Hi everyone, thank you for the introduction and opportunity to speak today. I'm going to tell you about Apollo Hill in Western Australia, which we're working very hard to make Australia's next new operating heap leach gold mine. You're looking at the hill there in front of you, and of late it's had a very exciting exploration and development history. Located in the heart of Western Australia on the Wiluna-Norseman Greenstone Belt, prolific multi-million ounce producers right in the heart of the most strategic land district at the moment for gold. I guess key points on that slide are good infrastructure, good gold infrastructure around us, 100% owned land, 2.24 million ounce asset right at the heart of 1,000 sq km of exploration ground. Yeah, we'll talk about Apollo Hill first.
Strengths on that corporate snapshot, I guess a very strong cash position for a junior explorer developer, and we're going to put that to very good use in the following year, both in terms of exploration and project development and speeding things up. Quite a unique register in that about 56%-57% of the company is now institutional, held in some very strong, safe, long and technical hands who've been with us for a long time and very supportive of our journey. On the right, we're working hard to narrow the gap between our project valuation and our project capability or possibility and the company's valuation. Moving on without further ado to look at the actual asset. All our ounces are contained within one single simple low strip.
The strip on that pit is 1.5 to 1 on that resource pit, and big selective mining units, 10 meter benches, which translates to low unit operating cost, very much a bulk mining proposition. I guess year on year we've been working very hard to grow that asset in a controlled, steady way. You can see there as we've grown it, we've also built the quality in in terms of the amount of measured and indicated. We've done three grade control programs there to bring a portion of that deposit into measured across the different geologies and metallurgies to underpin our studies and the work that we're doing. As well as its mining advantages, which really translate to economies of scale and a very low cost opportunity, the deposit has some fantastic strengths. All the gold is contained in quartz, quartz only, as grains in fresh rock.
When we crush it, it's easily liberated. When we crush it, it's great percolation of cyanide fluids in a heap. The grains are small and consistent, so they're leached easily and quickly, so low residence times on a heap, no carbon, no copper, no arsenic. This really is one of the cleanest ores you'll ever see anywhere. Again, translating into a much lower cost scenario than we see. You put that together with your bulk mining operation and looking at that in cross-section, there's a couple of things I always like to point out. There's three ore zones there in that pit or in those pit shells. One was done in the black, one was done in February, the blue one was done in July, so we've seen some substantive growth this year.
You can see we're running out of drilling at quite moderate gold prices of only AUD 3,500 there. Actually, on the pit floor, your ore zone's going to be about 100 meters wide or windows at surface. Of course, the white dirt there is the waste. I won't say strip ratio, it's a low waste to ore ratio, which really again helps with that bulk mining economics. Those things translated a couple of years ago into a preliminary economic assessment for a substantial strategic sized operation of about 10 million tons for 10 years, producing 122,000 ounces in a pretty elegant, not simple, but elegant heap leach scenario. I suppose since that point we've been working through our PFS, and you can see those blue bars there, which we've all pushed up now with about a 65,000 meter drill program.
We will have a look at some of the results of that, which have been quite outstanding in the last year. Cost, I think a couple of years ago one of my major shareholders had a look at those cost per ton for mining and processing and told me off and said I had been too conservative. I think that will stand me in very good juice today as we put our PFS out. I can stand here thinking I think we did our homework really well looking forward. In terms of mining, you know, in our belt, probably the best of the best in the big pits under a sort of traditional Archean low gold scenario, 5 meter benches might be looking at about AUD 5.50 a ton.
You start to see how those big shovels, efficiency of one guy moving the levers on that, really start to play in. All in sustaining costs there, looking very healthy. Really what this project is about is margin. I think at an all in sustaining cost per ton of about AUD 24 a ton there, and I think the highest gold price we used in our PFS was AUD 3,500, which is about where our resource is today. That equals an operating margin of AUD 21 a ton on an all in sustaining cost basis. If I can scribble on this, we have an AUD 21 margin times 10 million tons per annum equals AUD 210 million per annum free cash flow and rapid payback. I think that is what is very different about this business.
It is a margin volume business, and they're usually the most efficient, sustainable businesses in the world. I think probably the best example is there's millions and millions of Bibles sold at very small margins, but big volume. That is where the leverage is, particularly in these gold price environments as we move forward. That was the PEA. The numbers on the right were done at AUD 2,665 gold price, not USD, which has left us behind a long time ago. The numbers on the left, you know, this is really starting to look like a billion dollar project, very respectable payback IRR, and again a serious strategic sized asset, irrespective of any exploration potential that we have with it. In Australia, we're not that used to heap leach deposits, so I took the time to put some PEA comparisons up.
In terms of grade, scale, strip ratio, recovery, those numbers we looked at there earlier on are in the upper quartile, if not upper 10th percentile of heap leach recoveries globally. We have done our homework on our cost structure. We are really starting to see the gold bubble there falling into a very different PEA group on a global scale. I like to sort of make the differentiation for the West Australians who are perhaps more familiar with mill and CIL scenarios. What is our PFS looking like? I think three stage crushing circuit using high pressure grinding roll. The high pressure grinding roll was one of the step changes here in that it made a 10% kind of operating improvement in our recovery rates over standard three stage tertiary crush. I guess that is a heck of a lot of gold at this scale.
Improvements we've made since the actual PEA, I guess we've got a gyro crusher, we've got much better screening, stockpile management, two agglomeration drums instead of one. Really what it's about is about consistent delivery of product to our heap leach pad out here down the conveyor belt and onto here. The more control we can build in there, I think the more, particularly with exploration, we have more levers to pull to really make this thing sing better and better and really control what we put on that pad. Stepping back a little bit, perhaps gives you a bit of a feel for the scale of the thing. This thing's probably about 1.5 km long. The pit itself's 2.3 km long, not too different to the size of the last cut back on the Australian super pit.
I think you can see the little gold room and dilution circuit down there. Exploration, we have had a fantastic year putting some money into the drill bit, both in the deposit internally in terms of resource conversion to indicated and measured, pretty much all the way around the deposit. Wherever we hit it, we saw some fantastic explorations. I think if you were a mill CIL circuit, you'd be pretty pleased with some of those results, never mind a heap leach. One thing which really sort of caught the market's attention earlier this year was this little bit down here. If I look at it in cross-section, and this is about as geological as I'm going to get today, we'll draw a fault on there. You can see the blocks over here, typical of a big heap leach deposit, orange blocks, red blocks, pink blocks.
The blocks on this side, purple blocks, pink blocks, black blocks, the really high grade things. There are a couple of high grade shoots there you can start to see coming out of the deposit. Very different kind of structure and opportunity, some fantastic results, grabbed the market's attention and open, but we will have a bit more of a look at what we did. That was what grabbed the market's attention this year. I quickly stepped in and said, hang on a minute, market, nobody's been listening to me for the last few years. Here is one we found in 2020, which was fantastic, 54 meters at 3.72, right in the heart of the deposit in 2021. What happened as we put the infill drilling in, we really joined the whole thing up and the structure of this thing started to pop out.
What you're looking at really there is the kind of classic conjugate set geology. This is where I think it gets exciting because it tells you what we're going to do next. Again, a tiny bit of geology for you. One structure, the bright geologist follows it along strike, and we're going to probably find more. What we really started to see was structures like this cross-cutting. When that cross-cuts, we get a real blowout of the grade. I start looking and interpreting. I think there's another one through there. That structure popped out. There's another one through there. We join up. If I turn the lights on, by lights, I mean the drill intersections and lead drill intersections, we really start to see a few special things come in.
If I do that again, one of my favorites is down this structure. We've got some beautiful results to the north, to the left of that picture there. We'd never been able to make them join up with anything. Then all of a sudden, it's put a completely different light on the structural complexity. There are several new corridors, shallow, right within the mine footprint. All our exploration has been about ounces per cubic meter in a single pit and really pushing the value into that existing asset. We'll go up there through those lead intersections. We're drilling this right now. I'm delighted with the geology that's coming out of it and delighted enough to bring another couple of drill rigs in in the next week. Watch that space. Regionally, I promised you no more geology, but I can't help myself.
We start drawing the same patterns on these and we start to see the same sort of conjugate set at the district pattern. That is 1,000 sq km. There are 16 prospects we have found in the last few years outside the main deposit. All we have really talked about is this little bit here today. A couple of those are really starting to get some legs. Maybe 50% of that ground package has not had a hole yet. There is a lot of work to do here.