Next presenter is Barton Gold, Alexander Scanlon. Welcome.
Doing well, thank you. Right, good afternoon, thank you very much for joining us here today. I'm freshly jet-lagged, so we'll see how this works. Look, in really simple terms, what is Barton Gold doing? What are we focused on? We are a pure-play gold developer in South Australia. We are focused in the western side of the Central Gawler Craton. This is a very well-known geological domain, of course. BHP has consolidated the eastern side of the Central Gawler Craton in the IOCG province there. That same mineral basin, which is sort of deep and coppery on the east side of that Central Gawler, trends toward surface and sort of becomes shallow and goldy, as a manner of speaking.
Now, this is a 130-year-old historical gold district, and we have essentially consolidated the entire district over the past five years and scaled it to be a much larger development platform. This includes ownership of the only gold mill in the region, which we are now going to look to turn on around the end of 2026 to start a development pathway that takes us up to a 150,000-ounce per annum target for long-term large-scale production. The idea is first to create the scale and then leverage that existing infrastructure to get there on a lower cost, lower risk, and lower dilution model. For what we call our stage one operation, leveraging that infrastructure, we have just started a Definitive Feasibility Study. This will focus on the reinstatement of those operations in two phases: first, processing historical higher-grade tailings, and then high-grade hard rock material.
We are also looking to apply for our mining lease application for the development of our stage two Tunkillia project by the end of 2026. We have a lot of things going on underway, including upgrade drilling for that project. We've made recently a high-grade silver discovery that seems to be growing, and we've also acquired a new project called Wudinna. This completes our ownership of all of the major historical gold assets in that region, which will be part of our regional enhancement strategy. Our capital structure is very simple. We have around AUD 240 million shares on issue. We're about a AUD 250 million company with AUD 20 million cash in the bank. We recently did a AUD 15 million placement, cornerstone by Franklin Templeton, at a price of AUD 1.25 per share.
Really, in terms of our capital structure, some of the key takeaways are that we have both a very high, highly consolidated share register. About 20% of the company is owned by board and management, 35% owned by institutional shareholders, and another 15%-20% owned by family offices. We also have a high degree of liquidity. The remaining one quarter of our company that is owned by retail shareholders is represented by about 4,000 shareholders. We have really strong liquidity metrics for a company of our size. We have seen a lot of institutional shareholders consolidating our shares, both around this very strong board and management alignment and then very consistent cost-efficient progress.
Part of that cost efficiency is driven by something slightly unusual in our case, in that being, although we are not a producing gold company, we have been producing revenue for the past several years. We have a track record of monetizing our assets, producing and selling gold concentrates, disposing of surplus camp and equipment, renting our camps to third parties. That has actually seen us cover 100% of our corporate overhead costs during those past three years and really minimize dilution. This is something that's really built up, I think, a strong reputation for us in terms of having a low dilution, high value-add track record. This is something that we're now looking to extend as we go from the platform that we have created to moving this forward into operations and re-rating the company as a producer.
One of the most important parts of our capital structure is the human capital. We have a team that has several hundred years of experience finding, permitting, financing, and building major mining assets. Importantly, with a very strong pedigree both in South Australia, where we live, work, and operate, and in gold. We have a team essentially of South Australian natives or adopted South Australian natives, myself being probably the sole exception. We have very deep local, social, financial, and government relationships. It's very important to have these in the region where you want to operate. We are looking to lead the redevelopment of an entire gold district in the center of the state. This puts us in very strong alignment with the government, who is a key stakeholder for us. We also have a very strong pedigree in gold.
About half of our leadership team come from Normandy Mining, who was in the 1990s the largest gold producer in the Southern Hemisphere and based in Adelaide. This is a very strong nexus for us between South Australian gold. We're looking to really replicate the story of a South Australian development champion that the government can get behind. We're getting a lot of support from them. When you look at this on a map, what you can see is west of that Stuart Highway, we have essentially consolidated the entire district. In the northwest corner there, where you can see Challenger and CGM, that's the location of our Central Gawler mill. That's the only gold mill in the region. We own an infrastructure monopoly, for want of a better word. As we develop our second project, we will extend that infrastructure monopoly.
West of that highway, we will really be the only processing route for precious metals mineralization. Now, when you look at this map, in the center of that project, you see our Tunkillia project. That's actually where we focused for the first several years of being a public company. We grew that asset from 600,000 ounces to 1.6 million ounces. We published that latest resource upgrade in March this year. We published a study demonstrating that that will be a very cost-efficient large-scale producer, producing 120,000 ounces per annum. We first focused on establishing that anchor of scale, something that will be of institutional value and institutional consequence. We've now gone back up to the northwest corner of that map and said, "Don't forget, we have our Challenger asset. We have an existing fully permitted underground mine.
We have two fully permitted open-pit mines, and we have a fully permitted mill. Now we are looking at leveraging that infrastructure to go into operations, re-rate the company's equity and credit profile, generate free cash, and then develop Tunkillia quickly to follow that. The idea is we get to that valuation that we're targeting. We get to that scale that is of institutional consequence by investing a small fraction of that capital first in that existing infrastructure and working from the top left down to the bottom right. The Tarcoola asset between those two, that will be a source of high-grade blending material that will go into those two assets. The Tunkillia project as well is also part, or sorry, the Wudinna project is also part of our regional enhancement strategy, which I'll come back to.
When we look at this stage one operation, what are we talking about? We are talking about leveraging an old mill back into operations very cheaply. We have recently done two resource upgrades here. We are looking at about 300,000 ounces of gold next to this mill, 200,000 of which are high-grade gold on existing open-pit and underground developments. We have published a study in July that shows that we can reinstate this plant to its original hard rock capacity of 600,000 tons per annum at a low cost of around AUD 30 million, ± 30%. What we are looking at doing is actually breaking that reinstatement into two phases to further de-risk that. Although it is already cheap, we like the idea of getting a site into operations with as little risk as possible because the size of the reward for doing so is already so significant.
What we're looking at doing in the first instance is actually reprocessing some historical tailings. We have two tailings facilities here, the older of which, TSF1, was receiving the tails of this operation when it was producing 5 gram-10 gram per ton material at a period of very low gold prices. The prior operators of this were essentially force-feeding this mill and sacrificing recoveries for throughput. The benefit of that to us is that we've got a tailings facility where the upper outer ring of this material is grading between 0.6 gram-1 gram gold. It is simple, clean gold metallurgy. This is not polymetallic. No preg-robbing issues to worry about. It is coarse.
The grind size here, the effective grind size is that it's a 225 micron P80, which means from a metallurgical test work standpoint, we can essentially re-grind this material down to about 40 micron and recover 70% of that gold quite simply. This is how we can look at restarting essentially the back end of that mill, start generating revenue from this material, and then start feeding in fresh hard rock material from our open-pit and underground mines. We can defer some capital costs, but we can defer a lot of risk. Even within this sort of stage one, stage two development strategy, we break this stage one down into phases and effectively push back risk. This allows us to start processing material, generating cash flow, and create a forward growth profile that will then fund the development of our Tunkillia project.
Tunkillia is a greenfields development asset, very different in nature. This is 1.6 million ounces of gold mineralization on the western margin of a large shear zone. You can see there is very linear nature to the three deposits that are modeled there. This is something that looks more like a standard mid-tier bulk open-pit style operation, 5 million ton per annum, producing 120,000 ounces per annum. The key thing here to look at is the returns profile. When we looked at this asset, we had a suspicion that there was a higher-grade zone in the middle of the deposit that would produce a very fast payback and therefore a pretty compelling development opportunity. One of the first things we did was drill that.
What we've modeled now is effectively a higher-grade starter pit that in the first year of operations produces around 200,000 ounces of gold and over AUD 800 million in operating free cash. It effectively pays this project back two times in the first year. That comes down to the geometry of the geology, if that makes sense. Within the main 3 km deposit that you can see there, there's a 300-meter- long zone right in the middle that has essentially a higher-grade profile. There's a cross-section of that on the right-hand side of this slide here. What you're looking at is essentially fresh mineralization that is 80 meters-100 meters wide. It is very big, very bulk efficient. You're going to use large equipment. You're going to have low unit costs, and you're going to produce gold cheaply.
In this zone in particular, within that 80 meter-100 meters, you have 10 meters-30 meters of higher-grade material. This has the effect of averaging up the feed grade in our starter pit, which conveniently is located right in the middle of this deposit. When we look at the life of mine economics, what we see is these big mills and simple bulk mining, they've got a lot of horsepower, 5 million ton per annum, 0.8 gram head grade, 120,000 ounces per annum. We've modeled a cost of around AUD 2,200 per ounce or about $1,450 . When you look at that stage one pit, that starter pit, that grade there is about 50% higher. It's not a high-grade pit by any means. For your first 5 million ton per annum, you're not producing 120,000 ounces. You're producing 180,000 ounces.
What that means is your cost of production is less than AUD 1,000 per ounce. You have just pushed AUD 400 million into the development of this project. In your first year, you are going to get AUD 800 million back at a AUD 5,000 gold price. In the first two and a half years of operations, you are going to get about AUD 1.3 billion back. This is a project that pays itself back two to four times over in the first one to two years. This creates a very strong financial profile, but it is also a very important lesson about the sort of economic torque that we get to marginal grade in this asset as between the life of mine metrics and the starter pit metrics. Naturally, we would ask ourselves, is there more high-grade material around here that we can put through this mill in subsequent years?
It has very interesting metallurgical analyses, which indicate that we can concentrate about 90% of the gold into about 6% of the feed mass through flotation. Instead of building a whole new plant here, we can simply crush, grind, and float to produce a 25-gram concentrate and take 600,000 tons of mass, produce 36,000 tons of high-grade concentrate, and just send 100 tons a day, two trucks up the main highway to blend into our existing facilities and supercharge those economics. We also have our Tarcoola project. To recall, this is between our existing Central Gawler mill and where we will develop our second Tunkillia project. This is the home of sort of high-grade gold in South Australia. It is where South Australia had its high-grade gold rush.
While we were scaling Tunkillia, we wanted to work out what created this cluster of high-grade operations there. We ended up doing quite a bit of geotechnical work, including about 40 km in new seismic. We identified the structure that created the original cluster of gold fields there. We predicted another structure similar to that about 5 km to the west. We drilled that in 2024, and we announced a gold discovery there in August of 2024. We drilled that, we extended it, we drilled, extended, and then we realized it had some high-grade silver with it, higher grade than you would typically see in this gold field. We said, "Okay, park that.
Very interesting. We then drilled 500 meters to the west on our second main structural target there and have made one of the highest-grade silver intersections in contemporary Australian history, but also, I think it was the 5th highest-grade intersection on all listed markets for the first half of this year. We do not know what this is quite yet, but we essentially have two horizons of silver mineralization here: a shallow, thick blanket of low-grade silver mineralization, about 100 grams per ton, that is 10 meters-20 meters thick, extending to the west, and a lower horizon at the boundary between the oxide and transitional zones. This is where you are getting between 200 and 5,000 grams per ton silver with an additional 3-15 grams per ton gold. This is extending to the south and to the east. We are working to identify what this is. Very exciting.
The key takeaway for us, though, is we are now essentially on the pathway to commercialization. We have demonstrated a two-platform hub-and-spoke development model. The next 18 months for us are about turning on our existing mill and then applying to build the second one and then unlocking this value and growing from there. Thank you very much.