SPC Nickel Sharpens the Picture at Muskox Ahead of 2027 Drilling

0:16This podcast is made possible by the latest news of Mining Stock Daily Host and Grant Mourre.

0:30over the summer. The company closed a nearly$5 million financing in May to help it fund work and still holds its Lockerbie East project in the Sudbury Basin as a second leg of its portfolio. Joining me is Grant Moore, President and CEO of SBC Nickel. Grant, welcome to Mining Stock Daily. Thanks, Michael. Thanks for having me. Grant, tell us about MuskOx. In your news release, you described a quote as one of the most prospective greenfield polymetallic copper nickel and pgm projects globally yeah um you know it's a project that we've been active on for you know probably three or four years but really have kind of kicked up the the exploration activities over last year in this year and you know i'm someone who spent my kind of entire career in the magnetic nickel copper space and you know i think that this project it has a lot going for it is and as far as it shows a lot of similarities from a geological point in comparison to many of the other world's largest deposits so things like Norilsk in Russia, Voyses Bay so you can look at this project and see lots of similarities between it and other world-class deposits you know it's got scale our property is is quite large It's almost 500 square kilometers.

2:00So it's a big intrusion that's, you know, 120 to 130 kilometers long. And so those two things, plus the historical results to date, suggest that the, or imply that the intrusion in the system is capable of producing really high grade copper, nickel, platinum, palladium mineralization. So those three things together all in one place to me make me believe that it is one of the more attractive early stage projects because, frankly, there just aren't that many out there with this sort of size and scale. Where are you located? How do you get there? So the project's located in the western portion of Nunavut.

2:45It is remote access, so it's a fly-into project. We currently don't have a camp on the project that's going to be for 2027. So we access the project for exploration from a community along the Arctic coast called Kagalagtuk. Now you announced MT and EM work in 2026. Drilling is going to be for 2027. What is your season for drilling up there? Um, a lot, like I mentioned before, a lot depends on changes when you have a camp close to where you're working. Um, you know, with the camp in place, you're probably talking about, uh, uh, you know, April, May, June, July, August, September. Uh, if you remove the camp aspect, then you're in, in, are just commuting daily from the community.

3:41then you're kind of looking at a three, three and a half month expiration season, which is what we basically did this year. So you did have an update that you did put out. You were concentrating on gathering your MTN EM data. And then at that point, kind of looking forward to doing the modeling, which is going to be leading up to the drilling season. But what can you tell us right now? What have you actually learned about spending the season working up there and possibly setting targets? Yeah, so we, like I said, we kind of committed to a more aggressive approach starting last year. So last year, we did airborne EM across most of the property in airborne MT.

4:26And from that, we identified interesting areas from the airborne EM survey that we wanted to follow up with ground EM in order to better define targets. So we did that last year. we did the airborne EM. This year, we followed it up with a series of small EM grids. I think there was eight or nine small grids, kind of in that 10 or 15 kilometer range each, that were basically centered over prospective targets generated from the airborne survey. So that allows us to better to find the targets for drilling purposes. The airborne MT was kind of the same idea. It allowed us to cover a large area relatively easily and quickly, but the ground MT is just a little bit better for giving you better resolution and deeper penetration.

5:23So we flew the airborne MT, followed it up with ground MT, and we're able to take those two data sets together and get a really crisp image of what we think the bottom of this intrusion looks like. So you're looking, I guess, into the winter months here, and then you're going to be doing that 3D modeling as well, too. So you did plan a 5 ,000 meter drill program for 2027. How much work can you do on that project, kind of given its size? How much understanding to anticipate to kind of get out of a 5 ,000 meter drill program? Yeah. So the next step is taking the data and generating targets that we'd like to test them.

6:14And, you know, I can, from looking at the data so far, it's pretty early. I mean, there's going to be no shortage of drill targets for us over this big project. But we can't do everything in one season. So we are going to prioritize kind of our top, you know, I would suspect if we, if we're looking at 5 ,000 meters, that's going to give us somewhere in the neighborhood of, you know, 10 to 15 drill holes that we would look to complete over, like I said, a three to three to four month season next year. uh the project is in none of it uh it is remote do you have uh an idea in uh you're looking at in terms of like uh how big this has to get uh just regarding it's how remote it is well yeah that's a good question you know it's it's interesting when i do talk to investors about the project i i kind of say that and it might sound a little strange but i say that economics really aren't the issue because as you pointed out, given where the projects is, you have to find something pretty significant to move forward with the investment required to develop it.

7:27And you're not going to move ahead with a marginal project. So, you know, I don't have an exact tons and grade that you would need, but, you know, you look at things like, you know, some of the more recent discoveries, which were a long time ago, like Voices Bay. And, you know, you're going to to have to find a deposit that kind of moves the needle on a world production scale. So it's going to have to be something quite large or multiple deposits that kind of add up to something fairly large in the tens of millions of tons. But as I mentioned before, you know, without getting too far ahead of ourselves, the geology is there and the size is there that this property can certainly has the potential to host the size of deposit that you need to develop something in that region.

8:21Let's swing down to Ontario, and that's your other project. That's the LKE. You did have a resource estimate on that. December 2023 shows 665 ,000 tons indicated, 124 ,000 tons inferred. How are you viewing the LK vis-a-vis MuskOx? What are the types of resources it gets and how are you advancing it? Yeah, so the flagship asset of the company was the Lockerbie East project, which the Lockerbie, for the listeners, the Lockerbie East project hosts. It's a former past producing project. It has two deposits on it. It has a large near surface open pitable resource that's in excess of 20 million tons.

9:09And then it has a higher grade resource at depth that was actually mined from underground by Falkenbridge in the 80s and 90s. And we've spent most of our time advancing the open pit portion of the property. And, you know, it's still a nice resource. You know, I will say that when we started on that project, the nickel market, it's more of a nickel primary copper secondary, whereas Muscox is more of a copper PG property than a nickel property. We were in a much different nickel price space. So, you know, where nickel is right now, it certainly hurts the economics of the project, but it's still a viable project, especially given the infrastructure that's around Sudbury.

9:57So, you know, we are moving that project ahead slowly. It is kind of the work behind the scenes that needs to get done. We recently completed a metallurgical study on it. We still keep doing, you know, the environmental baseline studies that are needed in order to move forward towards, you know, eventually a closure plan. And I would say that we are exploring partnership opportunities to advance that project to a development stage in the coming years. Would it need its own mining infrastructure or is it close to some other operator near there? I mean, that's the great part of it. I mean, there's a paved road that pretty much comes right to the site.

10:44We are within about 25 kilometers of both Valet and Glencore's mills. I mean, this project is a partnership with Valet. I mean, we signed what was called a corporation agreement to combine two assets together that we are advancing. So we do have a partner in this in Valet. And that's the one nice thing about working in Sudbury is that we don't need to build a mill. We don't need to build an underground mine. We don't need to bring electricity in. Like it is a very, it would be an extremely low cost operation to get going and very close to mills that, you know, need feed. And just recently, Valet announced that they'd increase production or capacity in their Clarabill mill.

11:34So there is, both mills in town do need feed and this would provide an excellent source. Stepping back and looking at SPC nickel strategically and just where we are in the metal markets right now, I was just wondering how you're kind of looking at modeling the business and then kind of looking at other companies that have been, you know, further down the path right now, just with governments now supporting mining, governments supporting critical mineral strategies. We saw the big investment that went into Mark Selby's Canada Nickel, Crawford, for instance. There is also the other support here for other large projects across Canada as well.

12:19Is there anything you're kind of looking at right now in terms of path, in terms of types of support that you can kind of move in SBC forward? Yes, in a slightly different aspect that I don't know how much I can get into. But as far as, you know, straight government support for, let's say our more advanced Sudbury assets, I don't know if it meets the size hurdle that some of the projects that are seeing investment, like, you know, the Canada Nickel Company project is in the order of hundreds of millions of tons, whereas ours would be in the millions of tons. So, you know, we haven't really pushed government support to help develop that project.

13:06But I do think through partnerships with specific groups in the Sudbury area, we see that there is opportunities to access funding for project development. So that's certainly something that we're doing. the muskox project is still a little bit early to to access any sort of government funding and and i would also say that none of it might be a little bit behind the rest of canada when it comes to supporting critical metals although that's certainly changing news flow over the next uh 12 months grant um yeah we should actually be quite busy we've uh you know we've just gotten back uh well actually haven't got all back yet but we were we're soon to have all of the geophysical data back we've got some groups that are that are actively uh looking through the data and modeling up anomalies and so we will have the uh the results from both our em surveys and our mt surveys coming out in in you know i would say probably the next month or so and also uh assay results from our field program that we also had up there.

14:21And hopefully a couple of the things that we're working on as well. Grant, thanks for speaking with Mining Stock Daily. Thank you. The information presented should not be considered investment advice. Mining Stock Daily and its affiliates are not responsible for any loss arising from any investment decision in connection with the material presented herein. Please do your own research or speak with a licensed financial representative before making any investment decisions.