Victory Nickel Inc. and its wholly-owned subsidiary Victory Silica Ltd. announced the successful completion of commissioning of its 500,000 tpy Seven Persons frac sand plant (7P Plant) near Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada.
“We have attained sufficient consistent throughput at the 7P Plant that we can confirm that the commissioning phase is now successfully completed,” said Rene Galipeau, vice-chairman and CEO. “Congratulations to Ken Murdock and his team on this significant achievement. Although the commissioning process took slightly longer than expected due to damage and delays caused by the extremely severe winter weather experienced in Alberta and the rest of the country, Victory Silica has now established itself as a supplier of the highest quality frac sand available to the northern market and we expect to see sales continue to ramp up throughout the remainder of the year.”
“The effort from everyone involved in establishing Victory Nickel through Victory Silica as players in the western Canadian frac sand market has been tremendous,” said Ken Murdock, CEO of Victory Silica. “Going from a standing start to first frac sand production and sales in less than two years is quite an achievement. We now have 70 percent of the Medicine Hat-based oilfield service companies as customers. This is just the beginning however, and we have begun the push to implement Phase 2 of our business plan.”
The 7P Plant represents Phase 1 of a three-phase plan whereby the company is now processing concentrated sand imported from Wisconsin and selling various grades of finished high-quality frac sand. The 7P Plant is well located in an area populated with fracking companies, its potential customers, and is within only a few hours’ trucking distance of major oil or gas play well sites.
Phase 2, which includes the construction of a frac sand wet plant in Wisconsin, is expected to reduce costs and assure security of sand supply through ownership of a frac sand mine in Wisconsin.
In Phase 3, the company intends to construct a larger frac sand plant to process and distribute both imported and domestic sand, which may potentially, but not necessarily, include sand mined as a co-product of development at the company’s Minago nickel and frac sand project in Manitoba. The company said it has already identified a site in Winnipeg for this purpose.