Reaching the next milestone in mineral exploration, Nighthawk Gold Corp. ushered in 2023 with a preliminary economic assessment for its Colomac gold project in Northwest Territories. With the study indicating strong economics for the proposed mine, 2023 exploration was just the cherry on top for this great success.

"The results of our PEA demonstrate that the Colomac gold project has the potential to be a phenomenal asset, and the PEA is a monumental milestone for our company," said Nighthawk Gold President and CEO Keyvan Salehi. "We believe that the Colomac gold project is a top-tier North American mining project that could deliver significant value to our shareholders and has the potential to meaningfully contribute to the NWT economy."

Colomac is the main project on Nighthawk's 930-square-kilometer (359 square miles) Indin Lake property, which is found on the northern end of a regional structure that extends 200 kilometers (125 miles) south to the past-producing Giant and Con mines near Yellowknife, Northwest Territories.

Within Indin Lake, Nighthawk saw potential in the historical Colomac mine that produced more than 500,000 oz of gold during the early 1990s.

The PEA outlined plans a mining operation at the more than 3-million-oz Colomac gold project, which is planned to serve as a hub for processing higher-grade gold mineralization outlined in satellite deposits across the district-scale property.

Working toward a "hub-and-spoke" mining operation, this type of setup would see a 17,000-metric-ton-per-day mill located at Colomac Centre, where most of the main resource is located, but then also receive ore from several satellite deposits across the property.

An operation like this is based on the resource calculated early in 2023 that 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.

According to this 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.

The four satellite deposits host 24.3 million metric tons of inferred resource averaging 2.17 g/t (1.69 million oz) of gold.

Based on these numbers, the PEA outlines a mine at Colomac that would produce an average of 290,000 oz of gold annually.

"Only a handful of gold projects in the world (that are owned by junior gold companies) have similar favorable economics with the potential to deliver approximately 300,000 oz of annual gold production over a 10-year mine life and achieve an NPV (net present value) 5% to Initial CapEx ratio close to 2.0," said Salehi. "As such, we believe our project belongs to this rare class of global gold assets and that there is runway for the project to continue to grow as we start exploring for other meaningful deposits across our massive greenstone property."

With the confidence instilled from the release of its PEA, Nighthawk continued to expand the resources from its surrounding satellites and targeted Cass for the start of its roughly 20,000- to 25,000-meter program.

Nighthawk Gold Corp.

Nighthawk Gold released its inaugural ESG report in 2023.

"The results from the Cass deposit drilling continue to deliver higher-grade mineralization," said Salehi. "We tested the potential extensions of known mineralization and intersected high-grade, near-surface mineralization to the northeast, in an area on the other side of a fault structure where there was no data. The deposit remains open in all directions and warrant follow-up drilling."

To top off the fulfilling year of expansion, the company announced an inaugural ESG report to get the drop on the developing conscientiousness surrounding resource development in a world heading toward sustainability.