A very good afternoon, everyone. Thanks very much for joining us. I'm Nicholas Reed from Reed Corporate, and on behalf of Strickland Metals, ASX code STK, it's my great pleasure to welcome you to this investor webinar. Well, it's been a big year for Strickland, to put it mildly. It's seen the company announce the landmark acquisition of the globally significant Rogozna gold and base metals project in Serbia, and the appointment of several new high-profile board members to drive its next phase of exploration and growth. With a current resource of 5.4 million gold equivalent ounces, Rogozna is an exceptional asset, which has been delivering a steady stream of outstanding results, with four rigs working around the clock. The company is also progressing a highly prospective gold project in WA's Yandal Belt, where it has a proven track record of value creation by commercializing resource-level assets.
I'm very pleased to have two key members of Strickland's board and leadership team, Managing Director Paul L’Herpiniere and Non-Executive Director Dr. Jon Hronsky, join us this afternoon to step us through the Strickland story. Before we begin, a reminder that this webinar is being recorded, and the recording will be available shortly after, or if not, certainly by tomorrow morning. Also, a reminder to those listening that if you do have any questions for Paul and Jon, please log them using the Q&A tab on the right-hand side of your webinar browser, and I will put them to Paul and Jon at the conclusion of the presentation. Before I hand over to our speakers, just a couple of brief introductory words on each of them. Paul L’Herpiniere is a seasoned exploration management and project generation expert with a fantastic track record spanning over two decades.
He was the former head of exploration at Fortescue and a founding partner at Ibaera Capital. Jon almost doesn't need an introduction. He is regarded as one of Australia's preeminent geoscientists, and he has over 40 years of experience in the exploration of gold, copper, and nickel, a household name in our game. He was previously manager of strategy and generative sciences at BHP Billiton, and he's worked as a specialist advisor to numerous leading mining companies, and he's also played a key role in some very significant discoveries around Australia and around the world, so great to have him here this afternoon, so I'm really looking forward to hearing the story. I'm going to hand over now to Paul and Jon to tell us about Strickland. Paul, welcome. Jon, welcome. Please go ahead.
Thanks, Nick. Thanks for the introduction, Nicholas, and thanks to all the shareholders and investors who have joined us today. Hopefully, you find it informing. Okay, the usual disclaimers. I'll let you guys read that at your own leisure. Okay, so we'll just jump straight into it. So why invest in Strickland? So certainly, as a board, we believe Strickland is a really rare opportunity in the ASX gold market. We've got a very rare combination. Most junior companies would be pretty happy to have one good quality asset, but we're spoiled. We've actually got two, the Rogozna project in Serbia and obviously the Yandal project in Western Australia. Across those two projects, we've got serious scale. So Rogozna, 5.4 million ounces gold-equivalent in resources, and at Yandal, about 1,800 sq km, including over 100 km of strike on the main shear zone.
In terms of upside, we've got a lot of that. Serious target pipeline at both projects, and we've actually got a heap of drilled mineralization that isn't even sitting in the resources at the moment. Balance sheet, AUD 41 million. Again, most juniors would die to have that balance sheet. So we're really well funded. We don't need to raise capital. We don't need to dilute anyone. In terms of a team, we've got a great quality board, really strong technically, a lot of experience, a real strong track record in delivering value, making discoveries and pushing these projects through the development cycle and commercializing those discoveries as well. We believe Strickland offers a lot of value, so currently valued at about AUD 20 enterprise value per ounce gold-equivalent, and we have great leverage to both resource growth in the near term and obviously the gold price as well.
Location. Both of our assets are in mining jurisdictions. So in Serbia, we have an operating mine just four km away from our main deposit. And obviously, in Western Australia, we have the Jundee mine, which is owned by Northern Star, which is roughly 50 km from our deposits. And then there's Catalyst. So over the next 12 months, we're going to see a lot of news flow. We've obviously been putting out a lot of results since July. We were in the midst of an 80,000 m resource and exploration program across Serbia and WA. We'll have several resource upgrades over the next 12 months, and we really believe that over the next 12 months, the market and our investors will really start to see the value in this company. Okay, just a little bit corporately, you can see the board there led by Anthony McClure as Chairman.
He's got a long career in this space, a lot of success, as I said, discovery and delivery of major assets and commercializing those assets. Everyone on that board is actually a geologist. So even Trent, our CFO, has a background in geology. So very strong technically. At the project level, we have first-class teams, both at our Serbian project and Western Australian project. In terms of the corporate structure, a bit over 2.2 billion shares on issue. Current market cap is about 160 million. The top 20 shareholders have about 51% of the company. The top 50 shareholders have about 70% of the company. So it's quite tightly held at the top. And at the moment, we've got a real focus on trying to get more new investors in, including a lot of institutional investors. Okay, we'll start with the Rogozna project first.
We get asked a lot, what's Serbia like to operate and why Serbia? So I first went to Serbia in 2019 to actually conduct due diligence on this project. What I found was really a great place to operate. I've worked all over the world for the last 20 years, and certainly Serbia is one of the better places I've operated. It's actually an established mining industry. A lot of Australian investors don't know that, but following the recent development of the Čukaru Peki mine by Zijin, Serbia is now currently Europe's second-largest copper producer. So it's actually got a long history of mining in Serbia, primarily in two districts. In the east, the Bor District, which is a whole heap of copper-gold porphyry deposits, and then the historic Trepča District, which is where we're located, which is historically one of Europe's largest zinc-lead silver mining districts.
Long history of mining in the region. You've got all the skills you need, a really highly skilled workforce. The government has got really attractive fiscal terms, so 15% corporate tax, 5% net smelter returns. And then the obvious one is the other reason that it's so good is the geology. And on that front, I'm going to hand over to Jon to give his view on why the geology is so special here.
Yeah, thanks, Paul. So the deposits here are part of what we call the Tethyan Belt, and more specifically the Western Tethyan Belt. So the Tethyan Belt is the biggest mineralized belt on earth. It extends from Indonesia into Eastern Europe. It's like the Andes or the American Margin, but bigger. And it hosts copper and gold deposits, and in particular, the Western Tethyan Belt, which is really the belt going through from Turkey into the Balkans through Serbia, is the best part of that belt. And you can see from the slide that Paul's put up the number of new and significant developments there. Now, this is on the global radar of all the majors. They understand it's got a lot harder in places like the Andes.
So all of them without exception, if you're a world-class major gold and copper company, you're in the Western Tethyan, you're looking for opportunities, and we've had conversations with all of them. It's considered to be relatively immature compared to the traditional areas such as the Andes, and some of that is politics, obviously. A lot of this was in socialist countries, communist countries, until relatively recently. So we've already seen major new Serbia-based opportunities, Čukaru Peki, which was a very profitable discovery for the junior that found it, now operated by Zijin. When we drill down just one more level, we see that there's actually two belts. The one in light blue, which is copper dominant, and that's slightly older, and the younger belt in the brown.
This is a belt that's really emerged very strongly in Turkey in recent years, with a number of very large, significant gold discoveries being brought into production in Turkey. We're on the extension of that belt, where historically people looked at it as a lead-zinc belt, but what we're finding is that if you look the right way, you can find pretty big gold deposits in there as well.
I'll just add as well, Jon, just to really highlight that aspect of the majors where recently Zijin have come in and invested in Serbia in a big way. So they actually paid $2 billion to acquire Nevsun, which owned Čukaru Peki, which was a development stage asset. It wasn't in production. So they paid $2 billion to acquire that project and then spent another billion dollars developing it, and they've recently committed to a $3 billion expansion into the porphyry sitting underneath. On the other side of the belt, we've got Adriatic Metals, which is obviously well known here in Australia, fantastic success story, a company I admire greatly, $1.5 billion company that they've built over the last five years there. So this is the scale of the opportunity you get with these deposits in the Western Tethyan.
Yeah, and maybe make the point that Nevsun was a junior, and they made that transformative discovery at Čukaru Peki, yeah. Well, I might talk to this slide as well, Paul, if you're okay with that. And this is sort of trying to focus down on the geology of this area. So it's one thing for me to say, well, we're in the Western Tethyan, it's a very well-endowed belt, but what about our project area? And one of the things that's critical at regional targeting, giant deposits are not everywhere. They cluster in major camps, in major districts. And if you know what to look for, you can usually see the signs of such a major district. And what we're really looking for is the confluence of major structures.
And Paul, maybe you could point out to them that we've got this fundamental boundary we call the West Vardar thrust, and then we've got another really important feature, the Skadar-Peć transform fault. And these things are coming together in this Rogozna area, which is where we have this major complex. And we found probably now a total of five or six deposits or mineralized centers there. We'll drill down in detail in a minute, but it's really highlighting that within this province, not only is it a prospective province, but we arguably have X marks a spot within that province.
Thanks, Jon.
So in terms of the, oh, sorry, Jon, I was just going to say, in terms of the project geology, go ahead, Jon.
I guess these are the leases that we actually have, and you'll see that there's a sort of a central lease that has the known deposits that we found and our predecessors have found. There was some outcropping medieval mineralization probably here, veins, but because of the nature of our mineralization, where it's mostly concealed under volcanics, it's only been found by modern exploration by and large. A really important point that sort of highlights the scale of this opportunity, and I draw your attention to the scale bar in the right-hand corner, which is bottom right-hand corner, that's a five-kilometer bar, is that the magmatic system is much larger. What we found really is on one side of that system.
One of the things that is very encouraging in terms of exploration potential, if you look at the area that we've outlined and called younger volcanic cover, and it's only a little bit younger, but it's young enough to prevent the mineralization occurring at the surface. We see, thank you. So we see that as a major, major opportunity, and obviously the majors that have looked at this project have as well in the past. Now, we're only just starting to even think about that area because we've just had so much success in the exposed area, but I think it highlights the upside here.
Thanks, Jon. I'd also highlight here that historically there's been over $60 million USD invested in this project over the last 20 years. So almost $100 million AUD. Quite systematically, but a little bit piecemeal, and there's a bit of a history behind that, but there's been several companies that have had it, made a discovery back in the early 2000s. Gold price was nowhere near, obviously, what it is now. It was.
About 1/10, Paul, or not even.
The first deposit was too small for Phelps Dodge, then the next company had it. They did a bit more exploration. They made another discovery. Then they got in trouble, then Eldorado Gold had it, and so on and so forth, and it's really just now, over probably the last few years since the discovery of Medenovac in the north up here and the extension of Gradina, it's probably only the last couple of years that we're starting to have visibility on a critical mass here of mineralization that can be mined in a number of ways, so because we have four deposits, we get a lot of optionality, so you get a lot of optionality in terms of which of these deposits makes the most sense to potentially develop first, and then each of the deposits offers their own optionality in terms of the grade tonnage curve.
Do you go large-scale bulk tonnage, or do you chase just the higher-grade mineralization? Do you go with the deposits first that are more gold-rich? And then how does that look like in terms of life of mine sequencing? So you get a lot of optionality because we've got four deposits, and each one of them has their own optionality attached as well.
Paul, if I can just make one more comment on this slide, a little bit about the history of the project. This was a large company divestment, and the great thing about large company divestments is decisions are made to divest an asset that don't relate to the underlying value of the asset. So in this case, Eldorado Gold had a few issues, and they made a blanket decision, "We're out of Europe." So this was. They just wanted to get rid of this asset, and Ibaera Capital, who vendored the project into Strickland, were able to take advantage of it. I draw an analogy with Mongolia going back about 20 years ago when BHP said, "We're out of Mongolia. We've got this thing called Oyu Tolgoi, we don't care," and was basically given away to Robert Friedland and his group, and the rest is history.
These examples, they come rarely in our industry, but I think they're very precious when you get them because that's how you get the jewels. You get the jewels, the things that really matter, at an enormously low entry cost.
Yeah, and it's just rare for a junior to be able to get these sorts of projects, right?
Yeah, and I'll probably also just make the point that Ibaera only got the project in 2019. We could only start drilling a bit later because of COVID, and right off the bat, we made two new discoveries, and subsequently, in Strickland, we've already made a third, so it's there.
Okay, so in terms of the drilling highlights, so this year has been very positive since we started. Our first hole that we put out was the first hole we drilled, 149 at Shanac, and we made a massive discovery of a new gold zone, which we hadn't identified before. It actually had a lot of high-grade gold, the highest gold grades encountered ever at the whole project. Previously, Gradina had the highest grade gold in it, but now we've got a zone in Shanac that is the highest grade, gold-only mineralization. You can see a picture of it here on the right-hand side. So grades up to 20 grams, 40 grams through this zone. So that was an extremely positive start to the season. Importantly, beneath that, there were multiple additional sort of polymetallic, predominantly copper gold zones sitting in Shanac, sitting underneath.
And this has really validated our strategy for this year, which has been really focused around demonstrating the high grade and really being able to sort of drill more and more of it. So when we update our resource models, we can start to domain these higher-grade zones, and those higher-grade zones will form the basis for ongoing mining studies. So importantly, as I sort of said earlier on the grade tonnage curve, if you look at this intercept of almost 300 meters at 2.5 grams gold equivalent, good sub-level caves generally run the mining reserve is generally 2-2.5 grams gold equivalent for a good quality sub-level cave. So in the guts of this deposit, we are getting certainly thicknesses and grades that are consistent with some of the better sub-level cave mines in the world. Importantly, within that, we get these higher-grade zones.
So we get the opportunity to focus on these higher-grade zones, which in themselves can support a smaller-scale operation, something like an Adriatic Metals, a 1-2 million-ton type operation. Each of the holes pretty much always hits these sort of higher-grade zones within them. Recently, we've also put out a couple of really good results for our Medenovac deposit here. It's a little bit different mineralization. About 60% of the metal at Medenovac is in copper and zinc, with about 30%-40% gold, as opposed to Shanac, where about 60% of the metal is gold and 20% copper with the remaining zinc-lead silver. These are polymetallic. We do report them in gold equivalent, but that is because across the whole project, the dominant metal is gold. Okay, in terms of Shanac, we've really improved our understanding this year on the controls of the higher-grade mineralization.
We now understand that this central domain probably contains three-quarters of the high-grade mineralization. Essentially, in WA terms, you could view this as the main shear zone. These dykes represent fluid pathways that the mineralizing fluids pass up with, so most of the high-grade metal is sitting either side of this central dike. Our current resource footprint is 4.6 million ounce footprint, is just the southern part. We've actually got drilled mineralization to the north as well, but it's currently not in resources, so most of our drilling this year has focused on the eastern side of this central domain. In the current resource model, 4.6 million ounce gold equivalent, that's an MIK model, essentially a bulk tonnage model. There's no domaining of the higher-grade zones in that model. It's a diluted model, but through the core of that deposit, you get around 14,000 gold equivalent ounces per vertical meter.
To put that into context, the best WA gold projects out there, you'd start thinking some of the recent successes like Spartan, those sorts of deposits, you get up to 10,000 ounces per vertical meter. There's more metal per vertical meter in this than just about anything you'll find in WA. In terms of what it looks like in cross and long section, on the right-hand side here is a cross section. We do get vertical zonation in these systems. You get an upper zone generally in the volcanics. This is generally zinc-lead and silver-rich. Then sitting under that, we've got the newly identified gold zone where we hit 90 meters at 4 grams. That included a zone of 20 meters at 10. We've got the copper gold Šanac body that sits underneath that. Importantly, in between all this, there's still mineralization.
These outlines are just highlighting the current interpretation of where the higher-grade mineralization is. And you can see it basically sits either side of this central dike. On the left here, we've got a long section basically going from the southern end of the deposit through to the northwest. Along this central dike, it's quite a narrow view of only 40 meters, basically just this side of the dike. And it's really just trying to highlight, showing this stratigraphic position where we've intercepted this new gold zone, the 90 meters at 4 grams gold. There's only one other hole along strike in that stratigraphic position with over 500 meters of strike potential. So we have recently completed three follow-up holes. We've got one either side in the same stratigraphic position and one underneath, and we should be in a position to release those results in the next few weeks.
Copper Canyon. This is the one deposit that does outcrop. This was the focus in the early 2000s of Phelps Dodge. They drilled out a really nice copper-gold skarn, 30-odd million tons of shallow mineralization. Essentially, what we've got here is a nice sort of 50-meter thick blanket running about 1 gram gold and 1% copper, surrounded by a lower-grade halo. We've got 800,000 ounces in an optimized $2,000 pit at about a 2:1 strip ratio. Importantly, sitting underneath, a couple of hundred meters away, we've got a gold-only deposit, a distal skarn we call Copper Canyon South. We've got some historical hits in there where we've got almost 40 meters at 3.7 grams gold, and that's completely open as well. Gradina. This is a really interesting deposit for a couple of reasons. It's the most gold-rich of our deposits.
90% of the metal here is gold, so no need for me to report this in gold equivalent. Because it's primarily gold, it also has the simplest metallurgy. Roughly 88% of the gold gets recovered into a gold pyrite concentrate here running over 30 grams per ton. So really simple metallurgy. Really nice sort of 10 to 20, 30-meter thick high-grade zones. But one of the key things for Gradina is it actually hasn't been drilled near surface. So historically, the easiest access, we are in fairly rugged terrain. The easiest access was through this valley. So previous explorers, including Ibaera, just drilled from there. When you're drilling from that valley on an angle, you're hitting the body at depth. But there's been no drilling up towards surface. So recently, we've actually put in a new road up this hill.
We've actually just finished the first two holes, the first one coming through the bottom of the density anomaly and another one above that. We've also got all-grade soil samples at surface. So again, we should be in a position to report those initial results in coming weeks. Medenovac, as I said earlier, this is slightly different. Again, this one's more base metals rich, but we get some seriously thick high-grade zones here in a really coherent structural position along this northeast trending structure. We've got about 150-200 meters of strike on this higher-grade mineralization where we're essentially getting within 2-300-meter thick overall mineralization zones. We're getting 50-100-meter thick high-grade zones running sort of 4-6 grams gold equivalent.
Importantly, we think there's another two parallel zones of mineralization around Medenovac, one to the southwest, which is called Kotlovi, where we've just finished the two exploration holes. That one, we've got outcropping mineralization. We've got historical lead-zinc silver workings, and we've got a large IP anomaly. Along the other side of Medenovac, a bit off the page, we've got a prospect called Česme. There's a single old hole there drilled by Eldorado where they hit 36 meters at three grams gold equivalent. So Medenovac, the footprint of the system is massive. We think there's three parallel zones of mineralization, and we should have the early results back from Kotlovi in coming weeks. This is what it looks like in cross section. The most recent drilling that we put out, holes 157 and 159, you can see a really coherent zone of higher-grade mineralization.
Overall, average sort of thickness is sort of roughly 200 meters with multiple high-grade zones within it. So in terms of overall upside, I'm going to switch back to Jon here, and he can give you his thoughts.
Okay, thanks, Paul. Well, you recall from what I said earlier in this presentation that we see this Rogozna area as a major magmatic center with potential for multiple deposit types. The mineralization that you've all been hearing about is all what we call skarn style. And so that's replacement in carbonates. And typically in these systems, that occurs. The skarn deposits can be quite high grade, as we've seen, but they typically occur as a sort of outer halo around a core porphyry system. We see that at Grasberg, for example, where the Grasberg porphyry is surrounded by the giant porphyry surrounded by the Ertsberg and a number of other skarns. So conceptually, as well as extending these skarn targets, one of our big targets here is, could this host a giant porphyry?
Certainly, without mentioning names, some very large major mining companies have thought so and offered us joint ventures to target that potential prior to when Ibaera had it, prior to Strickland. The reason why we didn't is they just wanted to focus on the porphyry where we saw that our existing deposits were also very exciting, and we wanted to focus on those. But one of the things we've done, there's that central mining lease. And Paul, maybe you can just outline that, the one that historically everyone's focused on. Is that possible? Anyway, the central lease, right. So almost all the work that's gone on up to now has been focused on that central lease with great success, as you can see.
We're the first people to come in and say, "Well, what's the bigger picture here?" What we did, the first thing, as you would, you'd push out your geochemical exploration and found a number of interesting prospects. Now, some of the ones in the north were sort of known pits and known mineralization, but really excited by this Jezerska Reka and Obradov Potok. Obvious sort of Obradov Potok, obvious extensions to the known system, Jezerska Reka standing out by itself. Now, we drilled that last year, and we hit a porphyry system, the first genuine porphyry system in this project area. We've had David Cooke, who many of you might know. He's probably Australia's leading expert on porphyry. He heads up the CODES Research Centre in Tasmania. We had him on site. He looked at the core.
He said, "Yes, this is a porphyry." And we got mineralization. We got 92 meters at 0.4 grams. And what we think is probably the outer halo. So we're drilling that right now. And it's not just a gold anomaly. It's actually a really strong chargeability anomaly. So that tells us about the presence of sulfides. And our geophysicists are telling us that it's one of the strongest anomalies that they've ever seen. So yes, focusing in on now, you can see the Jezerska Reka prospect and how it really stands out, both in terms of geochemistry and geophysics. But you can also see that it looks like it's on a sort of corridor, an east-northeast corridor that goes through our existing ore bodies at Gradina, Copper Canyon, and Shanac. It's almost like mineralization is forming either side of that structure. And yeah, so that's the corridor we're looking at.
And it may well be that Jezerska Reka is the real center of the system. But we'll find out. We're drilling that at the moment. So Paul, you want to?
Thanks, Jon. Yeah, I'll just add, once we finish the first hole at Jezerska Reka, we're also going to put the first hole ever drilled into Obradov Potok. So this is obviously the geochem footprint here is similar scale to both the Shanac's and Medenovac's system. So this one, we're obviously also very excited. It's also got the IP anomaly. All of our current deposits where there's drilled mineralization, so Shanac's, Copper Canyon, Gradina, and Medenovac's, all of those deposits also have an accompanying IP anomaly. So generally, if we've got geochem anomaly, IP anomaly, there's generally some degree of mineralization.
Paul, can we just go back to the last slide? Because I did want to make just one point on that. You'll see that there's areas that are lighting up in the red and yellow colors as areas of anomalism. But what you'll see is the bit that isn't lighting up is exactly the same bit that I showed you in the geological map before has this veneer of younger color, right? So there's no reason why that area doesn't look as good or even better, arguably, than what we've got. It's just our current technologies don't see it through that, our geochem technologies. You will see that there's a number of features called ZTEM anomalies. ZTEM is an airborne technique widely used to find porphyries. And we've got a number of targets in there. So that's our next tranche of more challenging targets.
But that's the upside we have in this project.
Thanks, Jon. So currently, we've got one rig drilling exploration holes, totally dedicated to exploration. And the plan is going forward next year as well. We'll continue with that. So this is obviously a very target-rich environment. And by having that exploration rig continually to test these targets, we're very confident we'll be making at least one, but hopefully several new discoveries. Okay, so we'll stop Serbia there and we'll get on to the WAs. So obviously, the majority of Strickland shareholders have invested off the back of the Yandal project. And it's for very good reason. It's a cracking project. So when Ibaera first started talking to Strickland about a potential marriage or the acquisition of Rogozna by Strickland, one of the things that we, as Ibaera at the time, were really attracted by was the quality of the Yandal project.
Jon and I, together with our technical team at Ibaera, several years ago, we did a targeting study throughout Western Australia and really looking for sort of where could Ibaera potentially invest, what projects would we be interested in investing in Western Australian gold. Long story short, what came out of that was two projects that we identified, and Strickland's Yandal project was one of them. The other one was Apollo Consolidated's Rebecca project, which was bought by Ramelius. We really like the Yandal project. Okay, for those of you who might not know much about the Yandal, out here in the Eastern Goldfields, it's about 1,800 square kilometers of tenure. Last year, Strickland sold the Millrose deposit for about AUD 61 million in cash and shares to Northern Star for their Jundee operation. Jundee is quite an old mine now. It's a world-class mine.
It's currently running at about 3 million tons per annum. And any oxide resources that they can get their hands on are like gravy for that mine. So as evidenced by their willingness to pay almost $180 an ounce for some shallow ounces out at Millrose last year. So over the last 12 months, the team, the Strickland team led by Richard Pugh, have been really focused on the Horse Well Gold Camp up here. So over 20,000 meters has been drilled at Horse Well this year, with a real focus on trying to firstly improve the understanding because most of the drilling there was back in the 1990s and early 2000s, mainly shallow, mainly RC, aircore, RAB. 250,000 ounces of historical resources, with 150 of those at Horse Well and the other 100,000 ounces further north up at Dusk til Dawn.
In terms of geology, well, the team this year has really been pulling all the data apart to really understand the scale of the opportunity here. And I think I'll hand over to Jon again here to talk us through this.
Thanks, Paul. Look, I think the key point about Horse Well is we know what giant organic gold camps look like. They're always domes or antiformal culminations cut along major strike-slip faults, but then cut by cross structures. And Horse Well ticks all those boxes. We can see that it's a dome. We can see that there's northeast structures coming in, the same set of structures that are well recognized as controlling mineralization in the Jundee Bronzewing part of the belt. We've got the Millrose Fault as a major regional shear zone. We've got dolerites. We've got all the sort of rocks that we want to have. Probably one of the most exciting things, and I'm not sure how easily you can see it, but there's a line we can draw across this map. And south of that line, we've got residual terrain, which is relatively easy to explore for.
And then north of it, we've got concealed transported terrain. And the first thing that struck me when I looked at these data as well, isn't it interesting? All the known mineralization is south of that line. And I think that says a lot for the upside of this project.
Thanks, Jon. So in terms of the drilling this year, as I said, the team's really been focused on a couple of things, trying to extend the oxide resources along strike. So the historical resource here for Palomino, for example, is kind of just like that. So this year's drilling was trying to target the oxide resources heading to the north, but also drilling into the fresh primary mineralization and trying to track down and chase the downplunge extensions of that mineralization. So with these orogenic gold deposits, we are in a regional anticline. You do get localized folding. And along the crests of those folds, you get the development of plunging ore shoots. So the team has been really trying to hit as many of those as they can. You can see a general sort of relatively shallow plunge to this system.
And the great thing about it was the team's targeting strategy and their rationale and what they were thinking might be possible here at the start of the season. They used the rotary air blast. And particularly the early results that they were putting out earlier this season at Palomino were arguably as good as anything in the ASX junior gold space for a Western Australian project. Anything from sort of 10- to 15- or 20-meter thick ore zones, running 5-10 grams gold, as I said, as good as anything you'll generally see. And importantly, there's a lot of free gold in this. And we think metallurgically, it'll be quite simple to process as well. There's a very consistent theme across this gold camp. And as I said, because the historical focus was primarily on just shallow drilling, the same story here for Warmblood.
The historical resources of sort of 50,000-60,000 ounces were sort of just in these little zones near surface. So the team thought, "All right, let's test underneath those." And again, got really good results. Bit of a different style of mineralization to Palomino here. Here at Warmblood, you get more silica flooding. It does look like there is potential for thicker ore zones here. But the real key for Warmblood is the scale. We've got over a kilometer of strike. The average drilling depth along there is less than 100 meters. So the fresh domain, the primary mineralization here is totally open for over a kilometer of strike, both along strike and at depth. And we are starting to see some plunges to the high-grade mineralization here as well, sort of running through like that. Similar story, Bronco, slightly different style of mineralization.
Again, all of these deposits, you get really good oxide mineralization. We get quite a deep regolith here. But each of these deposits generally has multiple hits of sort of 10-30 meters thick as sort of 2-5 grams sitting in the oxide with a lot of supergene. And then sitting under that, again, we've got the primary. Here, the primary is a little bit different. And you can see here, 60-odd meters at just shy of a gram. It's potentially a bulk tonnage target sitting underneath this oxide zone. Okay, so back to the company fundamentals and really what we're aiming to do over the next 12 months. We've got a massive drill program underway, 60,000 meters up in Serbia at Rogozna. We've got another 20,000 meters as a minimum planned for Horse Well next year. We're about 15,000 meters of the way through the Serbian program.
We'll have at least three resource updates starting early in the new year. We should hopefully get Shanac and a maiden resource from Medenovac. Gradina will be in the second half of next year, and then we're also aiming to deliver a maiden scoping study for the project by the end of the year. At Yandal, the current focus is definitely Horse Well. We also want to start working on generating some new targets, particularly to the north of Palomino along that anticline axis, so we've got at least 20,000 meters of resource and exploration drilling for Yandal. We do expect we'll probably put out a resource update based off this year's drilling results, hopefully towards the end of the first quarter, possibly early second quarter next year, and so just to wrap it up, really back to that original question, why invest in Strickland?
Certainly, I hope you can get the feeling from this presentation. We've got two high-quality strategic assets. They're strategic for different reasons. Yandal is obviously strategic given the value of those ounces in proximity to an operating mine, plus the obvious upside that we've been able to demonstrate. Serbia, strategic given its scale. It's the sort of assets that majors want to build, and in the district, there's a lot of projects like it. Got a lot of catalysts to come from 80,000 meters of resource drilling and exploration drilling, so we'll have steady news flow. You've probably seen recently. We're generally putting out announcements every couple of weeks. It's creating a lot of liquidity. We've been able to double the liquidity in the stock over the last three months. Multiple resource upgrades.
So you'll start to get a real visibility over the next few months on what the scale of Rogozna really is looking like. We're obviously pretty confident about it. But by the end of the first quarter next year, you'll start to get a glimpse of that as well. Leverage to further discoveries. So with one rig at Rogozna, we'll have at least one rig at Yandal doing just exploration. So a lot of leverage to new discoveries. Both deposits, both projects are extremely target-rich. So we think when you combine all of those, as I said earlier on, this is a rare opportunity in the space. And we think we have a very clear pathway to create significant value over the medium to long term. Thanks. Nicholas, over to you.
Thanks very much to Jon and to Paul. That was a great presentation. We've got a lot of questions, so I will do my best to work my way through them. We had some emailed in as well prior to this webinar, so I'll try to get to those as well. But we'll deal with the online questions first. Paul, a lot of investors and shareholders have asked the question, and I would like to just sort of start with this. Just the share price over the last period, I mean, you're putting out fantastic results almost every week. And yet we're probably not seeing it reflected yet in the share price. Can you just give us your thoughts on that? A number of investors have asked that.
Yep. No worries, Nicholas. Well, look, we don't have our head stuck in the sand. We're well aware of that. We've done a lot of analysis. We've done a lot of analysis on the share trading and who's selling those shares. And what we can say is, from what we can tell, and the most part of the selling has obviously been in the last one month, six weeks. Most of it is from the bottom sort of 20% of the register. So certainly, no one in the top 20 has sold a share. So the top 50% by shareholding, no one sold. There's been a few that have sold out of sort of the next bracket, which is the 21 to 50. There's been a couple of shareholders sell out, but by and large, the majority of the selling is coming out of the smaller shareholders.
When you look at those holdings, when we go back in time, most of those shareholders have been in Strickland since the Alloy Resources days. Most of them have a very low average share price, typically around AUD 0.03. With the liquidity that we've been able to provide with this news flow over the last couple of months, a lot of them are just taking their opportunity to finally get out. They've been in this stock for several years, and they're saying, "Time for me to go." The other thing we have noticed as well over the last month or two is with the extra liquidity, there are day traders starting to play as well. Look, we're well aware of what's happening. What we're really focused on trying to do is meet new investors in trying to find new investors to invest.
We've got a real push as well on particularly institutions, North American, European institutions, guys that made a lot of money off Adriatic Metals. They understand the region. They understand these sorts of deposits. But it's just going to take time, we think, to clear out the rest of the sellers.
Makes sense. Thanks, Paul. Jon, I might throw one your way. I've heard your name invoked around the resource sector for as long as I've been doing this job. And I'm fascinated to get some more perspectives from you on how you see this opportunity. You talked a lot about the Western Tethyan Belt in a global context. And I suppose I really wanted to ask, how excited are you in the perspective of this?
Look, I'm very excited, Nick. I mean, my job, apart from things that I'm directly associated with, I do this sort of regional targeting for a day job. And what I'm always looking for are those rare major systems. And they do stand out if you know what to look for, but they're not common. And I would say Rogozna is one of the few that I've ever been directly associated with in my career. It has all the signs of scale and potential. And if you want to find more deposits, going into one of those camps, one of those districts is exactly where you need to be. And I think we're validating it. I mean, our hypothesis that that was the case, we've already validated with Ibera and now with Strickland by the new discoveries we're making, right?
We found three new and on the cusp of probably four new mineralized systems, I'm going to call them discoveries, that we've made since about mid-2019. And that strike rate just doesn't happen unless you're in one of these world-class environments. And that's an important point, right? It's not just that we've been here drilling out someone else's discovery from 50 years ago, right? While the Shanac discovery, I credit Eldorado with that. That's a good discovery, and that's a flagship resource. We're finding a lot of new stuff.
Fantastic. Thanks, Jon. Paul, next question here is a metallurgical one, so I might throw this to you. Investor says that the company's delivered impressively on the drilling in Serbia so far. In reference to the latest release about phase two metallurgy for Rogozna, does the approach reflect an interest in potentially pursuing an Adriatic-style high-grade mining scenario?
Yeah. Look, I think I'm on the record for saying that. As I mentioned, as I talked about in this presentation, one of the things I love about this project is the optionality that it gives you. So we see the potential for both the large-scale operation that if you're a Newmont or Zijin that they would want to do. It would be a sub-level cave. It would be starting off at five million tons per annum and probably going up to 10 million tons per annum. We see that potential. But importantly, because of the nature of these skarns where we do have these higher-grade zones within, we do believe that there will be an opportunity to do a one- to two-million-ton scale operation. Now, Adriatic's got crazy grade. So we're not sort of saying it's going to be an Adriatic-grade kind of thing.
But certainly, Adriatic Metals' currently producing or mining at a run rate of about just shy of one million ton per annum. We think this can easily do a one to two million ton at the smaller end, just chasing these sort of nice 10- to 50-meter-thick high-grade zones. But the metallurgy that we're actually doing is actually going to be testing both scenarios. So when we deliver a scoping study for this project, we wanted to define or demonstrate both ends of the spectrum. So we'll present an option that is a large-scale, and we'll also demonstrate a smaller-scale Adriatic Metals-scale operation.
Paul, can I just amplify one of the things you said there, and that's about this optionality because I think people need to appreciate how unique that is about this project. There are a lot of large projects around the world where someone will say, "I've got 4 million ounces. I've got 5 million ounces." But the only way to develop that will be putting $2 billion of capital down on the table day one, right? The reason why we're different is we're a large system, but we have skarn mineralization. Now, skarn mineralization gives you that grade variability, that range. Typically, skarn complexes are small. We're unusual that we've got large skarns. I'm hoping that's because the fundamental key porphyry that we have yet to find is also large. It's a reasonable inference. But even apart from that, the skarns that we have are large.
That gives us this optionality. And I don't think I could think of another system with sort of five million ounce plus scale around the world that has that grade variability and therefore that optionality. It really is quite geologically unique.
Thanks, Jon. Jon, I might throw another one to you. An investor here asks about the porphyry opportunity, which the company's obviously alluded to before, and you spoke to that in your presentation. How big a focus is that for you? And what are the sort of aggressive approaches?
We have a two-track approach to this project. Obviously, we've got our known discoveries, which are the Shanac style, and we're moving them forward into scoping. We've yet to discover the significant porphyry, though with our Jezerska Reka project or prospect, that clearly is porphyry style. We validate that. We know it's mineralized because we drilled 90 meters at 0.4 grams. What we want is 200 meters at 1% copper, half a gram gold, or like a Ridgeway or people are familiar with the Cadia system. That's the type of deposit that we're going for there. We're currently halfway through our second hole in that prospect, and it's still hitting the right sort of rocks, the right sort of alteration. The first hole hit the 90 meters at 0.4 grams. The second hole's hitting the right sort of stuff.
But we've got that vast area underneath the thin volcanics with these ZTEM geophysical targets. And at some point, we'll have to start drilling those. But I guess we're having to balance that with the capital we're putting into moving forward our known discoveries. But for me, I can see it as a big upside. And I think that the large mining companies who've offered us joint ventures on this before can clearly see that potential.
Fantastic. Thanks very much, Jon. Paul, there's a couple of detailed questions here. I'll try and just deal with a couple of them. There's a question about the rough breakdown of your quarterly exploration expenditure between Yandal and Serbia. Can you give us a comment on that?
Yeah. It was roughly 50/50, slightly more on Yandal, maybe 55% Yandal, 45% Serbia. So yeah. And obviously, all drilling related. In Serbia, we've got 25 people on the ground, four rigs at Yandal. We had at times up to 20 people on the ground with three rigs for the quarter. So we drilled over 12,000 meters for the quarter in Yandal. I think in Serbia, we drilled about 10,000 odd meters. So we were very active that quarter, but we do understand that it was a big cash burn. But importantly, moving forward this quarter, the cash burn will be a lot less, and then the first quarter next year, it'll be very small.
Okay. Yes, there's a follow-up question along those lines. So the announced drilling at Rogozna was eight holes or 5,700 meters or about 10% of the proposed 60,000 meters. Was more drilled and costed in the quarter?
So I'd need to check the exact results, but I think there was more hole. In three months, I'm pretty sure there would have been more than 5,000 meters, but I need to double-check that one. But certainly, as of now, we've drilled about 15,000 meters. So we're about a quarter of the way through the program. And budget-wise, we were pretty much bang on for the budget for that quarter.
Yep. Here's an interesting one. How do the results at Rogozna so far compare to your expectations?
I'll go first. In terms of just for this year's drilling, just focused on that, slightly better, I would say. This is the sort of project as a geologist, you can get a bit greedy. You start expecting two or 300-meter continuously mineralized zones running two, 2.5 grams gold equivalent. You start expecting those sorts of things every hole, including the 20, 30, 40, 50 meters at three to five grams gold equivalent, but particularly if you look at that early Shanac's holes, these last couple of Medenovac's holes, they're as good as we could ever have hoped for, and I think now that we've started drilling Gradina and we're trying to chase it towards surface, that could be a pretty significant outcome.
So if we can get Gradina going close to surface, that potentially puts Gradina ahead of Shanac's in terms of the potential first mine development because it's gold only. To come in off the valley there is only 100 meters. It would be a really easy one. So I think there's more to come. But to summarize that, I'm really happy with the results. They're probably slightly better than I could have hoped.
Yeah. Look, Paul, I'd probably amplify that. I mean, the question was relative to expectations. I have high expectations for this project. It doesn't disappoint. I think some of the numbers coming out of Shanac are a little bit stronger than what I was probably expecting. I think Paul mentioned this high-grade gold central core. And some of that is a function of getting a better understanding of the geology. I mean, it's such a big system. We initially drilled it on quite a wide spacing. And it's only when you come into the sort of spacing that's more typical of, say, a West Australian gold deposit that you start to see some of these things emerging in terms of central high-grade zones and so on. So yeah, probably tracking a little bit ahead of expectation.
Fantastic. There's an interesting question again here about, and I do want to cover it because I think you both have good perspectives on it. The question is around the process for choosing Rogozna compared to a project in Australia, and I thought it perhaps worth just recapping a little bit of the history of this asset, which you did touch on through the presentation, but just in terms of how Strickland came to end up with this world-class project, perhaps if you could both offer your thoughts on that.
Yeah. I'm happy to talk about that one. So when I was with Ibera, we first met Strickland last year in around September. And so shortly after they'd sold Millrose, they were cashed up. And the management team of Strickland, led by Andrew Bray at the time, were looking to acquire another asset. So they'd taken Strickland from a 2-cent share price to, at that point, it was probably about 10 cents. I think about 150 million sort of market cap at the time, 60 million of cash in Northern Star shares. Their management team were really focused on thinking, "All right, well, how do we grow this company further? How do we get Strickland to go from $150 million to potentially a billion dollars?
How do we make it, turn it from a good company into a great company?" They collectively settled on the fact that they thought they needed a second asset to do it, and so they were scouring the world looking for other assets. They looked at a lot of projects in Australia. I know from discussions with Andrew Bray that the majority of the projects they looked at in Australia that they could afford, when they got under the hood of the projects, they got in the data rooms, the resources that might have been 500,000 ounces or even 1 million ounces on paper quickly fell away when you started to interrogate them.
Basically, I've had over a beer many discussions with Andrew Bray, and he's told me, "Yeah, we looked at probably 20 projects in Australia, did detailed DD on about five of them, and they're all crap." Unless you want to go spending AUD 200 million-AUD 300 million for something that's got real guts and real scale and hangs together, forget it. So I mean, yeah.
Sorry, Jon. No, I was just going to say the comment I would make that's relevant here, and one of the reasons why I think Rogozna is such an attractive project to a junior or even a mid-tier company, is it offers the ladder to growth that other projects don't in the sense that you can get a big project, but if you need to find $2 billion of capital to develop it and you're a junior with a $200 million market cap, it's going to be really difficult to do that. What Rogozna offers is the ability, and you might find a partner that helps you with the $2 billion, but if you don't, it offers you that ladder where you can start, as Paul says, the optionality.
You can start small, you can build the asset, and you can actually build a world-class mining company on that asset because option value is the key. Option value is the key to take a small company and over time make it a big company.
Yeah. Thanks, James. Thanks very much. Just a couple of quick ones. Paul, will the drilling continue at Rogozna through the winter?
No, the current plan is to stop drilling probably first or second week of December, depending how each individual hole is going. We'll scale down the drilling as each rig kind of finishes that hole around that time. We could drill during winter if we want to. We've done it before, but without any real time pressure on us, we choose not to mainly because of safety. With the roads becoming icy or sometimes covered in snow, it does create a bit more of a safety risk. And also the cost. Serbia is a very low-cost drilling environment, but if we do drill during winter, our costs go up 30% just with all the extra kit and slower drilling rates and movement rates. So unless we're in a real hurry, we don't.
Okay. Thanks for that. There was an email question, which I do want to just quickly cover. Are there any results pending from drilling at the Yandal project? And while you're dealing with that, if you could quickly touch on the 25 program as well. Is the focus just Horse Well or more broadly across the Yandal?
So we still have the results to release from both the Great Western and Iroquois EIS holes. So we hope to be able to put out something on those in the next few weeks, maybe a month once we get all the results back and interpret the results. In terms of the plan for Yandal for next year, we're still working it out. We do see some real low-hanging fruit or easy opportunities, particularly at Warmblood, to extend that deposit both at depth and down plunge. But we're also really mindful that we want to identify and test some other targets. So to test the new targets along the center of the anticline, for example, we do need to get new heritage surveys completed to allow us to drill the new targets. So in a nutshell, we'll definitely still be doing some drilling at Horse Well.
I'd suggest probably mainly focused on Warmblood, and then we want to hit some new targets as well.
Excellent. We might just wrap it up with two final questions. The question that comes up a lot in discussion about this company and more broadly is Serbia as a jurisdiction. And I'd be interested to get both of your views on this. As a place to operate, as an explorer, as a miner, given what's happened with some other companies in that country, what's your view?
I'll start here, Jon. So I think I might have touched on it in the presentation. I've worked in over 20 countries around the world, and certainly, Serbia is in the top few from an operational perspective. So ease of operations, so good quality infrastructure. For our project, you drive from Belgrade about an hour and a half on a motorway, then about two hours on paved road, goes right up into the mountains where our project is, goes right through our project. We've got high-voltage power running through the project. We've got a really skilled workforce. It's low-cost drilling. Everything you want as an explorer, you're able to do. If I want to drill a new hole somewhere else next week, I can get approval next week. I don't have to wait three months like in Australia.
Certainly, from an operating environment, I find it one of the best places ever that I've operated in. Yeah, now, notwithstanding that, there's obviously been Rio Tinto has been facing some challenges, well, over a couple of years now, but certainly been coming back into the media a lot over the last few months since their licenses got renewed. We are in a very different situation to Rio. Rio, where their project, Jadar, is in the middle of Serbia's agricultural heartland, and it's not a mining area at all. But at the same time as Rio have been copping a lot of opposition to developing Jadar, Zijin have gone and built Čukaru Peki at the same time and without a problem. So they got Čukaru Peki permitted within 12 months and built within about 18 months. All the while Rio is facing this opposition to developing Jadar.
$2 billion project.
Yeah. We're in a very different situation where we are. We are in a historical mining area, the Trepča District, and we actually have an operating mine, Crnac, operating today four km away, so the local population are familiar with mining. Where we are is up in the mountains. In the footprint of our main project, there's not many permanent residents, so we're not needing to take over anyone's farmland. It's quite low-value farmland that is up there. It's just pastoral land, so we have a very different situation in Rio Tinto.
Yeah. Look, I don't have much to add to that except to say there seems to be a perspective that's maybe Australian-centric that focuses on Rio, and it doesn't look at all the companies that are actually actively and successfully mining in Serbia.
Good point. Well, look, I think we've covered most of the issues. There are one or two minor questions which we'll follow up with offline. But look, we've probably taken up enough people's time this afternoon. So I'll just finish up by thanking Jon and Paul for their time. It's been fascinating insight into Strickland Metals and two very interesting projects. And we hope to have you both back on this webinar again many times in the future. So look, thank you for your time. And thank you to everyone for tuning in. As I mentioned at the start, a recording of this webinar will be available on YouTube, on social media, through the company's socials and website. And thank you for your time this afternoon, and thank you for listening to the Strickland Metals story. We'll see you at our next webinar.