North of 60 Mining News - The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North

Nighthawk Gold Corp. Oct. 23 announced its inaugural environmental, social, and governance report for the company's flagship Colomac Gold project in Northwest Territories, Canada, representing the growing trend of mineral explorers highlighting ESG efforts that will add value to projects that hope to be developed into clean and sustainable mines.

Lying at the heart of its 930-square-kilometer (359 square miles) Indin Lake property, the Colomac project is home to a past-producing mine that unearthed roughly 527,908 ounces of gold.

According to the latest calculation, Colomac Centre hosts 59.8 million metric tons of open pit indicated resource averaging 1.45 grams per metric ton (2.8 million oz) gold and 10.73 million metric tons of open pit inferred resource averaging 2.32 g/t (802,000 oz) gold; plus 10.49 million metric tons of underground indicated resource averaging 1.73 g/t (584,000 oz) gold and 13.53 million metric tons of underground inferred resource averaging 2.05 g/t (899,000 oz) gold.

Recently, Nighthawk announced a preliminary economic assessment detailing a robust mine that would produce 290,000 oz of gold annually over an 11.2-year period.

This gold mine included an expansion of Colomac Centre and a maiden resource for four satellite deposits across the wider Indin Lake property – Kim, Cass, Treasure Island, and Damoti – of which host 24.3 million metric tons of inferred resource averaging 2.17 g/t (1.69 million oz) gold.

Considering the potential of this property, Nighthawk has taken steps to ensure that it is in compliance with the growing trend of stewardship and sustainable practices.

To better simplify this still convoluted process, the company connected with a platform that has designed a streamlined process of peeling back the layers of ESG standards and revealing the true and simplified data inside – Onyen.

Born from a conversation involving the difficulties of ESG reporting, Onyen was founded in the hopes of streamlining the weighty but necessary standards of ESG.

Preprogrammed with the standards from 22 global sustainability agencies that drive overall ESG policies, Onyen provides its service as a subscription, which condenses what a company should be reporting on based on company size, market sector, jurisdiction, and many other factors.

Onyen software simplifies the other half of the battle by offering a single system to input the pertinent ESG data and calculate a company's ESG score based on those inputs.

Laid out in an intuitive and easy-to-use format that asks all the essential questions related to all ESG topics tracked by standards bodies, Onyen's system even offers up definitions and instructions to assist users not deeply familiar with ESG terms and standards to be better educated and therefore more capable of enacting those standards.

"Nighthawk Gold believes in corporate social responsibility," said Nighthawk Gold President and CEO Keyvan Salehi. "We're focused on creating value for our stakeholders without compromising on our responsibilities."

Utilizing data compiled by Onyen's ESG reporting solution, some highlights from Nighthawk's 2022 ESG report include:

Environment:

• 100% compliance with laws and regulations, with zero fines and non-monetary sanctions.

• Contained greenhouse gas emissions, with the goal of improving efficiencies and reducing consumption.

The company says it envisions a future operation having 60% of project infrastructure powered by renewable sources of energy (wind and solar) and reducing the carbon intensity to 0.48 tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent per oz of gold produced. Presently, the company adds it is evaluating the implementation of solar to reduce diesel and natural gas usage.

Social:

• 0.169 lost time injury rate.

• Established engagement management plan, with regular communication and engagement with local communities and businesses.

"We have a duty to protect the environment surrounding the Colomac Gold Project, collaborate with the Tłıchǫ Nation and other aboriginal neighbours, and ensure that our organization continues to be diverse and empowered," added Salehi. "Being responsible drives success."

Governance:

• Controls in place to maintain high standards of ethics, transparency, and oversight amongst the Board and Management.

• Improving Board diversity.

With more companies beginning to get behind the diligent mindset of taking responsibility for their projects, Nighthawk has set an example for others to begin implementing ESG on its own determinism rather than until the day it becomes enacted as an enforceable policy.

"Our inaugural sustainability report reflects the Nighthawk's priorities and achievements in ESG to-date" said Salehi. "We've done big things for a small organization, and we remain focused on continuous innovation to raise the ESG bar."

You can read Nighthawk's complete report here, as well as Onyen's scorecard here.