NICKEL: Royal Nickel closes $12M financing

QUEBEC – Royal Nickel Corp. of Toronto has completed a $12.6-million deal with Orion Mine Finance. The finance company will invest the funds in return for a 0.75% net smelter return royalty on the Dumont nickel project and 10 million Royal Nickel common shares issued at a price of $0.395 per share.

Royal Nickel recently received the main environmental permit for the Dumont project 25 km northwest of Amos. In full production, the mine will be the world's fifth largest sulphide nickel operation – behind Norilsk (Russia), Jinchuan (China, Sudbury (Ontario), and Voisey's Bay (Labrador). The deposit is estimated to contain close to 1.2 billion tonnes of nickel in the proven and probable reserves. The measured and indicated resources contain 9.75 billion tonnes, and the inferred resource contains 2.9 billion tonnes. Grades in all categories are about 0.27% Ni.

Annual production is expected to average 90,000 tonnes of nickel, 4,000 tonnes of cobalt, and 19,000 oz of platinum group metals over the first 20 years of mine life. Start-up is targeted for 2017.

More information is available at RoyalNickel.com.