This fellow here I met last year in Sydney. I was introduced to him by that gold lady out in a corridor, and I had a listen to the story about Barton Gold, and I thought, "That's an interesting one." And then, I've been following the progress over the year because I became a bit invested in it, up 302% since we had a conversation last year. Not just looking for gold now, now looking for water. Why wouldn't you? Whatever it is, it's working for them. Would you please make welcome to the stage, Alexander. Sorry, go on. Just having a brain melt. I think of that 302% that I've missed is just throwing me completely. Alexander Scanlon, welcome to RIU Explorers. Please put your hands together for him.
Thank you very much for joining us this afternoon. I am Alex Scanlon, CEO of Barton Gold. Look, Barton Gold, who are we? What are we doing? Why do we care? Why do we think you should care? We are a pure-play, precious metals developer focused in the Central Gawler Craton of South Australia. This is an area that is better and best known as being a copper and uranium province. This is home to the Carrapateena, Olympic Dam, and Prominent Hill assets operated by BHP. They've essentially consolidated the copper belt there. To the west of the copper belt, where the same basin comes to surface, there's actually a 130-year-old historical high-grade gold district. About five years ago, we saw the opportunity to essentially consolidate this district while nobody was paying attention, so we did that.
We bought pretty much every significant historical exploration and production asset in the region. We bought the only mill, and we did not go back into operations. Our strategy was to step back, build up a much larger platform, so that we could then go back and leverage that infrastructure, knowing that we had pre-laid out our growth pathway. So our plan is to build a much larger platform. We're targeting 150,000 ounces per annum of production, first leveraging that infrastructure to take us into operations and then develop our second asset. We've also made some very interesting discoveries in the region. So we've essentially set up a three-stage project plan: build a platform, commercialize it, and grow it. And we've now done that.
We've essentially completed our first five-year act as a public company, and we now have a platform that can deliver near-term production, medium-term large-scale expansion, and long-term growth. So we've got a lot planned for 2026 as we essentially enter our new or next five-year act as a company, commercializing these things sequentially and going into operations. We have a DFS underway to start operations at our Central Gawler Mill. We're targeting the start of site works by the end of this year, production in 2027. We have upgrade drilling and a PFS to be completed, as well as a mining lease application for our large-scale Tunkillia asset, also all to be done by the end of this year. And we've made a really interesting high-grade silver discovery in the middle of this as well. Now, our capital structure is very simple.
We have about 240 million shares on issue. We're about a AUD 250 million company, and our capital structure or our shareholding is very tightly held, mostly by board management and institutional shareholders. We also have a lot of high-net-worth investors in our register. Essentially, our register has consolidated over the last five years around really consistent, cost-efficient performance, and part of that includes that we have also monetized our assets. We did a placement in October of last year that was cornerstoned by Franklin Templeton. It was about a AUD 15 million placement. In the preceding four years, we earned more money internally from our assets than we raised publicly. We only raised about AUD 13 million publicly over four years, and yet we delivered all that.
So we've built a reputation for being very efficient with our capital, and it might have something to do with the fact that we are the largest shareholders, so we are highly invested in preserving shareholder value. When we look at our capital structure, the human capital is our most important capital. We've built a team that has a very, very great deal of experience, building, finding, permitting, financing, operating major mining assets with a particularly strong pedigree in South Australia, where we live, work, and operate, and in gold. About half of our leadership team come from Normandy Mining, which was Australia's largest gold producer, the largest gold producer in the Southern Hemisphere, and purchased by Newmont in 2002. It was about a 2.5 million ounce per annum producer.
So when we look at the map of our assets, in a manner of speaking, what I've just described about leveraging the existing infrastructure and growing and then regionally expanding, we're really talking about starting in the top left of this map and working our way to the bottom right. The top left hosts the Challenger Project. It's the site of our Central Gawler Mill. Now, we did originally start our focus in the middle of the map at Tunkillia. Again, we wanted to do second things first, in a manner of speaking. We wanted to know that before we turned that mill on, we had already laid out a growth pathway that answered that very important question of, "Okay, now you're producing, what next?" We bought Tunkillia as a 0.6 million ounce asset. We grew it to 1.6 million ounces.
Very quickly, we found five new gold zones. It cost us less than AUD 20 per ounce on a true all-in cost basis. So that was a very cost-efficient exercise, and now we've gone back up to our Challenger Project. We just did two resource upgrades there. We have about 300,000 ounces, and we have a DFS underway to turn that on. So start that operation as a simple baseline, cross that bridge from pre-operations to operations, re-rate the company's equity and credit profile, start generating cash, then move and develop our second project and go to scale. And then we will have not one, but two processing hubs that we can use as a regional hub-and-spoke model. And that's where we then look at our regional enhancement assets.
So the one other project that you see to the south, which I'll take you through, has some very interesting metallurgical characteristics. That means it can probably be a source of high-grade blending feed for our mills, and we've got our Tarcoola Project and the Tolmer discovery sitting right between those mills as well. So this is really the beginning of what is the commercialization phase of our vision for the Central Gawler Craton. When we look at the stage one assets, this is sort of a LiDAR scan of our Central Gawler Mill. This is a fully established, fully permitted facility. We've done an initial study indicating that it cost about AUD 30 million to refurbish this mill to its original 600,000 ton per annum hard rock capacity.
We now have a DFS underway to say: how do we use this plant, potentially bring in some fine grinding, and leverage some historical tailings, some open pit mineralization, to start a simple baseline operation? We're not trying to shoot the lights out, we're trying to turn the lights out, turn the lights on without tripping in the dark, right? So start a baseline operation, get it going, and then increase the development optionality of our high-grade underground and all of our other assets around it. So that DFS is underway. We're hoping to start site operations by the end of 2026 and start pouring gold in 2027. I mentioned tailings. This is a really interesting opportunity for us. We have two historical tailings facilities there.
The older of the two, TSF 1, serviced this Challenger mine when it was producing a 5-gram open pit and an 8-10-gram underground. Historically, at a low gold price, they were essentially force-feeding the mill, so they weren't grinding the material as much as you might think they would have. The P80 of this material is about 225 microns. So we actually have a higher grade ring around the outside of this, this tailings facility, where we have material grading between 0.6-1 gram per tonne gold. The metallurgy here is very simple, clean metallurgy, and our metallurgical test work indicates that we can recover between 60%-80% of that material.
So we will target processing that material as just a simple, essentially sort of bootstrapping, make this operation pay for itself to get going, and then start blending in open pit, and then eventually underground and surrounding mineralization. And that gets us into operations, and then we turn our attention to Tunkillia. So this is our large-scale asset. We spent a lot of time growing this and thinking about this. We were very attracted to this asset because of what we believed it may have been hiding inside it. And we published a study in May of 2025 that demonstrated that this can be a significant gold producer, really focused on the economies of capital and scale economy, say, capital economies of scale and operating costs.
This would be about a 5 million tonne per annum processing plant, producing about 120,000 ounces of gold, about 250,000 ounces of silver. It has some fairly standard numbers when you're looking at free cash flow from operations and NPV. It'll produce about AUD 2.7 billion operating profit at a 5,000 Australian dollar gold price, AUD 1.4 billion NPV on that same assumption. What's really interesting about this, though, is the timing of cash flows. So when you look at the IRR and the payback period, you have a 73% unlevered equity IRR, a less than one year payback period. Now, this is because there is a central higher grade zone that we suspected was hiding inside this project.
So when you look at the geology here, it has some very interesting geometry, in a matter of speaking. The main deposit is about 3 kilometers long, but in the middle of that, there's a 300 meter long zone where if you look at the cross-section on the right, you've got 80-100 meters of mining width of just big, bulk, open pitable mineralization, but anywhere between 10-30 meters of higher grade mineralization. And this has the effect of essentially lifting the average feed grade in that area that we now call our starter pit. So if you look at the image on the top right of this slide, you can see how we've staged the development of these pits.
When you look at that starter pit, and you compare it to the life of mine metrics here, what you see is a slightly higher grade that brings forward a lot of production. So that stage one starter pit will produce about 180,000 ounces of gold in the first year, about 206,000 ounces over the first thirteen months. What that means is that pit alone will produce about $850 million in operating profit in the first year, essentially paying back development two times over. Stage one and stage two together produce about $1.3 billion in operating profit in the first two and a half years, paying back development three times over, and that's at $5,000 gold.
So of course, the current gold price, it would produce about $2 billion operating profit in the first two and a half years, paying back development 5 times. So this asset is a very strong, development prospect and has a very strong financing profile unto itself. One of the interesting things to think about then is, you know, what happens with that, marginally higher grade when you actually look at the productive economics? Well, we've compared the life of mine average with the starter pit metrics you can see in the table. And what you're really getting when you think about this is just for a slightly higher grade, so 1.2 gram versus 0.8 gram, about 45% higher.
What you're really getting for a given 5 million tonnes per annum, tonnes per annum through this plant, is not 120,000 ounces per annum, it's 180,000 ounces per annum. The net effect is that your cash cost of production is not AUD 2,200, it's about AUD 1,000 per ounce. It's a really important lesson to think about in terms of sort of the economic horsepower of a mill of this scale. That then takes us to the question: where might we have surrounding high-grade mineralization that we can blend into this and extend this type of starter pit economics in through the life of the mine? And what other assets could we, you know, produce mater produce such material at? I mentioned the Wudinna Project.
This is a 279,000-ounce asset we acquired from Cobra Resources. It has really two interesting features to us. Well, three really. One, it's historically underexplored. Two, it's on a main highway... and three, the metallurgy is very interesting. So it has 97% and 99% recoveries to standard gravity and leaching. But more importantly, the test work indicates that you can concentrate about 90% of the gold into 6% of the feed mass through a standard flotation. So instead of building a new mill here, we could process 600,000 tons into 36,000 tons of concentrate and just send 100 tons a day, two trucks up the highway to tip into our mills and continue to supercharge this infrastructure that we have already built. So that's really our large, a long-term strategy.
And Tarcoola is another one of these sort of regional enhancement assets. This sits between the Central Gawler Mill and our future Tunkillia mill. Now, this is a complex gold field. It is the original high-grade gold field of South Australia. We have a mining lease. There's an open pit. There's 600 historical high-grade workings around that pit. We took the time to try to work out what's actually going on structurally under this gold field, where is all this gold coming from? And we used some new seismic work to model a well, what we believed was a structure that was most analogous for that cluster of gold hits, and we drilled a target called Tolmer. And the first thing we drilled, we were drilling it as a gold target.
We encountered high-grade gold, made a high-grade gold discovery, and then we realized that there was, at least on a historical basis, unusually high silver with that gold. So we had silver of up to 300 grams with gold up to 50 grams. We then drilled 500 meters to the west and had quite a surprise. And what I mean by that is the first hole we put into what we call now the Western Silver Zone came back with 6 meters at 4,747 grams per ton silver, plus 13 grams gold. So it was the highest grade silver intersection reported on every stock exchange in the world for 2025. Quite a surprise in Australia, very much a surprise in what is an historical high-grade gold field with no mention of silver other than it being a minor accessory material.
We've now drilled that a number of different ways. We're trying to work out what we think are the local structural and stratigraphic controls. We will be following this up in parallel with the commercialization of our gold assets, but this obviously presents some pretty interesting opportunities for us. Obviously, people are pretty excited about silver these days, but with these types of grades that we see, particularly in that lower horizon, you're looking at silver between 100 and 17,000 gram per ton silver, with gold between 3 and 50 grams as a byproduct credit. There could be an awful lot of value in a very small pit, which could be quite, let's say, call it an accessory income to what we're already doing with our gold platform. Look, 2026 for us, again, it is the beginning of our commercialization phase.
We're working on taking our stage one operations into site works by the end of the year. We're working on applying to build our stage two expansion asset by the end of the year. It's going to be very busy. You know, in terms of who we are, why we hope you guys are interested, we have built a very, very interesting platform, very methodically, where we can deliver near-term operations, medium-term growth, and large-scale consolidation in the long term. We have advanced this very consistently and cost efficiently. We are still very well capitalized, in fact, better capitalized than we've ever been in our history as a public company. Very, very strong leadership, and of course, with multiple technical studies, 60,000 meters of drilling underway during the next five months, we are going to have an incredible amount of news flow coming out.
Please do follow us. If you have any questions, we'd be happy to answer them at our booth. Thank you very much.