Wilmac Sits Next to a Producing Mine - But the Story Is Expanding Beyond That

This map is why NovaRed Mining Inc. (CSE: NRED / OTCQB: NREDF) keeps showing up on my radar.

The company controls the Wilmac Copper-Gold Project in British Columbia’s Quesnel porphyry belt, just west of Princeton and about 8 miles / 10–13 km west of Hudbay’s Copper Mountain Mine.

That proximity matters because Copper Mountain is not theoretical. It is a producing copper-gold operation in the same regional belt.

Hudbay reports Proven and Probable Reserves of about 345 million tonnes grading 0.26% copper and 0.12 g/t gold, which works out to:

• 1.98 billion pounds of copper
• 1.33 million ounces of gold

At assumed pricing of $6.42/lb copper and $4,723/oz gold, that reserve base implies roughly:

• ~$12.7B copper (gross metal value)
• ~$6.28B gold (gross metal value)
• ~$19B total gross metal value

That is not mine economics. It is not NPV, profit, or valuation. It ignores costs, recovery, taxes, capex, and time. It simply shows the scale of the nearby benchmark.

Now look at Wilmac.

The project covers about 16,078 hectares, or roughly 160 square kilometers. That is about 39,700 acres, roughly 30,000 football fields, or around 2.7x Manhattan.

It is also larger than Copper Mountain on land footprint alone, about 2.6x by area. That does not mean more mineralization. It just means more ground to test across multiple targets.

The latest North Lamont results add something more specific than just scale.

NovaRed reported a 43-sample soil program with copper values up to 379 ppm Cu. A western cluster returned nine samples above 150 ppm Cu, averaging 209 ppm Cu.

Those results sit alongside:

• copper-in-soil anomalies
• magnetic anomaly overlap
• moderate-to-high Sr/Y fertility indicators
• V/Sc oxidation-state signals

North Lamont is currently ranked as a moderate-priority drill target. The next step is the IP/AMT geophysical survey, which is already authorized under “No Permit Required” status as part of the 2026 program.

If those results line up with the soil and magnetic data, the target ranking could move higher.

That is the standard exploration pipeline: land position, geology, geochemistry, geophysics, then drilling decisions.

But NovaRed is also adding a second layer to the story.

The company has filed a provisional U.S. patent for an AI-driven mineral exploration platform designed to integrate geological datasets, score targets probabilistically, and structure exploration decision-making using multi-source data.

It is also developing a public-facing AI tool through its MetalCore site that produces mineral prospectivity-style outputs for submitted properties.

That does not make NovaRed an AI company in the traditional sense. The core business is still exploration. The rocks matter first.

But it does add something most juniors do not have yet:

• a large BC copper-gold land package
• a producing mine next door as a benchmark
• early geochemical and geophysical targeting work
• and a developing AI-assisted exploration layer

The base case is still exploration risk. There is no resource, no production, and no guarantee that soil or geophysics will translate into drilling success.

But the structure of the story is shifting.

It is no longer just “a junior explorer beside Copper Mountain.”

It is a district-scale copper-gold exploration program in a proven BC belt, with early target definition underway and an additional data/AI layer being built alongside it.

CSE: NRED / OTCQB: NREDF

NFA.