Fortune Minerals Extends Option to Acquire JFSL Alberta Refinery Site for the NICO Critical Minerals Project

Fortune Minerals Limited (TSX: FT) (OTCQB: FTMDF) (“Fortune” or the “Company”) (www.fortuneminerals.com) is pleased to report that it has secured an additional extension to the option to purchase the JFSL Field Services ULC (“JFSL”) brownfield industrial site in Lamont County, Alberta (see news release, dated January 24, 2022). Fortune plans to construct a hydrometallurgical refinery at this site to process concentrates from the Company’s NICO cobalt-gold-bismuth-copper critical minerals deposit and planned mine and concentrator in the Northwest Territories (“NWT”) (collectively, “the NICO Project”). The JFSL site consists of 76.78 acres of lands in Alberta’s Industrial Heartland northeast of Edmonton and has 42,000 square feet of serviced shops and buildings adjacent to the Canadian National Railway. The facilities are close to sources of process water, natural gas, power oxygen, sulphuric acid, lime and other reagents needed to operate the refinery as well as a commutable pool of engineers and skilled chemical plant workers from the local petrochemicals industry. These are expected to materially reduce capital and operating costs for the NICO Project.

Fortune can maintain the option by paying JFSL C$15,000 per month and can acquire the facilities for C$5.5 million before December 31, 2023. JFSL’s has the right to solicit competing offers for the facility during the option period, subject to Fortune’s right to complete its purchase at the end of each month of extension at the agreed purchase price and/or exercise its right of first refusal to match the competing offer. If Fortune exercises the option to purchase the refinery site, the extension payments will be applied against the purchase price. JFSL is a subsidiary of Worley Group (“Worley”), a major international engineering services and construction management company. As partial consideration for the extension, Worley will also be a preferred contractor with respect to development of Fortune’s refinery. In addition, JFSL will have the right to continue using the site as a licensee while Fortune completes the permitting required to construct and operate the refinery.

The NICO Project is a planned vertically integrated development that would produce three metals identified on Canada’s Critical Minerals List needed in the energy transition and new technologies, being cobalt, bismuth and copper. The Minerals reserves for the NICO deposit also contains more than one million ounces of gold. Fortune plans to produce cobalt sulphate needed to make the cathodes of lithium-ion rechargeable batteries to store energy in electric vehicles (“EV’s”), portable electronics and stationary storage cells. While the NICO Project is primarily a cobalt-gold asset by projected revenues, it is also the largest bismuth deposit in the world with 12% of global reserves and the Company plans to produce metal ingots and oxide products. Bismuth is used in the automotive and pharmaceutical industries and has growing consumption as a ‘Eco-metal’ and environmentally safe and non-toxic replacement for lead. Bismuth also has growing demand in decommissioning and remediating abandoned oil and gas wells with installation of an environmentally safe, permanent plug that prevents greenhouse gas leakage, groundwater migration that can contaminate aquifers, and mitigating blowouts like the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. Department of Energy also recently validated the performance of manganese-bismuth magnets as a superior, lower cost, and environmentally safer alternative to Rare Earth Elements used in electric motor magnets that power EV’s.