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| March 11, 2010 --- Vol. 04, No. 10 | March 2010
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British Columbia
NICKEL/COBALT – Hard Creek Nickel Corp. March 5 said it has updated a positive preliminary assessment study of the company’s Turnagain Nickel Project, located 70 km (44 miles) east of Dease Lake in northwestern British Columbia. The property consists of 65 contiguous mineral claims covering about 33,220 hectares, or 82,085 acres. The study was compiled by Wardrop, a Tetra Tech company. It recommends open-pit mining, milling at a rate of 87,000 metric tons per day, conventional flotation, and Outotec's chloride leach process followed by on-site nickel solvent extraction –electrowinning metal refining. With a base case long term price of US$8.50 per pound nickel and US$17.50/lb cobalt, the study shows the project has a pre-tax net present value of C$819 million, using an 8 percent discount rate. The mine would recover 1.88 billion pounds of payable nickel at an average “life of mine” strip ratio of 0.74 to 1 with an overall refined nickel recovery of 52.8 percent over 24.4 years. On average, the project will produce 35,000 metric tons (77 million pounds) of payable nickel metal per year with a C1 cost of $3.34 per pound. The C1 operating cost is defined as the cash cost incurred at each processing stage, from mining through to recoverable nickel metal delivered to market, net of by-product credits (cobalt). Capital costs for the mine, processing plant, refinery and infrastructure development are estimated to be C$2.92 billion. “This study shows the project can produce nickel at a competitive cost and with relatively low technological risk,” said Hard Creek Nickel President Mark Jarvis. “We are using standard milling and flotation technology. Our on-site refinery would use chloride leach technology at atmospheric pressure developed and backed by Outotec, a company well known for their working technological solutions in the mining industry, and with particular strength in SX-EW.” Jarvis also said the Turnagain resource remains open to the north and at depth, so future drilling may extend the mine life beyond the 24.4 years estimated in the study.
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