Hello, and thank you for joining us. So just to jump into it, Barton Gold, we are a South Australian-focused pure gold developer. We have spent several years consolidating pretty much every significant historical asset in the western side of the Central Gawler Craton in gold. BHP have on the right side of the highway the iron oxide copper gold province, obviously anchored around Olympic Dam. They acquired all those minerals. To the west side of the highway, there is a 130-year-old historical high-grade gold-producing district. We saw an opportunity to consolidate this. We acquired most of these assets in 2019 and 2020, and we've recently acquired that fourth asset in the south there, the Wudinna Project.
The objective here was to acquire these assets, get the only mill, and not to rush this into operations immediately, but to step back and build up a much larger scale development proposition. So we did not want to target 50,000 ounces. We wanted to target 150,000 ounces. So we actually focused on scaling our Tunkillia asset, which we've done. We delivered a 1.6 million ounce resource earlier this year and demonstrated that that will act as a very efficient and attractive bulk open-pit mining platform.
So now we're shifting back up to what we call our stage one platform and saying, "Don't forget, we have a fully permitted mill, we have mines at that mill," and we're now looking at moving two development platforms, our stage one operation at our Central Gawler Mill and the advancement of our Tunkillia Project for it in parallel, targeting the start of operations at our Central Gawler Mill at the end of 2026, and then the submission of a mining lease application and completion of feasibility and reserve conversion also at Tunkillia by the end of 2026. Wudinna is an interesting addition to that in terms of our regional enhancement strategy. And we've also made a very interesting high-grade gold and silver discovery, which really caught us by surprise.
Our capital structure is very simple, about 225 million shares on issue, very tightly held, so we have very strong alignment between board and management and the rest of our share register, and we've seen this really consolidate around, one, strong alignment, but very cost-efficient performance, so we have raised AUD 13 million in equity in the past four whole years. We have made more money than that internally monetizing the assets that we have, so we're actually majority internally funded, which is a little bit of an unusual trick, but we produced and sold small volumes of high-grade gold concentrates. We're very good at making use of tax and grant programs. We sell scrap steel and copper, and we rent our camps to other people operating in the district.
So we're kind of a pretty scrappy group focused on really preserving value for our existing shareholders and delivering this large-scale platform. We've recently also found out that we will be added to the S&P/ASX All Ordinaries Index as of the 22nd of September. So really interesting step forward for us as a company and probably appropriate as we shift forward into commercializing these assets. Our team is really our most important capital. We, several years ago, built a team that we saw leading a multi-billion-dollar business. We have a great deal of experience in our team finding, permitting, financing, building, and operating major mining assets with a particularly strong pedigree in South Australia. I am probably the youngest South Australian resident at about seven years. Everyone else is a native South Australian or an adopted South Australian with a lot of experience there.
This gives us a very strong position in the state in terms of working with our regulators, having deep relationships there. We also have a very strong gold pedigree. So about half of our leadership team come from Normandy Mining, which until it was acquired by Newmont in 2002 was the largest gold producer in the southern hemisphere. When we look at the strategy on a map, our objective here is to essentially develop, lead, and own this district for a very long time to come. So the three assets that you see in the top left corner here, these are the three assets we originally acquired, and the existing Central Gawler Mill was the mill servicing the historical Challenger assets. So that's in the top left corner.
When you look at the Tunkillia Project, that's what we see as sort of the anchor, the medium-term anchor value to get to institutional scale and strategy. That's the thing that will lift us up to a 150,000 ounce per annum target profile. So we actually kind of ignored the mill and the mines around it for the past four years, and we focused on building up Tunkillia. Now we grew that from about 500,000 ounces to 1.6 million ounces, and we've published a study demonstrating that it will be a very efficient and very rapid payback bulk open-pit producer. And we've now gone back up to that Central Gawler Mill and said, "Hey, don't forget, we own a fully permitted mill, we own fully permitted mines.
Oh, by the way, here's a resource upgrade, here's 300,000 ounces next to the mill, and here's a preliminary study showing that that mill is actually not going to cost very much to restart." So the strategy is to get to Tunkillia, but not do that by spending AUD 500 million, but by starting much, much smaller, get Challenger going, get the Central Gawler Mill going, go from developer to producer, re-rate the company's equity and credit profile, and then self-fund our growth. Now the addition of Wudinna, which we acquired in June and July, presents an interesting opportunity to kind of turbocharge what we see happening at our Tunkillia Project. And I'll explain that a little bit more, but Wudinna and Tarcoola are effectively going to become satellite high-grade blending feeds to the mill templates that we have at our Challenger Project and our Tunkillia Project.
We're now kind of in the enhancement phase now that we've crystallized what these two platforms will look like. In terms of the stage one operation using the Central Gawler Mill, this is fully permitted infrastructure. We have everything up to and including our EPA license. We've just on Monday published an updated study here, an updated resource showing that we've got about 200,000 ounces of material at around three grams on existing open pits and on existing underground development. We also have some interesting high-grade tails from the early 2000s. What we'll look to do here is actually turn this on in sort of a two-phase process where we're taking sort of a low-impact step into operations, reprocessing some of those historical tails, and then we'll start introducing fresh rock feed.
We also published a preliminary study showing that the cost of reinstating this to its full 600,000 ton per annum feed for fresh rock is only about AUD 26 million plus or minus, so if we say that's AUD 30 million, that's a very short drawbridge to cross into operations to go from pre-producer to producer. This is now moving directly to definitive feasibility studies. The objective is to start this operation at the end of 2026 and then essentially start integrating hard rock feed during the end of 2027, early 2028. When we're looking at the tailings there, I won't labor this too much, but this is the original tailings facility that's there, and what you can see is essentially an upper outer higher grade ring material that grades between 0.7 and 1 gram, so this is coarse material with very clean metallurgy.
The size of this material, it's a P80 of 225 microns. So the metallurgical test work we've done shows that we can liberate between 60% and 80% of this material with either a conventional or an energy-efficient fine grind. So this is kind of low-hanging fruit. And then we can also sort of take the tail of the tails and use that as paste backfill in the underground to reinforce areas that we want to go back into and remine existing remnants, particularly near surface. The point of getting all that going is to make that transition, start generating cash flow, and then when we're ready to develop Tunkillia, when we get our mining development approvals, to move directly into development here. Now Tunkillia is the asset, again, around which we're anchoring our longer-term strategy.
And this is where it starts to look a bit more like a standard sort of mid-cap style asset, 5 million ton per annum, 120,000 ounces per annum of gold, about a quarter million ounces of silver, and around AUD 2,200 AISC. Now the economic returns of this look fairly standard, about AUD 2.7 billion in operating cash, AUD 1.4 billion in NPV, but it's actually the early returns metrics that make this really interesting. We have a very, very elevated equity IRR, so it's 73% unlevered, and a sub-one-year payback. And what this reflects is an interesting zone of higher-grade mineralization in the middle of the deposit. So in that main deposit, we have about a 300-meter-long section within where we have sort of a mining width of 80-100 meters.
Very big, very bulk efficient, but within that, we have 10-30 meters of mineralization that grades between 2 and 10 grams in the block model. This has the effect of essentially elevating that grade in what we call our starter pit. If we look at the way that this actually works on a life-of-mine basis, we're processing about 5 million tons per annum at about 0.8 grams head grade. But during that starter pit, that head grade is actually about 1.2 grams. The effect of this is for a given 5 million tons, you're not producing 120,000 ounces, you're producing more around 180,000, 190,000 ounces. The effect of which is you've just put AUD 400 million into building the infrastructure and doing the pre-strip, and during the first year of operation, you're getting AUD 800 million in operating cash back.
It pays itself back two times over. When you add the second stage pit, we're now getting about AUD 1.3 billion in operating free cash during the first two and a half years. That's 50% of the project's cash flow profile accelerated to the front end. This puts this in a very interesting light from a project financing standpoint. When we consider essentially the benefit there that we can see, sort of the economic torque to marginal grade in a project like this, or I should say the efficient processing infrastructure like this, we would ask ourselves, well, can we find some more high-grade material nearby to blend into the tail of that project and create more of these very attractive year one and year two style returns? That's where we go to this Wudinna Project. Wudinna is not a huge project. It's about 280,000 ounces.
It's 200 km to the southeast of Tunkillia, but it has some very interesting metallurgical characteristics. One, very high recoveries to standard gravity and leaching, 97%-99%, but preliminary flotation work indicates that we can float this material up from 1.5-2 grams up to about a 25-gram concentrate. So you take 90% of the gold and move it into 6% of the mass. And what this means is instead of building another Challenger-style plant down there at 600,000 tons, you put in a smaller, cheaper flotation circuit, turn 600,000 tons of feed into 36,000 tons of concentrate, and you send 100 tons a day up to your other mills and tip this in at 25-gram. And there you're really getting to leverage now the installed infrastructure value that you have either at the Central Gawler Mill or the Tunkillia plant.
When we also then look at our Tarcoola Project, and this is the project that sits between our existing plant and our planned future plant, this is actually South Australia's original high-grade gold field, so this is where they had their gold rush in 1893, a little less prominent than Western Australia's, but there are hundreds of shallow workings in the southwest corner of our project area here, and there's about 600 on that little mining lease that's there, and these are basically really high-grade little veinlets that come to surface, and people were mining 30, 40, and 50 grams per ton from these sort of meter-wide veins. Fast forward 100 years, and someone put an open pit around some of the more prominent of those workings, and feed at about 3-4 grams was being sent to our Central Gawler Mill for processing.
We wanted to figure out what was actually going on here. While we were building up Tunkillia for scale, we did a lot of work to remodel what's going on with the local sort of subsurface architecture here. We identified one particular prospect called Tolmer, which looked a lot like the original structure that fed the high-grade mines that were going there. We drilled that in 2024 and made a gold discovery, and then we drilled it again on a second interpreted structure and made a surprisingly high-grade silver discovery. This is a little bit small on the screen, I apologize, but essentially you can see on the left there, there's sort of two distinct zones of mineralization. You can see a lot of blue dots and a lot of yellow dots. Now the yellow dots are where we drilled first.
This was a high-grade gold discovery where we were getting intersections like 4 meters at 25 grams, this type of thing. We drilled it, we extended it, we drilled it, extended it, and then we started going back to think about how we model these vein sets. It's a very complicated gold field. So we did multi-element analyses, and we had a little bit of a surprise in that while silver is an accessory mineralization in this gold field, you typically see silver in a 1 to 6 ratio with gold. In this case, that ratio inverted. We started to see silver of up to 300 grams with gold of up to 80 grams. We then stepped about 500 meters to the left and drilled the second target, and the first hole we drilled returned 6 meters at 4,747 grams per ton silver from about 46 meters depth.
And this is basically at what we interpret to be the boundary between the oxide and fresh rock mineralization. We followed this up to the east and the west and north and south, and essentially we have what looks to be a thick low-grade blanket of silver associated with lead at about 100 grams per ton from surface that's open to the west, and a deeper sort of arm of very high-grade silver between 500-5,000 grams per ton, now associated also with five to 15 grams gold, which is extending to the south and to the east. So we get a lot of questions about what is this. We don't know. It's exciting. It's interesting. It is very, very unique in this gold field, and that's what interests us.
We've just done some diamond drilling and a whole bunch of soil sampling around this to see if we can figure out how do we vector in on the controlling structures. We think there are both structural and stratigraphic controls here. So this is our new kind of four-dimensional puzzle. We'll be continuing to advance this in parallel with the commercialization of our two sort of primary gold platforms. So for us, really, the next 18 months is about taking the plan that we put together or the proof of concept that we designed over the last five years and delivering it in reality.
The objective is to start operations at our Central Gawler Mill by the end of 2026 and then move Tunkillia all the way through reserve conversion, feasibility, and mining lease application in parallel also by the end of 2026 so that we can run the Challenger Project and the Central Gawler Mill for a couple of years and then self-fund the development of Tunkillia when that is ready to go. So in terms of who we are and what we do, obviously we are very focused on efficient delivery, and we've built something that we think is pretty unique in the region, and happy to take any questions that you guys might have from time to time.
I'm going to have to cut you off there because we have to move on to the next one.
Thank you.
Thanks, Alex.