Nickel Rim South exploring underlying footwall.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: SPECIAL REPORT: MINING

The new owners of Falconbridge are inheriting a shiny new base metals asset when the Nickel Rim South mine begins hoisting ore in 2010.

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With the company's dwindling nickel and copper reserves in Sudbury expected to run out by decade's end, the former Falconbridge executives were under pressure to find a major deposit and quickly get it into production.

They were jubilant in 2001 when their award-winning geological team made the high grade mineral discovery of the year in the underlying footwall rocks of Sudbury's igneous complex, a traditionally under-explored area of the basin.

It's expected to provide 20 years of breathing room for the new Xstrata Nickel to build up their Sudbury reserves with a renewed commitment to invest in area exploration.

The company is in the midst of a four-year, $630 million underground drilling campaign to better define the ore body with an inferred resource of 13.4 million tonnes of mostly nickel, copper, platinum and palladium.

Encouraged by surface drill results, geologists and engineers have wasted little time in plunging deep into the footwall rocks in the east end of the basin while drawing up plans for a mine.

Project director Greg Ashe says most of the major surface buildings and the hoisting plant are largely complete with this year's activity focused on shaft sinking and wrapping up their engineering work for the start of more detailed mine building next year.

Two shafts are currently being sunk; a ventilation shaft down to a depth of 1,675 metres and a main production shaft down to 1,785 metres. The ore body sits between 1,100 and 1,600-metres below surface.

In April and May of 2007, underground lateral work will begin with three horizontal drifts out to the ore body situated about 250 to 500 metres east of the main shaft.

North Bay mine builders, Cementation Canada Inc. were handed the development contract worth more than $150 million. They are the largest of the 300 contractor organizations on a site filled with more than 2,700 workers.

The peak construction activity takes place in two years when the underground construction will be in full swing with on-going lateral work and the shaft sinking finishing up, while underground diamond drilling continues.

"2008 in terms of workload and scope is definitely our biggest year," says Ashe.

The handoff to Xstrata Nickel's operations--Sudbury Mines/Mill--will happen in late 2009 once enough infrastructure is in place to deliver 60 per...