Thanks, Charlie. Thank you. Cheers. Hi, everyone. Just give me two seconds while I plug this thing in and make sure the technology works. Let's have a look. Beautiful. All right, without further ado, thanks everyone for coming to listen. What you are looking at there in front of us is our processing plant as defined in our Pre-Feasibility Study. Just to give you some idea of the scale of the operation that we are looking at, that is a 10Mtpa processing plant producing about 100,000 oz of gold per year. Despite that looking very real, it is our actual design drawings, which shows you the detail we have gone into. We are working very hard to make this Australia's next new virgin deposit, heap leach gold operation, and I am going to take you through this journey now.
We are located in the heart of Western Australia, on what is called the Norseman-Wiluna Greenstone Belt, which has produced historically about 44 million ounces. We have a central strategic land position in probably what has been the golden triangle of corporate activity recently, and with some fantastic infrastructure, road, rail, gas pipelines, and of course, a good workforce. We sit, I suppose we are now a multimillion ounce deposit amongst several other multimillion ounce deposits in that belt owned by major Australian gold producers and major global gold producers, and we are aiming to join that group, that very exclusive peer group.
Strengths on that slide at the moment, after a recent placement, we have probably AUD 150 million worth of cash. We have an excellent register in that around 55%, 56% of that register is institutional. Long institutions have been with us about four or five years, and we have been diversifying that position as we move towards production. Several big cornerstone positions there who have been very supportive on our journey and continue to be so. Irrespective of the share graph, which we see some of the volatility from local geopolitics, I think we are really holding our ground and pushing forward.
What is different about this story is all our ounces are contained within one single, simple, low strip, bulk mining, open pit, which means large selective mining units, which means low unit operating cost and a very efficient process from that big pit to the ROM pad and onto our heap leach pad which is, as we have just seen in the previous presentation, one of the lowest cost producing options for gold and silver globally. If we take a slice through that deposit, some of the strengths that we can see straight away, the ore outcrops at surface. We see very little waste material in the pit, so we are not paying big dollars to move that.
Some of the ore zones there on any individual bench could be up to 300 m wide, which means less geologists running around on the pit floor, less cost, and again, pushing that cost structure down. Probably one of the most efficient, simple mining operations you might see anywhere in the world. It is an absolute strength for that deposit. The next thing which is fantastic about Apollo Hill is all our gold in every instance, you can just see the little grains of gold there, which are gold and quartz.
There is nothing complicated. It is one of the cleanest, most efficient geometallurgies I have ever seen, which means the gold is easily liberated. It is easily digested under a standard heap leach process, just on crushing alone, so we do not have to grind this up, which is a lot of energy and again, cost to get the gold out.
When we look at what that does in terms of our heap leach recovery curves, we really end up seeing pretty high recoveries just by crushing that rock alone, low energy, and in a very consistent, narrow, and well-behaved band, irrespective of the rock type or the grade that we put on the deposit. Again, another efficiency. We bring those two ingredients together in that operation to really just produce that bulk tonnage mining, and you see a pretty flat production schedule there in terms of tons, in terms of grade, and it has an elegant simplicity to it. I suppose what you are really looking at here, it is a bit like base load electricity. We might not be your flash solar panels. This thing just chunks away mining at very sort of elegant, simple levels. The gold bars there are the indicated material.
The blue is the measured. About 86% of this resource is now measured and indicated, and we are due for an upgrade later this year as well. All that ore as it is dug up, gets stuck up on these heap leach pads. Those stacks there are about 10 m high. What you see on top in the pipework is quite similar to your garden irrigation system. We drip that weak cyanide solution through there, dissolve the gold grains that you saw in that core, and it collects into those ponds in waters, just like it would in any other gold processing operation in the world. This is absolute conventional processing and probably one of the dominant forms of gold processing worldwide, if not here in Australia. Very low reagent use. Those are the figures you are seeing on that slide, again, pushing the cost structure down.
When we actually look at that cost structure, we see a very respectable all-in sustaining cost. But the real kick is those economies of scale. That digger you see there is 60, 70-ton shovel. The one guy pulling the levers is six to seven times more efficient than he would be if he was mining smaller blocks, more selective mining units. What that really means is we end up producing a margin for every ton that we dig up at a gold price, which when we did this study, is now very respectable and conservative, about AUD 4,300. A pproximately AUD 1,800 below where we are now of AUD 20 a ton. Where this thing really begins to sing is this is a margin volume business.
I am going to do some terrible handwriting with my maths now, but AUD 20 a ton times 10Mtpa equals AUD 200 million per annum free cash flow. Then we have a big long life mine there, which in the PFS was 14 years. With our recent resource upgrade, we expect we are going to be able to take that a bit further in the DFS, which is due out this December. We have a long life, very profitable cash-generating business in front of us. To build the plant, it is about AUD 472 million out of the PFS. The important thing is with that cash flow, it is paid back in 2.3 years at that 4,300 conservative gold price, and perhaps a lot quicker at today's gold price. And some very effective banking metrics with around 51% internal rate of return there.
That gives you the finance, looks at that payback. This is just under a billion-dollar project at those gold prices. I suppose, producing about 100,000 oz a year for that core production. This looks at that gold price sensitivity, or as I like to call it, gold price leverage. That is today's gold price. If we draw a line across there, we are looking at a AUD 2 billion NPV and about 125% internal rate of return from that very efficient business. The deposit has arrived on a global scale. What you are looking at there in those bubbles, the gray bubbles are producing gold mines elsewhere in the U.S., other parts of the world, Indonesia. I suppose we are now sitting at the heart of that in terms of our grade, our tonnage, our ounces.
We have done our homework and our recovery, and most importantly, our local cost structure here in Australia. I think we are really going to enter a very different space to what we see, and perhaps provide a new dimension to gold mining and heap leaching in Australia. Production story over. What really keeps my heart beating is the excitement. The light gray pit, excitement on the exploration. The light gray pit is last year's resource. The dark gray pit around it is this year's resource. The nice thing about it is we have been able to expand laterally. When we have added ounces, which we did 600,000 oz in July this year, we did it laterally in the shallow depths. We did not have to go down.
We added a tremendous amount of ounces just from the infill drilling in the existing pit, which I think for the Definitive Feasibility Study is really going to keep the stripping ratio down. That is one of our biggest financial leverages is not paying to move waste. I think that really sets us up and there is about 2.2 million ounces now in measured and indicated on which we can base that Definitive Feasibility Study, which is a significant jump from the Pre-Feasibility Study. We look at some of the recent intersections, and you can see there on the screen some pretty high-grade numbers. I think there is five at 25, there is a four at 70 g, and one at 271. What we have found this year is we started to recognize these kind of east-west structures cutting through the deposit.
We were delighted this year to have found another one, not only found it, drilled around it, converted it, turned it into a resource, and captured it in the resource pit. Then we look at our exploration drillings, we step out, and we start to see some more intersections. What we really think is we see the potential to extend this system further north, perhaps with some much higher grades and some very different geology. I think what we're really looking is to extend that gold system to the north like that. To that respect, assay's pending on an air core program, an RC program, a diamond drill program, and we've been back in there again with the diamond rig after recognizing some really nice geology. I think I can really see the gold system growing. To the south, we're not done either.
Let me put these captures up. Where we have been able to do step-out exploration drilling, we've seen the system extend to the south as well. This, just like we've been looking to explore further north, again, is what we're trying to do with this gold system. There's 3 million ounces on that page in front of you, 2.8 million we've collected in an economic scenario. If I think about my vision for the project, I have one big shareholder who thoroughly has believed this is a 4 or 5 million ounce gold system from the start. I used to be a bit cautious. I'm absolutely very capable of saying, "Yeah, it is going to be," and we just keep doing the work. I think last year we saw some great high-grade shoots at Iris, where we started to see that.
We've started to see them again in the north. People say to me, "Is that all great? Could that be underground potential?" I always make the point, "Well, why don't we just extend the pit out again in that sort of shallow, efficient mining process?" Again, is the vision for the project something like that? Last but not least, to the south of us, all we've talked about today, we do have 1,000 sq km, is really just Apollo Hill there. We have been working on our regional land package, which is about 1,100 sq km, 100% owned. That's drilling results. There's about 16 prospects on there we've found outside. One of those is really turning out to be something quite special. It's about a 24 km air core gold trend.
If we zoom in a bit of difference, we can see there Apollo Hill in the north, and we're really starting to see a very substantial footprint in that air core drilling. Previous company, Sumitomo Metal Mining, who had this ground, did some deeper drilling under it, and we managed to pick this up off them maybe about three years ago. We've just had the tenement granted after a successful negotiation and mining agreement with the traditional owners, which also paves the way for the development of the Apollo Hill Gold Project. Where we see they've actually managed to drill under this thing, we've been delighted to see some very nice ore zones coming together and further there.
The nice thing about that deeper drilling, which is only kind of 200 m deep, is it's 5 km between those two sections, so tremendous potential in that gold system. I think perhaps for Apollo Hill or for Saturn Metals, I can see a second deposit, second major deposit coming together for us already, irrespective of that greenfields land package we have. For the project, we're kind of sitting here now. Our regulatory approvals are just about to go in. Our Definitive Feasibility Study, which I'm very pleased with progress, is only a matter of one, two, three months away this side of Christmas. Then we're into that. We're on that final journey and a very defined timeframe now towards production, construction, and commissioning in early 2028.
If we do our job well, we could be stacking those ores on that heap leach pad in late 2028. Along the way, we will keep those drill rigs turning, we'll keep that value-adding, and we'll keep that value engineering going to really maximize, I suppose, what I think is going to be a very special asset, and of global significance, never mind just Australian significance. I suppose we look forward to future discovery as well. Thank you everybody for listening.