Highlights
Fertoz holds some of the largest sedimentary, high-grade low impurity rock phosphate assets in Canada. Its Wapiti Project containing an Inferred and Indicated mineral resource of 1.54Mt at 21.6% P2O5 at 7% cut off1. Fertoz’s Wapiti and Fernie projects are located near Canada’s Western Prairies, a major agricultural region.
Fertoz will focus on expanding the existing resource both at depth and along strike within the current identified strike length area (Figure 1). Further tenements to the southeast of the current Wapiti resource remain untested.
With the Canadian Government having added phosphate to Canada’s 2024 Critical Minerals List3, Fertoz is reassessing its projects as potential sources of phosphorus for fertilizer, needed for food security, but also for use in lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery production, which is a growing market.
While it awaits approvals for two 10,000-tonne bulk sample permits and a 150,000t industrial minerals permit, with at least one of these expected to be granted in the current September 2024 quarter, it has begun to prepare core samples produced by previous drilling at Wapiti to determine its suitability for the LFP market as well as a high value liquid phosphate fertilizer.
Fertoz Managing Director and CEO Daniel Gleeson said: “We are in the advantageous position of holding some of Canada’s largest and most advanced sedimentary rock phosphate deposits with resources at a grade that is suitable for organic and regenerative agricultural use and we have demand from customers for this that is growing as we await approval of our permit applications.
However, in parallel with the Canadian Government’s recent decision to add phosphate to its Critical Minerals List, we are also experiencing a high level of inbound enquiries regarding our Wapiti rock phosphate deposit and will commence testing this for its suitability in LFP battery manufacturing – for EV and storage batteries.
With the injection of US$3.5B announced in November 2023 by the U.S. Department of Energy to Strengthen Domestic Battery Manufacturing, the path forward is clear in North America, in particular, securing a supply chain within North America. McKinsey & Company4 projected that the entire lithium-ion battery chain, from mining through recycling, could grow by more than 30 percent annually from 2022 to 2030, reaching a value of more than $400 billon and a market size of 4.7 TWh, up from 700GWh in 2022. A significant portion of this is moving towards the inclusion of phosphate within these batteries to provide a much more cost effective, longer life cycle product that is thermally stable, avoiding the current issue of fires often arising in standard lithium-ion batteries.
In addition to this, the production of battery-grade phosphate creates a secondary product that is utilized in the manufacturing of synthetic phosphate fertilizer’s such as MAP and DAP. Currently, the vast majority of Canada’s fertilizer requirements for synthetic phosphate fertilizer production is imported, predominately from the USA, but we see potential in developing our high-grade phosphate deposits to help meet this demand, particularly as shortage concerns continue to grow across North America.
While we have a large, high-grade resource defined at Wapiti, less than a third, or 12.5km, of the estimated 40km strike length of the deposit has been tested to date, providing an opportunity for Fertoz to further grow our phosphate resources, and we are currently determining the way forward to do this. This will include strike extension drilling and potential further depth extension drilling of current resource5.”
In May 2015, Fertoz upgraded the existing JORC Compliant Mineral Resource Estimate at Wapiti, BC with 52% of the previously classified Inferred resource moving into the Indicated category. The resource is shallow, having only been tested to a depth of 30m.
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