Robin E. Goad

Robin E. Goad is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Fortune Minerals, the TSX-listed company developing the NICO cobalt-gold-bismuth-copper project in Canada's Northwest Territories. He founded Fortune in 1988 and still carries the technical file: he is a Professional Geoscientist (P.Geo., the Ontario designation for a professional geologist) and signs the company's scientific and technical disclosure as a Qualified Person under NI 43-101, the Canadian standard for reporting mineral projects. Holding both the operator's chair and the technical sign-off is the reason his answers on critical minerals are worth reading in full.

Goad worked for Noranda and Teck and as a consultant to the resource industry before founding Fortune Minerals in 1988; he now describes his career as more than 35 years in mining, exploration and mineral development. NICO is the centre of that record: a planned open pit and underground mine with a concentrator in the Northwest Territories, feeding a hydrometallurgical — chemical rather than heat-based — refinery in Alberta. The company reports 33.1 million tonnes of mineral reserves at NICO, 1.1 million ounces of in-situ gold (gold already contained in the ore rather than bought) and roughly 12% of the world's bismuth reserves. In September 2026 he closed out the Northwest Territories Class A water licence and Land Use Permit renewals, advanced a road joint venture with the Tłı̨chǫ Government carrying conditional approval for up to C$50 million of federal First and Last Mile funding, and kept a final investment decision in the 2027 window.

Three habits define his approach. The first is vertical integration: rather than sell concentrate and take whatever the market offers, Fortune plans to convert it to battery-grade cobalt sulphate, bismuth ingots, copper cement and gold doré — doré meaning unrefined gold bars — with the gold positioned as the liquid co-product that cushions the project when cobalt or bismuth prices fall. The second is jurisdiction: a mine in the Northwest Territories and its refinery in Alberta, sold to buyers who want supply outside China and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The third is sequencing. He discusses permitting, the Tłı̨chǫ access agreement and the updated feasibility study before he discusses production, which is the order a development-stage project actually has to move in.

What an investor can take from him is a plain, itemised account of the distance between a resource and production: financing, the feasibility update, then the investment decision. The honest limit is that his public record is almost entirely his own company's disclosure. He has not published independent research and does not run a fund, so his comments on his own project are an informed operator's view rather than disinterested analysis — worth reading against the filings, and with the note that Fortune shares trade in pennies on both the TSX and the OTCQB, so the equity carries development risk well beyond metal prices.