Santana Minerals is moving rapidly from discovery towards development of the 2.34 million ounce Bendigo-Ophir Gold Project in New Zealand. With compelling economics, substantial cash, and early works underway, first gold is targeted for 2028. Please welcome Executive Director and CEO, Damian Spring.
[Non-English content] Thanks for sticking around. This is pretty late in the day. You have heard a lot of presentations, you have seen a lot of ounces. But for us at Santana, the message is simple. We have got the gold in the ground. We are building the team on the ground, and we are one step away from our final approval to get underway in late November. The title of the preso is Fast Tracking, and if you do not know about it, the government introduced this legislation in late 2024, Fast-track Approvals Act. Some detractors have started calling it the Slow Track.
But what it is best known about is a one-stop shop. It brings all the regulators together in one process that sorts out a variety of permits and conditions and consents that we need in order to get started. The act started with 141 projects over a variety of industries, but 19 of them were mines and quarries. About 23 have since been added, including a gold mine on the West Coast run by Rua Gold, who will be putting in their substantial application later this year, we understand.
There are 22 projects, again across all industries, including housing, that are currently being processed. But most importantly, 26 applications have been approved, including OceanaGold's Waihi North operation in the North Island. So we are a little three-hour trip away from here, Gold Coast, Brisbane, in Central Otago, about 90 minutes drive east of Queenstown. That is a lot closer than most mines in W.A. from this position right here. It is a substantial gold discovery that has been building since discovery hole in 2021, and we put out our maiden reserve of 1.2 million ounces in early 2025 or, sorry, late 2024.
That was subsequently updated with a PFS in mid-2025, and our current total all-in costs, not sustaining, including capital and sustaining capital, sits around AUD 2,200 an ounce at a gold price of AUD 4,950. So very conservative pricing. But the most important thing is that draft approval in the week beginning November 30th, so let us say December, and followed up by the final approval dates once all the conditions are agreed, the following month in 2027, January 20th, 2027. Lots of exploration upside. We are well-funded.
You will see that shortly in a slide. Obviously with the approval, there is a substantial potential for a re-rate. The project is made up of four deposits, but principally it is the Rise and Shine deposit. We have just over 2 million ounces in resources in the Rise and Shine. It now extends 2.4 km down plunge, 400 m or 500 m in width and up to 40 m thick. The key part about it is that high-grade mineralization you see in the purple, in which we have a very strong, high, consistent grade core about 150 m- 200 m thick. Just looking at some recent drill results we have published last week.
This is probably the third to last announcement on this current program, and you've seen some fantastic results there with 529, 21 m at 5 g. More interestingly with 530 there, we've got the 11 m at 8.5 g and at the top 26 m at 1 g. That brings that lighter pink out to extend that high-grade zone on that particular section. We're already growing the internal resources of this particular deposit.
What we see right down the bottom there is 11 m at 7 g, and that sort of indicates what we're potentially seeing is the feeder structure to the system. It's orogenic in nature, some dilatational fold that at some point the right sort of fluids have come through and deposited the gold. Just looking down a long section with north to the left. You can see it's been extensively drilled. You've got the location of that cross-section I just showed. It's a very, again, thick grade, high-grade deposit right down the length of the deposit.
It's cut off by what we call the Thomsons Gorge Fault and overlain by a different type of rock, the TZ3 schist. That is probably a normal extension fault that's ultimately provided the alluvial gold that the old-timers made the initial discovery in the 1860s. This is a completely new discovery, and as you can see, it's still growing. Our deepest hole there, 5,490, 37 m at 1.7 g, but includes an intercept within that of 13 m at 2.6 g.
For those budding mining engineers, this is a very simple mine development plan. Open pit, staged open pit, progressing ultimately to the ultimate pit with an an underground mine. Because of our topography, as it's shown there, the decline is located outside the pit. Current plans commence development of the underground in year five of gold production to bring the ore online in year seven as the open pit begins to reduce output.
Again, with that down plunge drilling, we've still got plenty of upside and further extensions to the north. That's the same view. It gives you a sense of what the country we're dealing with. This isn't pristine national park, not that we're allowed to mine in there anyway. This is freehold beef and sheep country in the hills of Central Otago. We have an Overseas Investment Office consent to purchase the land freehold, and with that, we nullify the royalties attached to those surface landowners. Here we've got a significant board consisting of our Non-Executive Chairman, Peter Cook, many of you would know.
He's joined there by Emma Scotney, formerly of De Grey and currently of Minerals 260 and a couple of other boards. Myself, a mining engineer, and I'm joined on the Board there by Sam Smith, who gave this presentation here last year. We are fully focused on getting this goldmine in production. With the current market cap AUD 520, a bank balance of just under AUD 180 million, we are well-funded for the next phase of our development.
New Zealanders, like Australians, we are pretty parochial. We have fantastic support and about 40% of our shareholders are New Zealanders, and that continues to grow even as we do private placements. The last one was in February. The base case. We did this at a very conservative gold price, AUD 3,500/oz , for initial development of just under AUD 280 million. The pre-strip we are calling out there is to lift the lid on that stage one pit. There is about 17 million tons, about 7 million BCMs of pre-strip that we have to undertake before we start exposing the ore. That is fine.
That gives us plenty of time to build the plant and get that ready for commissioning as the ore flow starts building from the mine. We are targeting about 120,000 oz a year through a mill of 1.2 million tons per annum. That is really building on some of those results you saw with that infill drilling. I expect that we are going to get grades well north of 3 g, if not 4 g over the quarters during those years. At that conservative gold price, our NPV is just under AUD 800 million, but that is at a discount rate of 6.5%.
I have put in there what is in it for the New Zealand government and for the New Zealand people. AUD 56 million a year , but it will be in Kiwi dollars, of course, over that 14 years. It was significant back then, but if you take it forward to still a relatively conservative gold price of AUD 6,000, we are talking government tax and royalty take that more than doubles. This is significant. In terms of NPV, that jumps to AUD 2.1 billion, and average EBITDA, remember those grades that we were reducing at the early part of the phase, but average EBITDA of just under AUD 370 million Australian.
An EV to EBITDA ratio of just 1x. Some of that is due to the low-cost infrastructure. We are well-endowed with good infrastructure, fresh water, hydroelectric electricity, substation only 8 km from the project. We have completed a bore field and pumps and pipeline of about 5 km to the project. That is virtually drinking water. State highway access about 8 km from the project. Local town about 8,000 in a district that has well over 30,000, if not more.
Of course, we are very near Queenstown. Compared to your remote Australian projects, we have no FIFO, no airstrips, clean water, and low-cost electricity, and we do have a skilled residential workforce. The permitting process, we are in the very last straight of this race. It has been going on since October last year under the guises of the expert fast panel, fast track expert panel, sorry. We expect that draft decision late November with those final decisions in January 20th. At which point, we should be in a position to make a final investment decision as our banking discussions are well advanced, and we expect to be able to make an announcement over that in the coming months.
It is also about operational readiness. We have a fantastic team based there in Cromwell. Management is in place. We've got a mining fleet that we've commissioned from Komatsu rolling off their production line in Japan. We've got a new exploration base already established, access roads, power, water, and we're really just waiting on this final approval to get started with the rest of it. People have been talking about availability of labor.
The beauty of where we live is we also have a fantastic lifestyle. That's why I've been there for over 20 years, but remained in the mining industry, and I know there's a number of others in the audience who have done the same. We've got over 1,400 expresses of interest for work. We converted that into a survey of just over 650-odd replies. 2/3 of those people either live within an hour or have access to accommodation within an hour of the project.
That's very important as we see pressures coming into the Central Otago area generally, without our project, around housing. But we're offering an ability for a lot of the people who may be FIFO out of New Zealand or FIFO in Perth or even out of here, to come back to New Zealand and have a fantastic lifestyle with their families. But we're still exploring. Although some field drilling is for mine development, we still have plenty of upside along strike and down plunge. We're getting very close to getting on the ground and drilling some of those out this summer.
We've added on that additional prospect permit to the north to take care of any further down plunge extensions of the Rise and Shine ore body. So we've got a major New Zealand gold discovery. We have a very keen decision that will be made for us late November, the first week of December, let's say. 120,000 oz a year by year two, and first gold late 2028. We've got plenty of upside without the current enterprise value and market cap. I think this is a project that if you haven't invested, you should be looking at it very closely.