"Our overall Measured and Indicated resource has more than doubled, driven in large part by outstanding exploration success in our East Zone. In less than three years from initial discovery, we believe Crawford has quickly become the fifth largest nickel sulphide resource globally," Canada Nickel's chair and CEO Mark Selby said.

The total M&I resources now stand at 1.43 billion tonnes at 0.24% nickel and the Inferred resource was 0.67 billion tonnes at 0.23% nickel.

"The East Zone M&I resource increased by more than 14-fold to 701 million tonnes at 0.23% nickel and the Main Zone resource increased by 17% to 724 million tonnes at 0.25% nickel," the company said.

The update shows 3.48 million tonnes of contained nickel in M&I resources. The M&I resources also include 93.9 million tonnes of iron, 8.5 million tonnes of chromium, 183,000 tonnes of cobalt, and 1.06 million ounces of palladium and platinum.

"In less than three years from initial discovery, we believe Crawford has quickly become the fifth largest nickel sulphide resource globally," Selby said.

"With additional potential from a number of holes still pending assays at the resource cut-off date, we expect the final feasibility study resource to support the upper end of our mine plan target of 1.3 to 1.8 billion tonnes," he said.

He added that the feasibility study remains on track for completion by the end of the year.

The Crawford project is in the Timmins-Cochrane mining camp.

Canada Nickel's share price was C$1.52 (US$1.17) on July 6. The company has a market capitalization of C$171.43 million.