Fulcrum Metals has arranged £1 million of financing support for its planned mine-waste metals recovery pilot in Mississauga, Ontario, combining cash subscriptions with the conversion of existing debt repayments into shares.
The AIM-listed company will receive £488,699 through direct subscriptions for new ordinary shares, while institutional lender YA II PN will convert £511,301 of scheduled principal and interest repayments into equity. Both elements are priced at 6.5 pence per share. Approximately half of the headline financing therefore represents the settlement of financial obligations rather than new money entering the business.
The cash proceeds are intended to support delivery, fit-out and commissioning of the Mississauga facility and provide general working capital. Fulcrum plans to conduct its first pilot programme using material from the historic Teck-Hughes gold mine, followed by work on Sylvanite and potentially other deposits.
The new financing advances a project already under development. On 5 October, Fulcrum confirmed that it had secured the industrial premises and signed a demonstration agreement covering the use of Extrakt Process Solutions’ cyanide-free recovery technology. It has not now announced a newly acquired pilot site or a completed commissioning programme.
The premises comprise approximately 12,526 square feet of industrial accommodation. The proposed equipment has been designed for processing up to 2.4 tonnes of material a day, with batches of around 600kg. That is a pilot-scale testing capability rather than a forecast of sustained commercial throughput.
Test Design Implement Solutions, known as TDI, is responsible for deploying and operating the equipment under the relevant programme agreements. Fulcrum will provide and maintain the premises and own the project-specific test results, subject to contractual provisions protecting its partners’ technology and intellectual property.
The project aims to evaluate whether metals remaining in historic mine waste can be recovered economically using the Extrakt process. Such material has already passed through an earlier mining operation, but its value depends on residual metal grades, mineral composition, process performance and the cost of handling and treating the material.
Mine waste is not a uniform feedstock. Particle size, the minerals in which the target metals occur and the distribution of those minerals affect how readily they can be extracted. Test work therefore begins with sampling and characterisation, followed by the selection of suitable preparation and processing conditions.
Fulcrum’s earlier laboratory work at Teck-Hughes produced a reported 78% gold recovery during a third-phase metallurgical test programme. The company also reported the recovery of other metals, including silver, tellurium and copper, under the specific conditions tested. Those results establish a development basis, not the output expected from every batch at the proposed pilot plant.
The company reported an optimised leaching cycle of less than six hours in the laboratory programme, with results varying according to the conditions used. Performance at pilot scale must be established through repeated processing of sufficiently representative material, taking account of material variability and the equipment used.
Cyanide-free recovery describes the chemistry being investigated, but it does not mean a chemical process is free of environmental or occupational hazards. Reagents, process water and solid residues still require appropriate controls, and the suitability of any recovery route depends on its full operating and waste management requirements.
After preparing the feedstock, an extraction circuit must bring the material into contact with reagents under controlled conditions. Operating temperature, reaction time and solids concentration can influence how much of the target material enters solution. Separation stages then distinguish the treated solids from liquid streams containing recovered material.
Downstream work is needed to produce a saleable product, manage the remaining residues and recover process water where practical. Water and reagent recycling may reduce operating requirements, but each recycling loop must preserve the conditions necessary for extraction and allow unwanted components to be controlled.
A pilot plant can provide information that laboratory tests cannot reliably establish on their own. Engineers need data on equipment uptime, throughput, handling characteristics, repeated batch performance, reagent consumption and the behaviour of recycled process streams. These measurements determine the basis for designing a larger facility.
Fulcrum intends to reuse the Mississauga infrastructure for successive projects, so the equipment must also accommodate different material characteristics and test programmes. Reusing a pilot plant can avoid constructing separate equipment for every deposit, though additional configuration and process development may be necessary as the feedstock changes.
The company holds rights to deploy Extrakt technology at specified historic gold mine-waste sites across the Kirkland Lake and Timmins districts. Those regional rights do not establish that every identified site has an economically recoverable resource or an approved production plan.
Successful Teck-Hughes pilot testing is a key condition of a proposed US$20 million gold royalty financing arrangement with Chancery Royalty. That financing remains subject to further conditions and cannot be treated as money already received or available for unrestricted use.
Of the £488,699 cash subscription, £288,699 is due by 5 November and the remaining £200,000 by 25 December under the subscription arrangements. The associated equity admissions are also scheduled in stages. Fulcrum’s plan to commission the pilot during the fourth quarter of 2026 remains a target.
The next operating milestone is installation and commissioning of the Mississauga equipment, followed by its first Teck-Hughes processing programme. Results from that work will determine whether laboratory recovery performance can be repeated under integrated conditions and used to support commercial engineering decisions.
