Let's switch back to gold with Sam Smith, Executive Director and Chief Development Officer at Santana Minerals. Sam is a mining engineer with broad experience in open pit and underground mining disciplines. He has worked extensively for contracting and mining companies at projects throughout Australia and overseas, and has also held significant executive roles. Thanks, Sam.
Thank you, thank you. Great to be here. This was actually the conference last year where we showed that famous video of the Minister of Resources in New Zealand, Minister Shane Jones, who was running around the country, mainly Australia and North America, trying to convince the providers of international capital that New Zealand would again be open for business, for investment in mining, in the mining space. We were playing that video because we were trying to convince our own investors that our project, located in New Zealand, was short for development sometime next year. We were happy that the bill, the fast track approvals bill that the Minister was talking about, the instrument that would change the regime, got ratified into law in December. What happened after that, we could never really imagine.
If you missed it, let me show you a recap on how New Zealand has now claimed the number one spot in mining investment attractiveness.
This morning, we're announcing our new fast track consenting one-stop shop regime.
I am the Minister of Resources! If there is a mining opportunity and it's impeded by a blind frog, goodbye, free. With this legislation, mining will be turbocharged!
If you missed that table at the end, the Fraser Institute has now listed New Zealand, above every state in Australia, as the most attractive place to invest in mining in our region. I must call them next week and thank them for putting that report out the week before Digs and Dealers. Location, we used to call New Zealand the eighth state of Australia, which gave comfort to our own investors in terms of being able to get a project up and running. Now we are proudly New Zealand, New Zealand-based, because it's actually a point of difference. South Island of New Zealand, an hour away from Queenstown, 25 minutes away from the town of Cromwell, 8,000 people there. When you drive into Cromwell, you see mini excavators, civil earth moving equipment. It's a services hub to Queenstown itself.
It's an area that's steeped with a gold mining history from the 1860s to the 1930s, and now with our project, the Bendigo-Ophir Project. We are also 90 km away from the famous MacRaes Gold Mine. There it is over there, owned by Oceana Gold, and one of only two gold mines in New Zealand, both owned by the same company. You can imagine how important it is for New Zealand to get our project into production. We are listed in that law, that fast track law, as a project eligible for fast track consenting, which is essentially a six-month permitting timeframe from the point that we get our application in, which is a matter of weeks away. A great analogue there, because the McRaes Mine's been going for 35 years, a huge contributor to the economic benefit of the Central Otago region.
Just remember that tenement shape on that slide there, that's us there. Just remember that shape. It'll be important as we move through. There it is again there in the inset. The little red square there, which is the project area you're looking at, is only 10% of the broader tenure. Already we've made four discoveries. The main event is called Rise and Shine. We call it RAS. I'll call it RAS from here on in. In RAS, there's 2 million ounces at 2.4 g/t, and that is the company maker for Santana Minerals. The other satellite deposits are meaningful in their own way, lower grade, but nearer to surface, will be included in the mine plan at the right time. See that blue dotted line there? That's the Thompson Gorge fault line.
It's the major fault structure where all of our deposits either outcrop or subcrop, and it's the structural pathfinder to other discoveries. I'll talk about that at the end of the presentation. It's all about Rise and Shine, RAS. This is the RAS deposit looking down on it in plan view. What we're seeing there is a mineralized system that's 450 meters wide and so far has been traced 1.7 km down plunge. It's a beast. It's very big. The high-grade core denoted in that purple color there, running down the axis of the deposit, is about 150 meters wide, runs about 4.5 g/t, and that is what we're going to concentrate on mining. I'm going to slice it into cross sections now so you can turn it 90 degrees and see through it, particularly at cross section A. We'll step through it.
We're very proud about the continuity and the grade of this discovery of national significance. It's the most significant gold discovery in New Zealand in over 40 years. Slicing it across section A there, what we're seeing, that purple shape, that high-grade core, 42 meters at 8.8 g/t. You look at the drill intercepts next to it. You've got 35 at 8.5, 37 meters at 11 g/t. You put that into perspective, it's probably about three times the height, maybe two and a half times the height of this room and 150 meters wide and persists over a kilometer long. It's a gigantic sausage of high-grade material that is going to run down the middle of our pit. If we step 400 meters to the north, you see that shape is still there. The high-grade core still persists, still 30 meters high, still 100+ meters wide.
400 meters north again, the shape is still there. Very continuous ore body. That's what mining loves. Easy to define, easy to mine. It's flat lying as well. All of those intercepts are close to true width. Two weeks ago, let's look at it in long section. You get a really good idea of the continuity here as well. Two weeks ago, we announced more drill results further down to the north, down plunge. It's getting pretty deep there. It's relatively untested, but that's a story that's unfolding now. Put out some more drill results, 31 meters, 32 meters at 5.5 g/t. We called it the honeypot. This system is just getting deeper. It's getting thicker and the grades are still there. Here's what it looks like in real life, sheep and beef country. It's not the fjord land.
People think of New Zealand, the snow-capped Alps of Queenstown, Milford Sound fjord land. It's sheep and beef country, private freehold farmland. We've got agreements in place to mine. In fact, we've moved to transact on one of the stations. That's Argyle Station to the left of the screen at Shepherd's Valley there. All of that infrastructure will go into that valley. That's quite important. Just remember that as we step through. Essentially what you're seeing there, the gold bar is the Rise and Shine deposit at RAS, and that'll be the open pitable portion of our project. When it persists deeper under Shepherd's Creek, we'll go underground, and I'll talk about that in a moment. Between two valley systems, there's the blue dotted line, the Thompson Gorge fault line in the Rise and Shine Valley, where all of these deposits outcrop or subcrop.
Stepping back a bit, the location on the top right-hand corner there, that's where the pit will be, is in an area that's absolutely blessed with infrastructure. I alluded to it before. When you drive into Cromwell, you see all of those services there. We've got access to fresh water, great for processing, a residential workforce at Cromwell. We've got Wanaka to the north and Alexandra to the south, catchment of about 35,000 people. Some of those people are already servicing other local projects. Access to hydropower, low-cost power, green energy from the Clyde Dam. All of the stuff that you normally have to mobilize to a remote project is already at the doorstep of the project, which is one of the reasons we'll be a low-cost producer. No FIFO, no airstrips, catering contracts, no major camps. It's all right there.
We updated our pre-feasibility study three or four weeks ago. This will underpin the dataset that we take through to the funding scenario. We're very happy with the outcomes. We'll have a 1.2 million-ton per annum plant. That will give us 13 years of mine life at the RAS pits. We'll mine that in seven stages, starting at the south where there's near-surface ore. We'll actually be mining that at 1.5 g/t and funding the development of the project, vectoring in on that high-grade core that I showed you before, and that will last 13 years, mining it at 2.75 g/t. Who's doing that in an open pit at the moment? We'll pull a million ounces out of that open pit, and then we'll go underground. Largely mining it with 250-ton diggers on the waste, 100-tonners on the ore, probably a 90-ton triple seven-style fleet of trucks.
We'll go underground in year seven, and the underground mine will last seven years. There's a bit of flexibility in that because the twin portals, twin decline comes off Shepherd's Valley, so it's not contingent on the pit plunging down. We'll mine the underground at about 2.7 g/t, currently 300,000 ounces in indicated category that we've put into the mine plan. We're constantly drilling those down plunge northern extensions and converting inferred material into the indicated category. This will just go on and on. This will be the life of the project at RAS while we go off looking for the next RAS discovery on the tenure, which I'll talk about soon as well.
In terms of the gold output, top right-hand corner of the screen, the gold production profile, there's the 60,000 ounces I mentioned in year one where we access that 1.5 g/t dirt, which is company-making grade for other companies, and we'll use that $60,000 of gold sales to fund the development of those extra cutbacks. By year two, we're punching out 120,000 ounces per annum. We're mining the pit at that stage at about three, three and a half g/t. In year six, we have the option to scale up that 1.2 million ton per annum plant to 1.8 million tons per annum, but we don't have to do it. We've actually baked the designs into the flow sheet, so we have capacity in the crushing circuit, the elution circuit, and the leach tanks to make that decision should we choose to.
With that production profile, and there's the underground material coming in in year seven, we're making a lot of cash, $2.5 billion of free cash on that 13.5-year mine life just to get us started. It is just the beginning. There's also another 500,000 ounces of inferred material at RAS, and we'll work at converting that as well. In terms of the metrics, it's going to cost us $250 million to get this project started. I've baked in a 10% contingency, so we've put $277 million of pre-production CapEx into the discounted cash flow. We're producing gold at $1,842 per ounce, all-in sustaining costs. $300 per ounce of that is a Crown royalty. We see that as a win-win, and surely they're very keen.
In fact, I'd like somebody to do a piece of work on all of the projects in the fast track law because I think we're probably the number one contributor in terms of the economics to the government. On a gold price of $4,950 per ounce, this project today has a value of $1.5 billion. Our market cap today is around $400 million, so that is the value gap that you will see close as we get into development early next year. Time's running out. I won't go into the mine layout, but all of our infrastructure in Shepherd's Valley, that's why we moved to transact on the Argyle Station, process plant, tailings facility, waste rock stack, all there. In terms of that process plant, again, 1.2 million tonnes per annum, possibly moving to 1.8 million. This is the simplest part of our project from a technical perspective.
All 3 million gold. We're getting 93% recoveries overall, 30% gravity recovery, low reagent costs, great leaching kinetics, leaches in about eight hours. Very simple CIL flow sheet. We have to put this table into our announcement when we release the PFS, but we added price steps above and below the spot price, but we added a column to the left to show you that this project works even if the gold price halves. This is not a gold project that only works because of the increase in the gold price. In a strong wind, only a turkey can fly. This is a greenfields discovery that stands on its own two legs and is very robust. In terms of the schedule, we are weeks away from getting our application for our final consent in.
Once it goes in, six-month permitting timeframe, we expect to be in construction Q1 of next year, which will give us that 14-month build that I mentioned before. Fourteen months to strip the top off the hill, build the process plant, establish the mine. We're pouring gold Q2 2027. A bunch of early works happening at the moment. In fact, we let off our first blast two weeks ago, winning some quarry material to sheet some of the roads up on the ridge. We're widening roads, trying to bring all of the services that we can to the doorstep of the operation. When we get the green light early next year, we're ready to go. We've got a board and management that have done it all before. Peter Cook's our Chairman. We've got $47.5 million in the bank, so we're fully funded right through to a mining decision.
If you want this stock, you've got to buy it on market now. The number two question I keep getting is, do you think there's another RAS, another major discovery on your tenure? I just want to, I've never really spoken about this before. You see that gold square there, that's the project area that I've just been telling you about. What about the other 30 km of strike on this very fertile tenement? A number of other thumping gold anomalies or soil anomalies at Dans and Orkney that we're yet to get across. The last time I was there, I was in Thompson's Valley, beyond the project area, where there's 2 km of stacked tailings from the old timers. As far as you can see, river stones pulled out of the creek. Something major happened back there, Albert scale for that time.
That gold was bleeding from somewhere, probably from rocks like the RAS discovery. I think the answer is absolutely yes. There's much more discovery upside on our broader tenure. We're getting across it. The guys have just mapped another 5 km of the Thompson Gorge fault line. Remember, that's a structural pathfinder to our discovery. Looking for obviously those structures coincident with those soil anomalies. We have a very high-grade, high-value, nationally significant project that is being shepherded through the consent process by the government to get us into construction early next year. I want to make a little prediction. This project in years to come will be the pride of Cromwell and will reignite the Central Otago goldfield story. I know this is going to be true because we've had over 1,000 job applications in the last six months.
I met one of those applicants in a pub in Cromwell last time I was there. There was a truck driver driving from Wanaka two and a half hours to a neighboring project. She had to buy a caravan. She couldn't afford a room to rent. Two and a half hour drive to get to work. When I told her that I worked for Santana Minerals, she got all excited and said, "Sam, if you can get that project up and running, I can be at home every night and back to my kids sleeping in my own bed." That's why we're building this project. Obviously for our shareholders, but those people in Cromwell, every family in Cromwell, Wanaka, and Alexandra will either have somebody or know somebody that works at this project in years to come. Thanks very much.
Thanks, Sam.