added products.
One of the highlights I'd like to mention is the importance of administering and processing—I'll touch on that a little later—because if we don't process our minerals here in Canada, then they're lost. In simply producing concentrates and shipping those to Asia, we don't have custody and control of the metals, and therefore those metals are not available for our industry here in Canada, which is really the most important thing we're trying to achieve in incubating a critical minerals industry here in Canada.
Our project has a 20-year mineral reserve, but being an IOCG-type deposit—that stands for “iron oxide copper-gold”—analogous to the giant Olympic Dam mine in Australia, we have the opportunity to find a billion tonnes of metal realistically. Right now, we have a 20-year reserve, which will be the primary source of feed for the hydrometallurgical refinery in the Edmonton area.
We also have a process collaboration with Rio Tinto, where we will take waste residues from the Kennecott smelter in Utah and process those through to value-added products in Edmonton. It's another good example of “build it and they will come”. Having downstream or mid-stream processing here in Canada will attract other sources of feeds to be processed and available to our industry.
Our project is very advanced. We've spent $150 million to date and are in the process of updating our bankable feasibility study, FEED engineering and, as well, doing some metallurgical optimization.
Three critical minerals are hosted in the deposit, cobalt being traditionally the most dominant metal, but we also have 1.1 million ounces of gold, which today is worth just a little over $5 billion Canadian on the ground.
We have the largest deposit of bismuth in the world, with 12% of global reserves. That's an important metal used in environmental applications, as well as some important defence applications.
The cobalt, of course, will go into rechargeable batteries, which will enable the energy transition and transformation of the auto industry to e-mobility.
We were the very first Canadian project to receive a U.S. Department of Defense grant, and that was quickly matched by the Canadian government. We have about $17 million in support coming primarily from the U.S. Department of Defense and Natural Resources Canada. We also have a small grant that comes from Alberta Innovates, so the Government of Alberta is also contributing to our project.
We have tremendous support for our projects through indigenous relationships. We have co-operation agreements with the Tłı̨chǫ, who have a settled land claim with the governments of Canada and the Northwest Territories. We're hoping that with the work that's being partially funded by government to get a construction decision in late 2026.
There are a number of recommendations we would like to point out and also some challenges.
Probably just to start off, exploration is a very high-risk industry. Only one in 1,000 projects is successfully developed into a mine. Only one in 3,000 projects is a tier one asset. We've allowed our mining industry to deteriorate, for a number of reasons, and I think the biggest threat to our industry is that we don't have a pipeline of new projects to be developed to maintain the knowledge and expertise we've developed here in Canada.
There are certainly challenges with the manipulation of metal prices from China and other actors, so we think there's a role for government in that.
Jeff mentioned the importance of infrastructure development, particularly in Canada's north. We're working in the Northwest Territories. We think that's very important in developing projects in the north, where 45% of GDP comes from the resource industry.