Cheetah’s Nechalacho rare earth deposits are located at Thor Lake, 110 kms southeast of Yellowknife, 8 kms north shore of the Hearne Channel on Great Slave Lake. The two principal deposits are the North T deposit, the focus of the current Stage 1 rare earth mining program, and the Nechalacho Tardiff deposit currently in the planning stages for Stage 2 mining.
The North T deposit, at 101,000 tonnes grading 9.01% TREO, consists of a 4-metre thick layer of the light rare earth (LREE) mineral bastnaesite, which occurs in coarse grained to massive aggregates in a gangue of pure quartz. The ellipsoidal sub-zone is one of several concentric mineralogically-distinct zones in the ovoid North-T deposit, which is approximately 150 metres in diameter and 150 metres in depth. The bastnaesite sub-zone crops out on surface and dips inward before flattening out in the centre at an average depth of 30 metres. Open-cast extraction commenced in June of 2021, providing feed-stock ore which was processed by XRT sensor-based ore sorting technology which produced a high-grade bastnaesite concentrate for shipment to Hay River and ultimately to Cheetah’s Saskatoon will facility.
Stage 2 will see the development of the much larger Tardiff deposit, one of several high-grade LREE sub-zones in the 94.7 million tonnes Nechalacho deposit. The mineralogy is similar to the North T deposit, consisting primarily of bastnaesite, with sub-ordinate REE minerals monazite and allanite.
Cheetah has off-take agreements with the Norwegian firm REEtec for Stage 1 production of 1000 tonnes REE (ex-Ce)/year for an initial 5-year period, and an MOU with UCore Rare Metals Inc to supply rare-earth concentrate to their planned separation facility in Alaska.
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