Thank you very much. Great to be here today, and I'm excited to tell you about this project. It's the most significant gold discovery in New Zealand in over 40 years, and it's so significant that recently the New Zealand Coalition Government named us officially in their Fast-track Approvals Law that is aimed as a project of national and regional significance that's aimed at getting us into construction in the next eight months, so it's a really exciting time for Santana, and it's a really significant project for the country of New Zealand. I'll tell you all about it, so first of all, just to locate you, we are on the South Island of New Zealand. We are one hour away from Queenstown. You've probably, some of you have probably been there. Beautiful location. You can see our tenement map here. Remember that shape for the next slide.
We are 20 minutes away from the town of Cromwell, and we are 90 km away from the famous Macraes gold mine, one of only two commercial- scale gold mines in New Zealand, both owned by the same company, OceanaGold. So you can imagine how excited and important it is to get our mine into production to be the third commercial- scale gold mine in New Zealand. Zooming in now, you remember that tenement shape? Here it is here. This little red square here is the image you're looking at. And in this, what is that, 10% of the broader tenement, we've already made four discoveries. The most significant one, and the one that we're all excited about, is Rise and Shine, this shape here with 2.2 million ounces at 2.2 grams per tonne.
Post our pre-feasibility study that I'll tell you all about, we now have a Probable Ore Reserve of 1.5 million ounces. The other three satellite deposits are smaller, fewer ounces, lower grade, but lower strip ratio, and might have a meaningful input into our throughput, maybe even to commission the plant. Certainly at the moment, it's all about Rise and Shine, but we've got plenty of tenement. Oh, and this blue line here, that's the Thomsons Gorge Fault , a major regional fault structure that all of our discoveries outcrop or subcrop on, and that transects our entire tenement package. There's plenty of upside in exploration. Zooming into Rise and Shine now, this is plan view looking down on the deposit. The purple and red dots are the very high grade intercepts that you see going down the center of the axis of this deposit.
It is 450 meters wide. That's the mineralized zone. The high grade core is 150 meters wide. That's what we'll be focusing on extracting as we start this mine. I'm going to, and as you can see the Thomson Gorge Fault there, that's where it subcrops. So I'll slice it at section A, section B, and section C so you can see 90 degrees through this deposit because that's what makes this project work. So looking across section A, looking through the deposit, what you're seeing here is 40 meter intercepts. So this high grade halo you see here, particularly over to the eastern side, is 40 meters thick. We're constantly getting, I think the last hole we drilled into it was 42 meters at 8.5 grams per ton. As you can see there, there's one at 41 meters at 10 grams per ton.
So the thickness of this thing, it's long, it's thick, it's continuous, probably four times the height of this ceiling. So when we are mining this, we won't have a lot of dilution when our excavator is in the ore. It's really in it. We step 200 meters to the north now, cross section B. If we slice that open and look through, the shape is still there. Now 25 meters thick and getting deeper underground as we move to cross section C, very continuous and getting deeper. This will be the life underground of the mine. We'll start open pit. I'll tell you about that in a moment. If you look at it in long section, that's a really good view to see the continuity of this thing. Thick, high grades, all the way down 1.7 km so far. Notably, we have, it's in a schist metasediment.
We have two schist structures, the TZ3 in the light gray material at the top here, and the TZ4 where all of our mineralization is hosted, the TZ4 at the bottom here. This is what it looks like in real life. Sheep and beef country, private freehold farmland. We have agreements in place to mine. The farmer is incentivized, so he's keen to see us get up and running. It's rabbit infested, low value kind of grazing country. This gives you a bit of a view of the dip of the ore body. Oops. A dip of the ore body as it plunges underneath Battery Hill. So some topographical features to remember, Shepherds Creek over here. All of our infrastructure will go into Shepherds Creek, which keeps it hidden away from the local community. Rise and Shine Valley, where all of the deposits have been discovered.
Of course, Battery Hill, that will be kept intact and we'll start mining below the ridge line for our pre-strip. Locally, this is where it sits. This is a really important slide because this is a project that is blessed with infrastructure. A lot of the things that you normally need to mobilize to a remote project are already in place. Our project up here in the top right-hand corner in the Dunstan Ranges, Cromwell, a town of 8,000 people, a good labor source, 25 minutes away from the site. A lot of people that service the Macraes mine are driving in from Cromwell, Wanaka to the north, and Alexandra to the south. A total catchment area of about 30,000 people that are crying out for better paying jobs. Access to plenty of fresh water. That's meaningful for our processing plant.
It's fresh, it's potable, and we'll plumb into a 66 kV substation eight kilometers from the project, and that's fed by renewable hydropower from Clyde Dam that plugs into the national network. So it'll be a residential mine. There's no FIFO, no camps, no airstrips, no catering contracts, no travel costs. So all of those things mean that we'll have a very low cost of production, and that's what we saw in the PFS that we released three weeks ago. We saw a very high grade, high margin, long life, open pit transitioning to underground development story that is nationally significant to New Zealand. It came with an NPV of over $1 billion, a payback of under one year from production, and an IRR of 68%. Super high margins, mining at three grams per tonne. We actually had to cap the grade.
I'll tell you about that when I get to the open pit section, because in the early years, plunging down on that high grade core that I showed you, the grades coming out are phenomenal. This is the first time we've been able to reveal the mine layout, all structured around the Rise and Shine pit. We have a valley style tailings storage facility in the valley up here, fully buttressed by 200 million tonnes of waste that come from that pre-strip in this section here. So it'll be very safe valley style TSF. Coming down the valley, Shepherd's Valley, we have the processing plant. I'll tell you about that a bit later, 1.5 million tonnes per annum. We will scale it up to 2.1 million tonnes per annum towards the back end of the project.
And coming out of the ravine into the flats where we'll have our admin buildings and we'll have a temporary construction cab just to get this thing built. Some of the PFS highlights, again, a nine year operation. There's life under that. There's 700,000 ounces down plunge at Rise and Shine that are still in the inferred category. So they will be mined. And it's such a continuous ore body that we're pretty confident that we'll still be mining 100,000 ounces per annum thereafter. But for the sake of the PFS, nine years will get us started. We're pulling out over a million ounces, 1.15 million ounces of gold in that term, at an all in sustaining cost of $1,416 per ounce. So it's low. $340 million maximum cash drawdown.
That'll be what we need to finance to get into production, resulting in free cash flow after the nine years of $1.8 billion. The graph in the bottom right-hand corner of this slide shows you the two years. It's about 20-22 months of pre-production activities with the $340 million max cash drawdown. And then boom, in year one, it's all paid back. Everything after that is cream until we get to the $1.8 billion of free cash flow. In terms of our ounce profile, what we've done is we've brought ounces forward. We've got that very high grade core to start things off. So we're seeing 150,000 ounces in year one, year two, and 130,000 ounces in year, 38,000 ounces in year three. So around 147,000 ounces on average for the first three years. Over the nine years, it's 125,000 ounces per annum.
The underground comes in in year four, fully scaled up by year five, and we upsize the mill to take care of some of the low grade that we're stockpiling from Rise and Shine in year six. In stage one of the open pit, in fact, that's the next slide. It's mined in five stages. In stage one, we're pulling out four grams per tonne. So there's actually a stockpiling and blending strategy in the background to cap it at 3.5 grams per tonne because you can't put super high grades in a lumpy fashion through your mill. It needs to be stayed consistent. That's what we've done. We're mining over a million ounces in the open pits, typical conventional truck and shovel, 250 tonne excavators, 140 tonne trucks, and mining at an operating strip ratio of 12.5:1 .
But we're working on that. We think we can steepen up the wall angles, and we'll dial that in for the next round of study work that we're doing. Moving to underground, it's a longhole open stoping exercise, paste backfill. We come off Shepherds Creek, so we're not constrained by the limits of the pit. So that's why we can start producing underground ore in year four. It is 230,000 ounces coming out of the underground. And as I said before, the most important thing, we have 700,000 ounces in the inferred category down plunge that we haven't drilled into indicated yet. So the life of Rise and Shine will be underground once we've mined the pit and gone through the first six years that you see in this PFS.
Over to the processing plant, very simple single stage crush, single stage SAG mill starting off at 1.5 million tonnes and ramping up, as I mentioned before, to 2.1 million tonnes. Very simple metallurgy. All of our gold is free milling, so it's very simple, 60% gravity gold. The rest of it leaches in about eight hours. We're getting 93% recoveries, very high recoveries. Again, fresh water, access to fresh water helps with the recovery as well, but it's all about the permitting, and so the most exciting thing that's happened to this company since the discovery of this in 2021, so it's a relatively new discovery, is the change of government in November 2023, so the first thing they did is rolled out an economic reform called the Fast-track Approvals Bill.
In March, that was read into parliament with an ambition of identifying nationally significant projects. We're one of them officially, and helping them get into production as soon as possible. The ratification of that bill, we're being told, is before Christmas, so by Christmas, we're in the bill. We will have priority eligibility to submit our application to get all of our mining approvals in a one-stop shop within a six-month period, so we could be standing here in July next year, and that's our timeline. Next slide. With our permits, having been through all of our detailed engineering, we're going through financing discussions now, and all the banks are interested because it's gold, low risk commodity. It's New Zealand, low risk jurisdiction, and if everything goes well, this will be our timeline.
Submit the application in February, get our permits by July next year, pioneering to make way for the big equipment to come in, building our plant 12 months, pre-stripping another 14 months. Within about 22 months, or by the end of 2026, we'll be pouring gold. We've got the team to do it. Peter Cook is our chairman. You may recall Peter Cook from his days at Westgold . He built that company. He built Metals X . He's developed numerous gold mines. He's the chair of our company. Damian Spring permitted the last three mines in New Zealand, and they were all coal mines under the Ardern government. So he knows the landscape. Kim Bunting, he's the geologist who discovered Rise and Shine. Myself, I'm a mining engineer. I've spent a lot of time in contract mining as well. I'm on the board. Craig, our company secretary.
We're very well funded, AUD 30 million in the bank. We have AUD 30 million coming in through the exercise of bonus options in February. So we will be sitting here in February making our application for our mining permits with AUD 60 million in the bank. So it's in really good financial shape. So we're moving directly to detailed engineering on the back of that pre-feasibility study. We have a very high grade, high margin, nationally significant project that we're looking to get up and running. I keep thinking companies in other parts of the world, Western Australia, who have assets like these that already have a mining permit and already have a processing plant, have market caps in the billions of dollars, AUD 1.5-AUD 2 billion single project companies. Our market cap is about AUD 350 million at the moment.
So there's a value gap that we're closing, and we're closing it rapidly. Put us on your watch list. Thank you.