Royal Nickel on a tear after northern Quebec find

Royal Nickel Corp (TSE:RNX) stock jumped as much as 14% out of the gate on Wednesday after releasing results from prospecting by its 68%-owned True North Nickel subsidiary at the newly-consolidated Qiqavik project in northern Quebec.

By lunchtime the micro-cap was changing hands for $0.20 on the Toronto Exchange in higher than usual volumes of more than 520,000 shares affording the counter a $26.3 million market value.

Adjacent to Royal Nickel’s West Raglan nickel-copper-PGM project, TNN discovered a new high grade gold, silver, copper and zinc mineralized trend during the 2015 exploration season with several grab samples ranging from 5 g/tonne up to 198 g/tonne over 15km of strike length, with several outcropping areas also containing high grade silver, copper and zinc, representing a potentially important new discovery in an underexplored volcano-sedimentary belt within the Cape Smith Belt, according to a statement by Royal Nickel.

The most impressive grab sample was a boulder showing 98 g/t of gold, 79/g/t silver, 0.58% copper, 4.38% lead and 2.59% zinc. Other significant samples include 26.8 g/t of gold and 3g/t silver, 14.9 g/t of gold and 33g/t silver.

Mark Selby, RNC’s president and chief executive, said the advantageous land position in this emerging mineral belt has given TNN “a unique opportunity to acquire some of the most prospective ground in the Cape Smith Belt”:

“These very positive prospecting results at Qiqavik, together with historic drilling by Falconbridge Limited during the mid-1990’s, leads us to believe that this relatively unexplored region of Northern Quebec has the potential to host important new gold and copper deposits.

“Both Qiqavik and West Raglan could represent major discoveries in this underexplored, emerging polymetallic belt, which is comparable in scale to the Kambalda-Kalgoorlie camp of Western Australia, and home to the world class Raglan Mine.

“We will be looking for opportunities to fund exploration in 2016 through our TNN subsidiary which will be non-dilutive to RNC.”

The Toronto-based firm’s principal asset is the Dumont Nickel project located in the established Abitibi Mining camp in Quebec and the company also owns an interest in the advanced stage nickel exploration Aer-Kidd project near Sudbury, Ontario.