Quick snapshot of Challenger Gold. Two assets, both in South America. Lead asset, very much our Hualilan Gold Project, 2.8 million oz. We've taken that through from exploration. High-grade core of one and a half million oz at about five g gold. We're almost about to execute a Toll Milling strategy, be pouring first gold in November. That Toll Milling strategy funds a larger 150,000 oz a year operation. In Ecuador, 9 million oz, a large porphyry project. Where that asset has all of a sudden become interesting is that the company next door to us in Ecuador has just been taken over for $650 million. You take a look through valuation per oz of what they'll take over for. It values that asset at about $170 million, which incidentally is our current market cap.
You could argue you're getting, you know, our main asset, which is in Argentina, for free. Well funded. We raised $35 million about two weeks ago. We were approached by two major gold funds, L1 Capital and Helikon Investments, the two largest shareholders in Adriatic, who put $15 million in each. Our Chairman went along pro rata as well. He ended up putting $7.5 million into the company. That funds us fully into production from Toll Milling with quite a buffer. In terms of the Ecuador asset, what I'm showing you there is on the top right, you've got Lumina Gold, the Cangrejos Project. 26 million oz, runs about half a gram. We've got 9 million oz. You go to their core shed, we've been to their core shed, they've been to ours, it's exactly the same stuff. It's one large deposit split by a tenement boundary.
Two weeks ago, CMOC, which is China Molybdenum Co., closed the acquisition of Lumina for $650 million Australian. Which again puts a valuation of us on of around about $170 million on that asset. Does it make sense for CMOC to take us? Yes, they've got a big streaming deal they inherited on there. We've got no royalty. That 9 million oz we got gives them critical mass to probably start at a million oz a year. We've got all the exploration potential. We've got 9 million oz from drilling out four and a half of 15 big gold-in-soil anomalies. We've drilled six of the other ten. They're all mineralized. How do you get full price on it? You can't be a desperate seller. I couldn't say that two weeks ago, but with $35 million in the bank, I can.
You've got to be prepared to take your time, and it's got to make sense for the other party to buy it. We were in the process of spinning that asset off into Canada. We put that on hold. Give us six months, maybe a little bit longer to get full value, but you'll see a significant surprise out of that. We'll just sort of work through slowly and get full value for that. Hopefully there's a very nice windfall for shareholders sometime in the next six months. The main asset. What I'm showing you there are the financial highlights of Toll Milling. A really synergistic opportunity. There's a mill 165 km down the road that didn't quite have enough ore to start. If they didn't restart production in the next two years, they're going to lose that mill. They're about half a million tons of ore short.
They approached us and said, look, would you process 3% of your ore body through us? We process 3% of our ore body. It's the sort of 450,000 tons near surface, goes about 6.5 g gold. It's the ore that's not ideal for the plant that we'll build. It's our oxide cap. Over the three years of Toll Milling at current spot prices, it actually generates about $150 million EBITDA or about $100 million after tax. That sort of fully funds us into the larger operation. That's why that's what Toll Milling's been designed for. In terms of who's who, I'm an exploration geologist. Started a company called Citadel Resources, came with a great management team, had an asset in Saudi, sort of six years of hard work on, you know, that company was taken over for a billion dollars. Mike Zivcic is our COO.
Up until I pinched him two years ago, Mike was running the largest gold mine in Argentina. He was running a half a million oz gold mine for Barrick in the same province as us. Sonia Delgado, Director of the company based in San Juan, does the government community permitting. Without Sonia, we wouldn't be fully permitted for production, which we are. Bira, we put Bira on as General Manager about three months ago. He's a mining startup specialist. His job is to get his mine ready for Toll Milling in Waliyan in Argentina. In the last three weeks, we've signed up and have started about 11 of our first 25 staff. It'll be a contractor-run operation, so we're fairly lean. In the next month, we build out the entire management team. In terms of shareholders, Eduardo Elsztain, one of Argentina's richest men, 13% shareholder and Chairman.
He's also the owner of the toll mill. His stake in us is worth more than his stake in the mill, so interests are aligned. L1 and Helikon that came in in that recent raise, and then BlackRock have been there for about three years. They're the world's largest gold fund. Importantly, board and management, myself included, we've got serious skin in the game. We own about 16% of the company, so we lie awake at night thinking, how can we get the share price up? Not, do you think I can convince my Chairman to pay me an extra $50,000 a year? Argentina, Argentina up until two years ago has really been uninvestable.
The challenge of Argentina is you sell a gold bar, under the legislation you had five days to convert it to pesos, and that does no one any good when you've got 100% inflation and the peso's declining about 100% a year against the U.S. dollar. You fast forward to where we are now, they've got a new president, a new mining act. They've dropped the tax rate from 35% to 25%, but you no longer have to convert your gold sales into pesos. You can hold them as U.S. dollars. You can export dividends. About six weeks ago, they floated the peso. Even if you had to convert into pesos, it's now a big liquid market, like converting Aussie to U.S. You can get USD in and out of the country very easily. You're crossing about a 0.5% spread. The size of the prize. What does Toll Milling fund?
Late 2023, we put out a scoping study, high-grade underground focus, fit for purpose. It was a terrible market at the time. You needed to be low CapEx, quick payback. It was a lovely project. 120,000 oz a year over seven years, low cost. NPV of about $400 million U.S. You look at sort of $2,500 gold, the NPV of that project's about $800 million U.S. A week before we put out that study, we got back some column test results. That's testing that tells you whether Heap Leach will work. Our ore body's got about 1.5 million oz, goes about five, and then another 1.5 million oz going about a half a gram below a grade halo. The Heap Leach results we got back were showing recoveries of an average of 75% from the low grade at a half inch cross, which is quite friendly.
Really, that's unlocked the ability to take out almost the entire 2.8 million oz. What you're seeing there is the high-grade scoping study, which is now irrelevant. In the brown, you can see four small pits in the underground workings. What it looks like now, we're working on a sort of larger lifeline study. It'll be a sort of 12-13 year mine life. You're moving 900 million tons all open pit, putting about 25 million tons of ore through a plant, another sort of 60 million tons- 80 million tons of ore in a Heap Leach pad. You're recovering just under 2 million oz of gold over around about a 12 or 13 year life. You do the math and it's going to be a plus 150,000 oz a year long life producer, which will be very attractive to just about any mid-tier North American. A little bit about the project.
What I've done is I've put the geology over the topography. That line of hills there that you can see up the page, that's the key. That's actually a thrust fault that controls the mineralization. You can see that line of hills goes to the top of the page, another five km. It goes another four or five km to the bottom of the page. Green's high grade, yellow's low grade. Important points are we've got 16 m at about 16 g where that Hualilan sign is, 600 m south. The two km to the bottom of the page in the hills, there's a series of old workings and we've got 25 gram material two km north. This deposit's wide open. For the last three years, we've just had no money to go drilling.
We stepped back and put a kilometer-deep hole underneath the deposit to test it at depth and that hole finished in four m at six. Mineralization wide open everywhere. It will get bigger. This is just a sort of typical section. The sort of inset there is the higher grade scan material. Lovely hit, 60 m at 10 g. That does continue at depth. You look at the sort of lower grade halo sitting above it there. It's actually interesting that it's starting to turn high grade. The deepest hole we've been able to drill on that line there ended in 28 m at 5.5 g or 5.4 g gold. Again, the deposit's wide open, both the low grade and the high grade mineralization. It will get much, much larger. I won't say too much about the met. It's simple, vanilla, off-the-shelf flotation.
We then take that gold and silver concentrate, produce gold bars on site. The Heap Leach for the low grade I've spoken about really unlocks that 1.5 million oz of low grade. This is visually what it looks like. On the right, you've got the grade at various sort of cutoffs. The yellow there, that's the sort of high grade, almost 1.5 million oz. That was based on that high grade underground study. It was only accessing 1.5 million oz of the resource. At gold prices of $2,500, the Heap Leach is economic, probably down to almost 0.1 of a gram. We'll cut it off at 0.2 g, which is there in green. By doing that, we access almost 3 million oz of gold in the larger operation, which is why it's a step change different. Exploration potential: we own the entire belt. We've got 600 sq km.
We own the underlying land. It just made things easier. That's the reason we're fully permitted so easily. We know landowner negotiation, don't have to pay for water, don't have to pay compensation. The pink blobs there are intrusives, think the gray mining. These intrusives are the source of the gold. You have these hot fluids containing the gold that comes up above those intrusives. The black dots are where we've drilled. We've got almost 3 million oz on 3.5 km of strike around those intrusives. They're all the same age. They're the same composition. They're the same rocks. We've got another 35 km of strike. We've done no exploration for the last three years because we've been locked up with no money. Come November, when we get a cash flow, that all changes.
We're going to have to be unlucky if there's not another Waliyan there, given the current resources open everywhere. A little bit about how we do Toll Milling. What I'm showing you there is the Toll Milling mine plan. Those four pits there in green, they're our Toll Milling pits. We start at the left, that Sanchez pit. That's a one-to-one strip, goes about 8 g. Really easy pit to get into. Same thing with Norte, that goes about 7.5 g. My Chief Operating Officer, who's here today, is probably at the booth, has driven me mad with this. If you look at all of that infrastructure, the way this has been designed is everything in the same spot for the larger operation.
The waste out of those first two pits builds that blue ramp that gets us access up to the Magnata pit, which is our third pit, so we can mine that. We've got a reserve pit, Sanderson, where if anything goes wrong, we've got another sort of 120,000 oz, or if the plant does better than expected, and you know, that plant's nameplate capacity is 400,000 oz. We've done our numbers based on 300,000 oz, so we may well be processing more ore. We then use the waste to build ramps down to get us access to where the tailings facility is, and also up to the top of the ridge line, the purple ramp on the left, so that we're basically taking off the top of the hill and we can start pioneering in large-scale mining in 2028. We mine that out over two years, we process over three.
We've also got excess dozer, grader, water cart capacity, so we build out all of those roads, that big road to the right there, that ring that goes around our Heap Leach pads. We don't need that for three and a half years, but we want all of the infrastructure ready, prepared, so that in two years' time, we're actually building a larger operation. The aim is to go seamlessly from 30,000 oz a year of Toll Milling up to sort of 150,000 oz a year plus when that finishes. This is just the cash flow out of Toll Milling. Pick your own gold price. Again, you know, we've converted all of the costs on a per-ton process. Probably the most important part there is how the toll treatment works. Firstly, it's batch processing. They run 75,000 tons of their material.
They then clean the plant out, they run 75,000 tons of our material. We're not having a fight at the end of three months saying how much gold's ours, how much is yours. It's typical sort of batch processing. We pay them at cost, which is about $75 a ton. Then there's a 30% margin on top of that based on recovery. We've assumed they're going to get better than 85% recovery. That's what our network shows. In our numbers, we're assuming a little bit less than that. You sort of take current gold prices, you know, $3,350. It spits out just over $150 million U.S. EBITDA. By the time we pay tax, it spits out about $100 million U.S. cash. The cost for the larger operation is about $250 million, which means hopefully $150 million debt and $100 million equity.
That is the strategy to be fully funded into becoming a 150,000 oz a year producer. Timelines, we're getting close. First blast in September, which is six or seven weeks away. First mining October, first processing November, first gold pour in December. Hopefully that gets you in that quarterly report. I think when you see that quarterly report with, you know, $15 million U.S. cash coming in in January, probably a curie rating event. As I've sort of gone around and for the first time in probably a year, because we've got a story to tell, we've done a little bit of retail marketing in the past two weeks. I think there's a general recognition the stock is really cheap, and you know, all of the retail brokers, I think, are planning on buying the day before we pour first gold. Something's got to give shortly.
In terms of the larger operation, we're well down the path of a Pre-Feasibility Study. Aim to have that out first quarter next year. That's where we can talk about numbers and show the value of the larger project. I think that's a key milestone event. Bankable first quarter 2027. Financial investment decision. We've had a bunch of debt financiers already wanting to wave term sheets under us to get a foot in the door. I'm not concerned at all about debt finance. The overall focus and wrap up: key right now over the next three months is getting focused on Toll Milling production. We want to be pouring first gold in November. We've got the team on the ground to do that. We've got some experienced mining guys that have run, you know, between them six or seven different operations in South America.
Western experience with those operations as well. In terms of the studies to show the value of the full project, first quarter next year. What we're sort of working through slowly, and we've got to be careful because we've got another asset there that normally is worth our current market cap. We've just got to be not desperate, run a proper process, and hopefully shareholders get a windfall from that asset sometime in the next six months as well. If we sell that asset for what we hope to sell it for, then potentially you can do something for shareholders. Thanks. I'm at the booth for the rest of the day, so feel free to come by and ask any questions. Thank you.