Now, this next company has recently completed a definitive feasibility study on their Katanning Gold Project. Really interested to hear an update on that and what's next. Please welcome from Ausgold Limited, John Dawood. Sorry about that, everyone. It took me a little while to fight my way through the crowd of people who were leaving. The short-sighted ones are going to miss out on this great opportunity. Thank you for bearing with me, and afternoon tea has not been served yet, so I don't know what the rush is. I joined Ausgold Limited 12 months ago as the Executive Chairman. I could see the opportunity for a greenfields project development in the southwest of Western Australia. I could see a mine that wanted to be built and a very large land position that's only in the very early innings of the discovery journey.
There's a large land position controlled by one company, and we're now going to get down to building the processing infrastructure that's needed to fully leverage that position. You'll see here we're located about three and a half hours' drive southeast of Perth, Katanning. We're about 30 km east of the town of Katanning, about 5,000 people. We delivered a definitive feasibility study three weeks ago, which I think really does, and I'll take you through that, but it really does sort of, I think, outline the underpinnings of what we think will be a very strong and one of the next mid-tier Australian gold producers to come. Very attractive economics. As I'm going through those economics, just please bear in mind that that's just a snapshot in time.
This is very much about building the foundations for a multi-decade, multi-million ounce gold district, which we control 100% under Ausgold Limited. The feasibility study. We got cracking on this. This has been in the works for about 18 months. A lot of work's gone into it, and I think there's some really unique attributes of the project, which I'll take you through. First off, resource. We inherited a 3 million oz resource. We took the rather unusual tactic of actually going backwards to go forwards. What we did with that is we applied a pit constraint to that resource. Previously, it wasn't constrained within a pit shell. Not as conservative a way of presenting it as we were comfortable. We put a pit shell around that.
It went from three million ounces back to nearly 2.5 million oz, but a much more robust way to show the project and a much more robust resource. It's just under 2.5 million oz at 1.11 g. Importantly, 91% of those ounces are in the measured and indicated category, so the higher confidence end of the spectrum. That's at a $4,500 Aussie pit shell. Reserves are 1.25 million oz at 1.11 g, and again, 84% of these are proven. The highest confidence classification for reserves is what we have for 84% of it. There's basically no inferred material in the mine plan. When our CFO, Ben Stockdale, and his team come to project finance this, we're going to get a very good reception from the banks and the other potential lenders when they see the robustness of the resource and reserve.
It delivers a really attractive production profile. As you can see here, it's a 10-year mine life. That was our goal, to have 10 years. We think to be taken seriously, you sort of need that 10 years to really be able to find your feet and fully prosecute the exploration program. As you can see, the grade is weighted towards the first seven years of the mine. First seven years, we average 130,000 oz of production. It drops off as we start to draw down on stockpiles. What we think it provides is ample runway to get on with the drill and extend the deposit, downplunge, along strike, and also a number of the satellite properties that we've identified, which I'll take you through. Project's 3.6 million tonnes per annum throughput. I'll show you how we can expand that. It's got a little bit of future proofing in mind.
We spend $355 million Aussie to build that, and we think that's a really conservative number. Very defensible. Maybe people were expecting it to be a little bit lower, but at the end of the day, we believed that what we needed to do was table a credible number that we could take to the market, we could take to prospective lenders, and actually deliver. You can see that it still delivers some very attractive costs and overall returns. All-in sustaining costs for the life of the mine, $2,265 per ounce life of mine, a little lower in the first four years when we're doing about 140,000 oz. That shows some very compelling returns. We did the base case economics at $4,300 an ounce, and that generates an NPV of just under a billion dollars Aussie. That's compared to our market cap today of around $250 million.
We think there's plenty of room for us to increase the value just on what we have in terms of this feasibility study. If you run those numbers at something closer to today's spot, if you run them at $5,000 per ounce, the after-tax NPV jumps to $1.35 billion, a very high IRR of 68%, and a 12-month payback. Again, very important numbers when it comes time to look at how we finance this. This project will generate a lot of cash very early and really reduce the risk quickly and repay its capital. A lot of the time I get asked, I guess the fairly inevitable question is, are we going to build this or are we going to sell it, to buy it or what that is? I say we're indifferent.
I've been taken over four times in my career, twice having built a project and being board as an operator and twice as a developer looking to still build the project. What we've done here though is we've designed this feasibility study as if we're going to eat our own cooking. We are going to build this project unless someone has a better idea. What we've done is table a very achievable project and study that we think we can deliver, and we won't have to walk away. This is not a marketing document to wave around to try and attract the takeover fairy. No question. You can see here, that's the production profile. We sort of, a very nice even production profile. We move about 35 million tonnes per annum. That's sort of consistent over the first seven years.
We build a low-grade stockpile and then we draw that down in the last three years. I think therein lies the opportunity here for us to be able to find more ounces, either downplunge, along strike, or have some of our satellite deposits come in and prolong that higher grade period. We're averaging 1.3 g/t gold for the first four years. The task and the challenge for us and our exploration team is to keep that going. Ultimately, what we'd also like to do is find enough material to justify an expansion. First and foremost though, is to maintain that run rate at sort of 140,000 ounces, 150,000 oz for many years to come. From a metallurgical perspective, recoveries are very straight, very much huge to a sort of a grade recovery curve.
The slightly higher grade material recovers a little higher and vice versa with lower grade material, nothing unexpected there. This is free milling, very clean metallurgy, no nasties here. From a technical perspective, it's a very straightforward project. Costs, as I mentioned, are competitive. You can see some of the key metrics here, sort of in the first four years and then life of mine. You know, good recoveries, you know, that higher grade driving those higher returns. From a cost perspective, we drive a very high margin. These are at the $4,300 prices, so you can add a lot more margin at the current prevailing gold price of a little over $5,100. I've taken you through those, sort of those metrics in terms of the sort of the after-tax NPV and IRRs, et cetera. Very attractive.
This project is demanding to be built, which is what we want to see. Here's where the project sits in the sort of the context of the Australian cost curve. These are the numbers from the March quarter. As you can see, it's very competitive. I was told when we did the original sort of marketing in some of our investor meetings that it's the first feasibility that someone's seen that wasn't in the lowest cost quartile. We sort of had a miss there. What we've tried to do again is coming back to being credible and conservative appropriately, and we think we've done that. As you can see there, it's in very good company. It's going to be a lower cost mine than the majority of the ounces that are produced in Australia. We're very happy with that, and we think this is very achievable.
Some of the sensitivities that you'd expect to see, not unsurprisingly, it's sensitive to recovery. We've done a lot of metallurgical test work here. There's nothing funky with the metallurgy here. It's very straightforward. Grade also, but as I mentioned, a significant portion, nearly 84% of the reserves are proven. This is well drilled. There's nearly 300,000 m of drilling into the Katanning Gold Project in just under 4,000 holes. This project has been very well drilled and we think been very well modeled. We think we're standing behind our resource and reserve, and I think it will show well when it comes time to finance this. In terms of the project and what it'll bring to the region, Katanning is an agricultural region. It's in the wheat belt of Western Australia. A lot of the properties, the farms there have been consolidating over the years. More mechanization, less labor.
The towns have been gradually getting smaller. Katanning is the regional centre, so it's been in pretty good shape, but when you look at some of the smaller towns around the region, they are slowly sort of losing people, and it's sort of hard for people to find their work opportunities. What we're doing here is bringing a really significant diversification to the regional economy. It's going to be a lot of very well-paid jobs. We are bringing our own accommodation village to bear, which I think is important. We're not going to cannibalise the accommodation stock in Katanning. Housing is a sensitive subject in Katanning, as it is many places in Australia today. We're not going to compete with people with higher paying mining jobs. We're going to bring our own accommodation. This will be drive-in, drive-out.
A significant portion of the Western Australian fly-in, fly-out workforce are in the triangle from Perth down to Bunbury, down to Albany. We think we'll be able to draw on people instead of flying up to the Pilbara or the Kimberley to drive in on a Sunday and do their shift and drive home, be closer to their families, be closer to their communities. We think that's a good offering. In terms of support from the local community, the Shire of Katanning has been very, very supportive of us. They see the benefits that we will bring, and we're in discussions around leasing a large plot of land on the outskirts of Katanning to site our accommodation village. I think that speaks to the support that we're seeing from one of the key local stakeholder groups. Mentioned the resource, the very high component of measured and indicated there.
Nearly 90% of the ounces for this project come out of that one central pit between Jinkers and Jinkers South. It's not sort of ratholing a whole stack of little deposits here, there, and everywhere. It's a very efficient operation. The first four years of mining are exclusively within the central zone, then we move north to Olympia and Jackson, two small satellites. In the later part of the year, we mine the southern zone really around Dingo for the last three years. It's an efficient operation. One of the items that we were able to do recently was our consultants with their scheduling were able to avoid closing a road to the north of the project. That was always sort of envisaged that that would have to be done.
Under the current plan, that's only going to be closed for about six weeks with some traffic management and diversion strategy. Again, sort of looking at what was concerning local stakeholders, we were able to be responsive to that. We're very happy with that outcome. Reserves, I mentioned, as you can see again, very high component of proven. This is a very unusually high level of proven reserves for a development project of this nature. We think that's a really strong point to focus on for the robustness of this deposit. Processing plant, very straightforward. 3.6 million tonnes per annum. Straightforward CIL gold project. Primary jaw crusher into a SAG mill, ball mill, and then into the gravity circuit. We get about 25% of our gold through gravity and then into the elution circuit, cyanide destruction, thickening, and off to a lined tailings dam.
We will be lining the tailings dam because we are in an agricultural zone. We think that's a good mitigation of risk. This project can be expanded to five, five and a half million tonnes per annum relatively straightforwardly, with the addition of a secondary ball mill, some more CIL tanks, and an upgrade to the elution circuit. We think we've given ourselves a little bit of future proofing in terms of being able to bring more capacity online as and when we build the resource and reserve base to support that. Here around permitting, we've started the permitting. We've referred to the federal government under their environmental legislation. We think there's three main areas that they'll be interested in. One is eucalyptus woodland. This is an area that's been farmed.
It's been comprehensively cleared by the farmers over the last 80 years, so there's not a lot of remnant original woodland. Where there is original woodland, we preserve it. We've designed this, as you can see in the top right-hand corner, there's a sort of the green hatched area. It is such an area, and we've designed our tailings and waste rock facility around that. We don't touch a blade of grass in that sensitive ecological area. We have very strong mitigation strategies around Carnaby cockatoos in terms of putting breeding boxes in, more foraging plants, as well as the red-tailed phascogale. We'll be doing feral animal control there to give the little guy a fighting chance. We think we've got good answers to what we anticipate will be items that the regulators will focus on.
We are about two weeks away from making our initial referral to the EPA in Western Australia. Permitting is on our critical path. We think we're allowing ourselves about nine months to get through that process. In terms of upside, you can see here the deposit is wide open, downplunge. This is drill constrained, not geologically constrained. The first order of business for us is to get drilling, downplunge, and if the Katanning Gold Project is going to get really big, this is how it's going to do it in the early days. We've got a large regional land position. I'm running out of time, but if you can see down there to the southeast, Nanakup Bridge, Zinger, keep an eye out for that. We are targeting a maiden resource on that early next year.
This is really our main opportunity for a significant satellite deposit, which may ultimately justify expanding the deposit. We've been drilling that a few months ago. Our drill season starts in October, so we'll be back there with gusto. You should see a lot of results and leading to a maiden resource early in the new year. In terms of looking to pour gold, if everything goes ahead according to plan, we start building in the middle of next year and we pour gold before the end of 2027. I will stop there. Thank you very much. Thank you for persevering.