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Thank you. It's nice to be back here again and doing this discussion. As Jørgen mentioned earlier in the presentation, there's a very interesting comparison between the level of development of the mining industry in Tanzania to what we see in Ethiopia. I've worked in both countries a great deal, and Ethiopia is a bigger country than Tanzania. It has all the institutions and training facilities that you would expect from a country much bigger than Tanzania, whereas Tanzania has a much more developed mining industry with many large scale mines and numerous much smaller mines as well.
What I see as a professional geologist. I also did my PhD in an area 300 km further north of our license area, and what I see is huge potential. There's very little. We're the only people that have really done modern exploration in this particular part of Ethiopia, and it's part of what we call the Arabian Nubian Shield, which hosts mines all the way up through Egypt and into Saudi Arabia, some of which are fantastically profitable and very large. So we have 182 square kilometers of exploration licenses with 16 kilometers of mining license in the middle. We have a lot of targets in the wider exploration area outside of the Segele mining area, which are very exciting to explore.
We've done some work on some of those, but there's a great deal of targets that we have left to really understand and to really get our teeth into. We have great conditions on the exploration license. On the exploration license, it's valid for quite a number of additional years. It comes with the mining license comes with the ability to sell the gold freely. We have duty free imports on our machinery. This also applies to exploration licenses. We also have a very good royalty situation as well. If we go back to the Segele deposit, it's nice to talk a little bit about what this is. The grade from the mineral resource estimate is 22.7 g per tonne.
This was a resource that was put together by SRK in Perth, Australia, who are specialists in doing these kind of estimations and are world renowned and used by all sorts of companies worldwide for this. The indicated resource, which is at the top of the resource that we are just getting down to now in both wells that we've hit in the Western Winze and we will hit in the Eastern Winze, is actually 40.6 grams per tonne, which is one of the highest grades in the world, one of the highest concentrations in the world. These high concentrations equate to obviously very low operations cost on a per oz basis. Our scoping study has calculated an operations cost of $243 per oz of gold produced.
We are planning to, well, we are underway, obviously, of doing the underground mining of this. The initial mining will be done through the Eastern Winze and the Western Winze, which are relatively small tunnels going into that indicated resource with the very high grades. We're into the ore body in the Western Winze, and we will be shortly into it in the Eastern Winze as well. As Jørgen mentioned earlier on, we'll develop cross cuts into that, which will be the first production to go through the plant. But it's also very interesting to note that SRK produced the resource estimation that shows 69,000 oz. However, that estimation does not include all the resource that we know about.
We know that it extends deeper than 400 meters length going at depth, but we haven't had the opportunity to drill that out yet and create the estimate. We're very excited to see how much further the resource will continue. We've also got several targets in the adjacent areas close to the mine, which have fantastic potential for expansion. We also have very exciting exploration results from an area called West Segele, which is just a little bit further, just about one kilometer away from the Segele mine itself. We're looking at fantastic potential to expand the resource and to expand production and ramp up production. I'll come back to the possibilities of ramping up production later.
As an introduction to the methodology that we're using for mining, there are all sorts of different types of mines in the world, with different levels of complexity and different sizes. We refer to our mining as boutique mining because we're operating at very high grades, but the actual size of the mine is relatively small. We're using underground mining to access the resource. This is essentially a series of tunnels, which go down at an angle. The winzes go down at 45 degrees and the incline shaft goes down at 27 degrees. The winzes are joined up in between. We have two parallel winzes, which will be joined up in between by cross cuts, also referred to as drifts.
Then we'll mine upwards using a method called stoping in order to get to high rates of production of the ore. The ore is then taken to the processing plant where it is crushed, and gravity methods are used to extract the gold and also cyanidation. We actually have two plants at the site. We have what we refer to as the ultra small plant, which is essentially a pilot scale plant, which has relatively low percentages of recovery of the gold from the rocks. That's already working and it does successfully extract the gold, so we're very happy about that. We've operated it on the mineralization that we've hit in the Western Winze already, so that's very good news.
The main plant itself is able to operate at 10 tonnes per hour, with the possibility to upgrade it to 20 tonnes per hour with extra investment. This means that when we discover additional resources, we will be able to put those additional resources through the plant and then increase the productivity of the whole operation. In fact, double the productivity of the whole operation with very little investment indeed. If we go and look at the actual progress with building the processing plant, you can see some photographs here. The construction of the plant is completely finished. In terms of construction, there's only a very few minor amounts of cabling and piping, which is needed to complete it.
We have already started commissioning some parts of the plant already. This gives great hope for the future. Just to give an indication of how the system works, up at the top on the left hand side, you can see crushing circuit. The ore is put into the crushing circuit from the top and it goes through a series of screens and jaw crushers, which breaks it down from being about fist sized to about two millimeters in size. It's then passed into a rotating ball mill, which then crushes it down to essentially a fine dust of less than 70 microns. Our testing that we performed on the mineral resource much earlier showed that we can extract 76% of the gold from gravity.
As soon as the rock has been ground to a fine dust, we can then put it through a thing called a Falcon concentrator, which then extracts most of the gravity recoverable gold. The remaining gold, up to 97.2% of what's in the rock, can be extracted with the cyanidation plant, which is the tanks that you can see on the bottom of the image here. The final steps are carried out in the gold room relatively later. We've also, because we took a decision early on that we would be advancing this project with ESG in mind all the way, we've put in place a cyanide destruction system, which is a belts and braces approach towards protection of the environment.
Technically, it shouldn't be needed, but in order to be absolutely certain that we minimize our impact, we've put that in place. Then we can move on a little bit further and talk again. We can go back to exploration. As I mentioned, the plant can be doubled in capacity very easily. We've already put in place the foundations for those extra parts. The reason we took that, the reason we overdesigned the foundations and preplanned the design of the plant for doubling capacity is because we see many fantastic targets that we've been understanding for some time now. Some people who were involved in investing in the project earlier on will know that we were involved with Joru, which is a very exciting area. We can see that we've done a lot of drilling there.
Our understanding has increased quite a lot. We've got high grade intersections in the drill holes that we see. We even have grab samples from an area called Joru South, which has up to 60 g per tonne. Also, relatively recently, last year, we did drilling and bulk sampling at Gingibil, that we refer to as Gingibil deep and Gingibil surface. We have relatively lower grades at Gingibil surface, but these are in rocks that are very loose and can be easily turned into a mine because they exist right at the surface of the regolith profile. I don't have time to go into all the other exploration targets that we have.
There's even more that are not even listed here because we don't have time or space to put them into the slide. As an indication of how excited and confident we are of developing these additional targets, you can see that we've put the effort into preplanning the plant to double in size. If we take a step outwards again to have a look at the Arabian Nubian Shield and the real reason why we're excited about growing the company is because we exist in Gambela Province, in our little pit of Ethiopia. We exist in an almost unexplored area of Precambrian terrain that forms part of the Arabian Nubian Shield. Anyone that's involved in mining investing will know this is a hot topic at the moment.
You can see that up in Saudi Arabia, there's a lot of mines that have been listed there and also in the Sudan areas and the Egyptian parts of the Arabian Nubian Shield. There's a lot of large scale mines. There's even copper mines there and other various commodities. For example, the Sukari Mine is one of the biggest in the world and one of the highest production rates in the world. Likewise, Ma'aden in Saudi Arabia are producing a great deal of copper and gold. If we look down towards the south into our part of Ethiopia, there are two projects that are advancing very fast. In Western Ethiopia, there's a project by Allied Gold, which has recently taken over new management, new Canadian management who have a lot of experience of developing exploration and mining projects.
They are really focusing on this now. There's a lot of work happening with the Allied Gold project. You can see it's the one that says 2.6 million oz. Next to that, there's another one in Ethiopia called the Tulu Kapi Gold Mine, where I worked at many years ago, which has 1.7 million oz. South of the Tulu Kapi Mine, where it says 1.7 million oz south of there, almost no exploration has been performed. We're the only people that have the logistics set up and the geological knowledge and our own rigs and the experience of exploring and successful exploration in that area.
We're very excited to expand our operations and to use the revenue that's generated from the Segele Gold Mine in order to grow this company and to turn it into and to have the same story as we've seen with TRX Gold in Tanzania and the other successful mines and successful acquisitions that were made in Tanzania. This is a very exciting role for me and I'm very much looking forward to discovering more deposits in this area. Now maybe we'll go back to Jørgen for some final words. Thank you.
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There's a question about, you know, our ambition is to get to one and a half to two million oz. Yeah, yeah, we're still very excited.
I mean, we haven't, you know, even with the work that we've done in drilling so far, we're still hardly scratched the surface of the exploration license just in the area that we have now. You know, I said in the slides, one of the slides earlier that we have eight targets that are just close to the mine itself. Then, one of our most exciting targets, Western Segele, which is one or one and a half kilometers away from the mine. We're going to start drilling there very soon. Those targets in themselves, you know, have the potential to be very, very, very exciting. I'm not going to try to, you know, we have ideas in our head and numbers in our head for what we think might be there, but I'm not allowed to say because of the JORC code.
We have Gingibil itself, which has the potential to be a large scale project on its own. Those are just a few of the targets that we have in the 182 square kilometers. It's part of the reason I joined the company years ago because I could see the potential of the area.
You know, Segele itself, the mineralization when you show the rocks at Segele to a geologist, they look at it and they say, "Wow, this is really exciting because the gold just stands out, but it looks like a strange rock." You pick them up and you pick up a rock from Gingibil and you show it to any geologist who's experienced gold and they'll say, "Yeah, this is the kind of rock that has a large scale gold deposit in it. It's recognizable from other deposits that you see in other parts of the world." So we're very excited about that. I'm really excited to see what happens and what we find in the future.
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Yeah, so depending on the mineralization that we find, often you find slight variations in the type of rock and the other minerals that are around the gold. What that would mean is if we saw a big change in the mineralization at a new target, that might mean that there was a slightly reduced recovery of the gold in our project.
But also we've, in the same way that we've pre-planned it for expansion, we've also pre-planned it to add on to possibly add on flotation stages like flotation that can deal with those sort of problems. But in the end of the day, I mean, if we did discover a, you know, 1.5 or 2 million oz deposit, that would probably require a whole new, you know, sometime several years in the future that might that would require a much bigger plant.
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