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Cdn Arrow targets Kenora nickel potential

By NICK STEWART An impending drill program on Canadian Arrow Mines Ltd.’s Kenbridge property 70 kilometres southeast of Kenora is the first step on the fast-track to a possible producing mine, according to the company’s vice-president of exploration.

By NICK STEWART

An impending drill program on Canadian Arrow Mines Ltd.’s Kenbridge property 70 kilometres southeast of Kenora is the first step on the fast-track to a possible producing mine, according to the company’s vice-president of exploration.


“We’re setting ourselves up to take an aggressive approach with Kenbridge,” says Dean MacEachern.

Spring drill results on Canadian Arrow's Kenbridge property is expected to help the company determine viability of production. “We want to hit the ground running, so that a year from now, when it’s looking a lot more concrete with a lot more data, it’ll make a pretty easy decision for us.”


The 5,000-metre drill program is expected to be carried out by Sudbury’s Morris Drilling within the next month. The program will involve a single drill rig, which will cut a series of 200-metre holes throughout the first phase.  This will be followed by a feasibility study, with the objective of bringing the property to a production decision within the next year and a half, MacEachern says.


While results from the ongoing development of an official resource estimate and economic scoping study will be available by early March, MacEachern says the property is historically said to contain 2.7 million tons of ore, grading 1.05 per cent nickel.


In the 1950s, Falconbridge established a mine shaft on the property. However, nickel prices were too low to bring the deposit into production.


With nickel prices currently on the rise, Canadian Arrow saw an opportunity at Kenbridge, and acquired the property last year.


MacEachern says the smaller size of the deposit may require $100 million for the construction of a mill and mine site.

 This represents a much smaller investment required by much larger deposits, which can reach from several hundred million to totals in excess of a billion dollars. 


With nickel being high cost and in low supply, Kenbridge may represent a niche of small deposits being quickly explored and mined, MacEachern says.


“We’re going to work this thing as if we’re going to put it into production.”


Strong expectations for the site have led the company to acquire the Denmark Lake property, adjacent to the Kenbridge site, in December.  The two sites have a combined strike length of 15.5 kilometres.


A drilling program is expected to begin on the Denmark Lake property later in the year.


As part of the company’s plan to leverage potentially promising but historically under-explored properties, Canadian Arrow recently signed option agreements to acquire the Chief Peter Lake, Eva Lake, Kawene and Abiwin properties, located 50 kilometres east of Atikokan.


A second drill rig will be acquired this summer, and will be used to perform some drilling on these properties. 

However, if results from a recently completed airborne survey over the four properties identify some high-priority targets, efforts will be made to conduct drilling in the spring.


“There are a lot of these old showings that haven’t been worked for many years because the price of nickel has been low for so long, so a lot of these things have kinda been forgotten.  So we’ve been picking those up and putting them into our portfolio.”