Northstar Gold Corp. (CSE:NSG) CEO Brian Fowler joined Proactive to discuss the company’s latest drilling results at the Cam Copper Mine and its extension.
The company announced significant findings from its recent drill program, which was completed late last year. The geological modelling was conducted by Caracle Creek Consulting, followed by an exploration target study by CGK Consulting Limited.
Proactive: Welcome back inside our Proactive newsroom. Joining me now is Brian Fowler. He is the CEO of Northstar Gold Corp. Brian, good to see you again. How are you?
Brian Fowler: I'm well, thanks. Good to see you too.
The company is out with significant news today about a high-grade copper exploration target. You’ve found an exciting one to talk about. Brian, tell me a little bit about it.
Yeah, this has been a while coming. This morning, we're pleased to report results of a recent drill program that we completed late last year on our Cam Copper Mine and copper extension. With those results, we modeled the geology and had Caracle Creek Consulting model the geology. Subsequently, an exploration target study and estimation was performed by CGK Consulting Limited.
The results determined that what we call the number two exploration target ranges between 75,000 and 140,000 tonnes, grading between 9% and 18% copper, with a conceptual average grade of 12% copper. These are extremely high-grade numbers and we’re very pleased to report this.
You’re talking about the number two zone exploration target. As far as the project is concerned, maybe talk a bit about how this relates to what else you’re seeing on the project.
Certainly. The Cam Copper is a historic high-grade copper mine. It produced a limited amount of direct shipping ore in the mid-1950s. Since late 2023, we thought we’d put a couple of holes in it to see what was happening at depth. Our best hole returned 14.58% copper over 2.5 meters, which generated a lot of excitement.
We continued exploration and development, running an EM survey over the southern extension of this horizon. Mineralization is what’s called a volcanogenic massive sulfide. It’s tabular, discrete, and continuous. The survey lit up the extension with a number of targets that we drilled late last year.
We’ve got a number of horizons, including not only copper-silver horizons but also indications of zinc-gold discrete stratform horizons. This is exciting stuff. This is a new VMS discovery for this area, and we’re really excited.
We should mention that it was about 200 meters down, about 125 meters as far as strike length is concerned, and a meter in width. So, sounds like there’s some size to it as well, which is always a bonus.
Definitely. It remains open at depth, with this deposit shaping up to be perfect for what's called surgical mining. In October of last year, Northstar entered into an MoU with Novamera Inc. They’ve got proprietary techniques and the ability to mine steeply dipping narrow vein deposits that normally are too small for commercial production.
This number three zone is perfect for this style of mining, which has low CapEx, is quicker to bring into production, and has significantly reduced environmental and social impacts. As part of our MoU with Novamera, they are now looking at the results of this exploration target study and conducting a proposed development and surgical mining evaluation study. We expect positive results and hope to receive them very soon.
Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and style