Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Takes Stake in Nunavut Copper Play

Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting has announced a deal with an early stage copper explorer, White Cliff, for a 13.5% stake in the company. The investment, which is subject to approval by the company’s investors, will give Hancock a stake in White Cliff’s Rae copper project. 

The Rae project is located close to Kugluktuk, in western Nunavut, in northern Canada.

Troy Whittaker, Managing Director of White Cliffs, comments: “Hancock Prospecting’s decision to invest is a major milestone for White Cliff and powerful third-party validation of what we are building at Rae.” 

“We have spent the past two seasons demonstrating that Rae can deliver exceptional grades across a mineralised system with genuine district-scale potential.”

Troy added that there remains intense interest in identifying large, high-quality new copper discoveries amid intensifying demand for copper.

Strategic timing

The investment also bears the typical Hancock hallmarks of well timed strategic investment into an early stage mining company.

The injection of funds will enable White Cliff to continue its drilling programs as it seeks to understand the full scale of this system. The junior miner has not yet produced a resource or economic study for the project. 

“This investment gives us the financial strength to accelerate drilling at Danvers 1, aggressively test the scale of Danvers 2 and Danvers 3, and advance the broader sediment-hosted copper opportunity across Rae,” Troy added.

White Cliffs had recently announced encouraging results from an assay in the Danvers copper system in August, assay results from the Danvers copper system at the Company’s Rae Copper Project, where drilling intersected copper mineralisation over 4.75km of the interpreted Teshierpi structural corridor.

The project does not yet enjoy an all-season road connecting the Kitikmeot region with the Northwest Territories. However, the federal government has offered to support a road and port project in the area, which would improve the transport logistics for the project.

Hancock Prospecting operations

Gina Rinehart is Executive Chairman of Hancock Prospecting Group, the largest privately owned mining group in Australia. While Gina is one of Australia’s wealthiest people, and well known as a media celebrity, her true achievement has been steadily developing her inherited mining company to develop the Hope Downs and Roy Hill iron ore mines. More recently, Gina acquired Atlas Iron Ore, expanding its iron ore portfolio. 

Hancock has continued to diversify its investments in extractive industries into other minerals, such as the Sirius mine in the UK. Hancock has also taken a minority stakes in a precious metal project, the Four Eagles Gold Project in 2020.

The investment in White Cliffs’ represents a second investment by Hancock in a copper developer, after investing in Titan Minerals’ Linderos project in Ecuador. It represents a first investment in a project located in the Arctic, far from Hancock’s traditional focus in Australian mining assets.

Hancock has also increased its focus on other critical raw materials. Hancock has assembled a portfolio spanning rare earth processing, lithium extraction, and integrated mineral production facilities, including an 8.2% stake in Lynas, the largest rare earth processor located outside China. This reflects an interest in the opportunities presented by rising electrification, rising demand from the growth in data centre investments, as well as strategic moves to diversify the sources of critical raw materials beyond China.

Meet Hancock’s partners

• Rio Tinto is a globally diversified mining company, with world class assets in a number of mining commodities, including its iron ore assets in Western Australia, bauxite and alumina assets, copper and nickel assets. Hancock Prospecting and Rio Tinto’s entered into a joint venture covering the Hope Downs project in mid-2005. Hope Downs comprises of four major open pit mines (Hope 1 North, Hope 1 South, Hope 4 and Baby Hope) producing high-grade lump and fines products.
• POSCO is one of the world’s largest vertically integrated steelmakers, and  currently operates two Blast Furnace route steelworks in Pohang and Gwangyang, South Korea. The mining giant has committed to achieving carbon neutrality throughout all steel making processes by 2050. POSCO holds a minority stake in Hancock’s Roy Hill iron ore mining operation. 
• Marubeni is one of the largest general trading companies in Japan, and is involved in the handling of products and provision of services in a broad range of sectors primarily related to food, textiles, materials, pulp and paper, chemicals, energy, metals and mineral resources, transportation machinery, and offshore trading. Its activities also extend to power projects and infrastructure, plants and industrial machinery, real estate development and construction, and finance, logistics and information industry. Marubeni is listed on the Tokyo stock exchange with a market capitalisation of US$52.24bn.