Our final presenter for this session is James Champion de Crespigny, Managing Director and CEO of Catalyst Metals. James is a qualified Chartered Accountant with extensive experience in capital markets, financing, and mergers and acquisitions, primarily in the mining sector. His past experience includes roles as a Director of a London-based mining finance group, Cutfield Freeman & Co, and with Sydney-based private equity group, EMR Capital. Thanks.
Thank you, Courtney, and thank you, everyone, for coming to see me present today. My name is James Champion de Crespigny, and I'm here to talk to you about Catalyst. I am joined today by Craig Dingley, who looks after our Corporate Development, and Sylvain Guillaume, who some in this room have termed a "jack of all trades". The increasingly famous Mick Garbellini also joins us from our Operations, and I'll show you a few things that Mick's been working on up at Plutonic shortly. Another fellow that's joined us has had a very material part of this announcement we made this morning, which was an update to a resource on the Plutonic Belt. Trident is the second largest resource on the Plutonic Belt, and today we released a resource of 800,000 oz at 5 g.
Andrew Finch has been a member of our team for over a year now and has been pushing the exploration team on site to take a resource that was about half the size it is now in the indicated area to double. Today we can say that we've got over 500,000 oz at 6.5 g in the indicated category. The reason that's important for Catalyst is for some time we've been talking about taking reserves at Plutonic from 1 million oz- 2 million oz and increasing gold production targets from 100,000 oz a year to 200,000 oz a year. This work that Andrew and the exploration team have been at for the last six months is a very important step to being able to start to demonstrate to people to put our money where our mouth is as to where we see that coming from.
As Andrew keeps reminding me, we've got over 800,000 oz here 400 m from surface, and we've got some attractive ounces per vertical meter there you can see on the left side, but the deposit is far from closed off. Hits 250 m away from the resource envelope that are running 11 m at well over 3 g is very exciting for what work we've got to go from here. We are a company that's got a sizable balance sheet, and we do see there to be more of this type of activity going forward. We've been able to increase the grade by about 40%. We've been able to increase, as I said, that indicated resource by over 100%. The benefits of being able to do this from surface we think are not terribly well known.
We've been able to bring resources that are unknown, pre-discovery, for $70 an ounce into that indicated category. Now, previous studies on this Trident project are showing costs at around $1,600 an ounce or thereabouts. You can see the margin we're putting on with also the discovery of these ounces. Today we released this announcement, and we do think that it's material that we've got many more opportunities on this belt. Catalyst took control of the Plutonic Belt only two years ago, and this has been a real lack of drilling. It's been 14 different owners over the last 35 years at Plutonic. Understandably, there hasn't been geological teams that have been able to focus for extended periods of time with ongoing budgets of the kind that we put into Andrew's hands of some 50-odd million dollars a year.
To give this a bit of context as to where it really sits, we are a business that has two belts. We operate down in Bendigo. The foundation assets of the company to Plutonic is very much the flagship asset. We're producing about 100,000 oz a year over at Plutonic and some $2,300. We've got reserves of about a million ounces, and we'll look to update reserves at, say, Trident going forward to see if we can hit that 2 million oz target that we've set ourselves. As I said, we've got a balance sheet that we think is a real asset, some 330-odd million dollars of liquidity and about 230- odd million dollars of cash with no debt. This is the Plutonic asset as it stands there today.
The aim of the business, the target of the business, is to try and take reserves from 1 million to 2 million and to take production from 100,000 to 200,000. We'll do that almost entirely from these five deposits. That's certainly what we talk about internally. We're operating from two of these deposits at present, and we're developing another two as we speak. That's really where Mick spends a lot of his time pushing the team forward on Trident, where we commenced the open-pit and the K2 Mine. The Old Highway deposit down there at number five is a recent acquisition. We will go through a permitting process there. Our projects team that has bought these other projects of Plutonic, Trident, K2, et cetera, online is yet to miss a permitting deadline. Old Highway is an acquisition we made in May this year, paying some 30-odd million dollars.
It's got a resource of 200,000 oz, but a nice high-grade core there of about 100,000 oz at 4.5 g. The permitting team will go and attack that deposit in the same way that they've done Trident. It's almost identical in terms of an underground sitting just below a small open pit. It's from these five projects on this tightly contained and therefore somewhat easier to manage belt that we'll aim to take that production up to 200,000 oz. You can start to see from what we've previously reported out there in the public domain, we're starting to put the meat on the bones of where we aim to get these ounces and production annual production targets. Just quickly flipping through where we're up to in some of the development, we have started the open pit mine at Trident.
It's a small open pit, or some might say a large box cut, and that's very much where Mick applies his day-to-day efforts. Just up the road from there is the K2 decline. Again, this is fast. We've got a team up there dewatering and rehabilitating the decline. This is another part of another project that Mick has to manage after he handed over the Plutonic East to Operations recently. We do have exploration along the Plutonic Belt, as I mentioned, and here you can see the Trident deposit hits, as I said, 11 m at 3.7 g. We've got 4 m at 3.8 g and 13 m at 4 g sitting well beyond the resource envelope. If anything, this 800,000 oz at 5 g we think is far from over. Historically, we've seen inferred resources increase with grade.
More drilling will determine as to whether or not we can repeat that last success. Really encouragingly for Andrew and the broader exploration team is this ability to drill from surface. In the last six months, we've been able to bring this project along in leaps of bounds. When you've got 10 drill rigs sitting on top of a resource like this, and you've got a balance sheet of the size that we do, the ability to move quickly we think is terribly important for our shareholders. That's not the only one. Baltic, it is a deposit. We'd love to say that this is our creation, but it has been well known by other people before. What we are doing is putting that much-needed capital into extending this mine life. This Baltic deposit sits as part of our Plutonic operations.
Plutonic is an asset that we fall more and more in love with every day. It's wonderful ground conditions. It's very shallow in nature. No seismicity, dry and wonderful temperatures mean that we really are able to push the tons quite aggressively. While the grade is a bit lower, what we make up, we make up for in economies of scale. We do see Baltic as being just another part of that puzzle, except we very much know the costs at which we can extract these ores from. From a risk perspective, we really are quite attracted to this area that exists well beyond our current mine life at Plutonic. The K2 deposit that sits up the far end of the tenement, some wonderful hits here sitting outside the resource envelope that we'll get to. We are currently developing down into this mine, as I mentioned, and more to come.
Old Highway, it's really an area that we've got to get permitted, but from an exploration standpoint, at least for the next 12 months, we do hope to try and expand this mine life that's currently there at about four years and see if we can take that out to the stated 10-odd years. There are a number of projects on this belt, this area here. You've got that Cow Hole Bore and Shed release that we've got a few hits on there, 22 m at 7 g, et cetera, that just need the attention and dedication of our exploration team that hasn't been focused on these areas in the past. What we're trying to highlight to people is two years ago when we took control of the Plutonic mine, we really did it for the exploration, but our last two years of efforts have been focused on operations.
We needed to bed down the business, we needed to repay debt, and we need to get ourselves in a much more comfortable position before we could tackle the development of these deposits. We've started doing that, and we've also started being able to give our shareholders the benefit of that exploration. Trident is merely the first step in finding what lies beneath in this belt. The fact that there's been 14 historical owners here, all of which have had varying relationships with the belt, we think is only an encouraging fact pattern for our geological team as it gets more and more comfortable with the mineralization. Bendigo, it's not a project we talk terribly much about, and I will just do a couple of quick slides on it.
The focus is very much Plutonic, but we've got down here the starting asset of the business, and we were able to get control of a processing plant not too long ago. That was paired with a high-grade discovery at Four Eagles that you can see on the slide behind me. We were able there to discover a 26-gram deposit known as Iris that sits immediately below 100 g there at Boyd's Dam within the Four Eagles tenement. The Maldon Processing Plant, we have an option to take control of that and some with a joint venture of Kaiser, who bought our Henty M ine down there and just reported a wonderful first quarter post their acquisition. The key focus of this part of the business is really to get approval from the Victorian government to go underground. The Victorian government is probably more in need of commercial friends these days.
As you might know from some of the successes of Southern Cross around neighbor Falcon Metals next to us, the Victorian government is trying to act a bit more like the New Zealand government, as [Sam] was saying, albeit to get it enshrined in law. There might be some way off. Fingers crossed. That approval is probably looking more likely now than perhaps it was in the past. We really would like to sit there and find another one of the Iris Zones. We don't think that is unrealistic because people might give us credit for in Bendigo. We have been operating down there for some 15 years. It is a joint venture with Gina Rinehart's Hancock Prospecting business. We've had a group of geologists that we really do feel understand this mineralization.
For those that do know him, a fellow director by the name of Bruce Kay, who's had a very storied career in the exploration space. He's been very much a driver of this project for a long period of time. That led to the discovery of this Iris zone at 26 g that lay just below the Boyd's Dam, 100-odd thousand ounces at 5 g. It really is only a short haul from the Maldon Processing Plant and these litany of intercepts that you can see on the screen that really help us track down where we think this mineralization could ultimately go.
It is important to note hits like 6 m at 82 at Pickles there or 5 m at 13 over there at this newly defined [cutting-edge trend] is the type of intercepts we saw back in 2015 and similar when Catalyst held this project before these resources were discovered and before Fosterville, our neighboring partner here owned by Agnico Eagle, really discovered that wonderful deposit of Fosterville right next door. That as a business is us. We are a business that's very much focused on Western Australia. We're focused on trying to see whether or not we can increase these reserves from 1 million- 2 million oz at the Plutonic Belt. By doing so, we hope that will lay the foundations for an increase in the production utilizing our existing infrastructure, our 2 million-ton processing plant to take production from 100,000 oz- 200,000 oz a year.
The announcement of Andrew and the broader exploration team today illustrating Trident's potential at that sum, 800,000 oz at 5 g, we think is a very meaningful step to being able to explain to people why we think that these targets are achievable. Thank you very much for your time.