Welcome to the third quarter presentation for Akobo Minerals. Good morning from Addis Ababa and Oslo and Trondheim. Today, we will take you through the third quarter. Together with me, I have Helge Rushfeldt, our new Head of Mining Operations. He's in Trondheim. He will go through his area of expertise, which is mining and processing plant. We have also, as usual, Dr. Matt Jackson with us, our Chief Operating Officer. He has lately taken over the overall responsibility for exploration and the development of the exploration. This is his field of expertise, so we will talk a bit more about what we think about exploration going forward, and how we can build value over time through exploration. But first, I'll give a short introduction to the company.
We'll go through some of the highlights of the quarter and what's happened after the quarter, and at the end of the presentation, we'll have a Q&A session, and we'll also show a small video from site. For those interested, we'll finish off with that. So, I think we'll just start and go to page number four. Okay. Akobo Minerals, Scandinavian-based Ethiopian gold exploration company. We have been working in Ethiopia for the last 13 years. We're now listed on the stock exchange in Oslo. We are trading on the OTC in the US. We have some 3,000 shareholders, majority owned by Norwegian investors, so the corporate foundation is solid. We have close to 200 employees these days, and a solid management in Ethiopia that works day and night to move this project forward.
So we have the capacity to grow, and we have the capacity to expand in different directions. We'll talk more about that later. So again, we have a strong local foothold. We have been working closely with the local community. We are working hard to do it right. This is an important part of our business. We do have also developed a very cost-effective operation. It's a low overhead cost, and we do have a very flexible operation in Ethiopia. And we expect to fund continued exploration and then development with cash flow now from our Segele mine and the boutique mining that we are developing. So though Ethiopia, we only have one asset in Ethiopia so far, and we do have the ambition to become a leading player in the Ethiopian mining industry over time. Next slides, please.
So looking more into the project and where we are, we do have significant exploration and high margin production here, gold production potential. For those not familiar with the project, you can see the map here on the right-hand side. We're located close to the South Sudan border. It's about 700 km from Addis. We have a tarmac road all the way now, we have our own airstrip. It's easy access to, to the area and to the site. It's a very nice and beautiful area to work in. Very calm. We have never had any incidents the last 13 years, working there. Despite several conflicts in other areas in Ethiopia, we, we have not had any issues so far, and we're not expecting that either going forward. So very nice place.
We have what we need, and we have the most important thing, which is a mineral resource estimated by SRK, which is quite astonishing. It's a small resource, but still it's a very high grade that you can see here, 41,000 oz at 40.6 g per ton, which is the indicated part, and the total inferred and indicated, close to 69,000 oz, with an average of 22.7 g per ton. So for those familiar with the industry, and of course, those not familiar, you know that you can run a mine at 1.5, 1, depending on up to 2, 3. That's the normal industry average, so we're way above that. And the mine is still open at that, and we do have a lot of near-term, near mine targets to explore.
Actually, today, we got some very exciting results. Helge will talk more about it. We have done the first production from the Segele mine and the ore body. We reached the ore body last week, and we'll be producing from it as we go on, go forward now. So the estimated free cash flow is still approximately $50 million from the Segele mine. It's based on the current resource estimate and the scoping study. You can see the details why we managed to get such a good cash flow out of this small resource is due to the high grade, which again, gives us a very low all-in cost. Matt will talk about more about the exploration side, but we do have an ambition to establish a 1 million-ounce potential—a 1 million-ounce deposit.
We have several targets identified, and we're also doing some changes to our exploration, philosophy, and strategy. Let's take the next slide. Thank you. For us, it's all about doing it right. It's a part of, it's a part of our DNA and the way we work, all the way from, from the board and our shareholders, investors, down to, down to operations on site and camp. These are just a few of the projects we are working on, highlighted here, but our ESG team is also heavily involved in the general development of the company. They're working closely with the processing plant team to make sure we have good plans for handling the cyanide. We do have monitoring plans, so our ESG efforts goes into all parts of the organization.
So these are just some of the projects that you can look at here. We've started a tree nursery. We've been building eco-brick houses. We are putting up a small solar grain mill for the Women's Association. We just got some results today. You can see a few bricks here. They're made from the Hydraform equipment that we have at site. We have people now being trained there at site. This is a very interesting technology that we're working on with the local community. And what we're looking at here, actually, the three bricks in the picture, bottom picture here is made from the tailings that we've had from the first production. So we intend to use a lot of the tailings into making bricks, which will be a good...
It will be a good project, for the community and will be very good for us also to be able to reuse the tailings and not continue, piling up. So that's, that's part of doing it right, and we're very proud. We've been awarded the ESG Nature Award in Indaba. We've been runner-up two times at Mines and Money for ESG Explorer of the Year, so we're very happy to, to continue developing this program. Go to the next slide, and thank you. So for the key events. Q3 is not that interesting, anymore. Most focus is on what's been happening after that. However, I will say that we did have a good visit to site here the other day with MKS PAMP.
So we have a good, a good plan now in place for how we will transport the gold out and sell it, refine it, and then sell it, and get the money back into the company. So that was a, that was a very good trip that we had. So we're looking forward to the first trip with the MKS and see what can happen there. I just added this small teaser picture here, Helge will talk more about that. This is fresh out from site today. It shows the last production and some of the interesting stuff happening at site. So when it comes to what's been happening after the third quarter, obviously, the gold price is all-time high, which fits well with the first production from the Segele Mine.
We have been working a lot lately on the mining side, to not only take over the operations from IW Mining, which went very well, but we've also worked very much on rectifying and fixing errors made by them, unfortunately. So our strategy initially, of course, was to reduce risk as much as possible when it came to mining, and that's why we went for the contract miner. Unfortunately, that got us into a very, well, not the place we wanted to be, and they missed completely on the trajectory. So Helge will talk a bit more about that, but it's been fixed, and we hit the ore body here last week, and we're extremely happy with that.
That, of course, cost us a lot of delays, which will have an impact on our funding strategy. As you can see here, I have, we have here mentioned that we have started a funding dialogue. We potentially both see if we need advisors or if we, or if we, do this on our own. But there is a funding need that we are looking to secure up to $5 million. I assume most of this will come from existing investors, but we will get back to that once we have more, more information. We do have initiated a cost savings program, which is only natural in the situation we are in. We're working very hard now on some of the main key challenges that we've had, which is related to procurement.
It's not easy to operate in Ethiopia these days. There's high inflation and difficulty sourcing just normal consumables and spares in Ethiopia. However, I think going forward with the latest agreement that Ethiopia did with IMF and some of their partners, they've at least gotten some relief on repaying their international debt for the next two years. And we also see the new governor of the National Bank of Ethiopia working hard to move the economy forward, make it more open, inviting more investors, and doing the right things. So we're very positive that this will make changes to the economy going forward.
... Then I think we'll move on to Helge, to take us through more on the operation side and mining side. So if we can go to that section.
Thank you, Jørgen. Yes, as was said now, we have reached gold at last. The first gold was extracted from the mine called the Western Winze on November 27. So about a week ago. You can see the picture on the right here with the absolute first gold that we got out from the mine. The ore was also intersected exactly where we had expected it to be, so that proves that the resource is where we expected it to be, and our calculations have been correct. This gold has been then transported to the what we call the ultra-small plant, which is a pilot plant for the first test production.
We did have, as Jørgen mentioned, quite a significant setback in mining in this Western Winze. And it actually took, yeah, around two months to fully recover from what was basically an angle error on the inclination of the shaft going down. It meant a lot of extra excavation, securing, and ripping to get back on track. But we are now back on track. And we have now moved from contract mining to owner-operating mining, with a very fully functional and highly competent team. And we are now running the whole mining operation ourselves, and it is going very well. We do, of course, have challenges.
One of the things that was mentioned is the procurement issues. So just getting ordinary consumable spare parts, et cetera, can be quite hard. So that poses a challenge to us. But I will say that this is a challenge we are set to solve, and we are getting better at it as we go along. It is not easy to operate in Ethiopia, but if it's easy, everybody would do it, and we are not in it for the easy, but we are in it to learn, and to conquer, and to get better at it. The instability of the surface rock has been also quite a challenge.
Almost down to 15 m, 20 m, it's highly eroded, and that poses safety concerns and can lead to rock slides, et cetera. It means we have to safeguard and secure much more than we had thought. But again, we are on top of that, and we are getting better at understanding the formations. Also, the amount of water is one of those things that has been quite much more than we expected. And also, the weather patterns have changed, so that normally there's no rains in November and December, whereas this November and December, we have had very heavy rains. So this is a change from the ordinary. And when it rains, it really pours. So that typically would lead to flooding and things like that.
But we are learning from what we're doing, and our pumping capacity and everything is going to be built up to be able to hold this in balance. Yeah, we have reached now 55 m in the Incline Shaft, which is the main shaft, which is going to produce from in the future. The Western Winze is down to 46 m, where we have reached gold, and the Eastern Winze, which will run more or less parallel with the Western Winze and help us with production, is now down to 31 m. Okay, next. This is just a schematic illustration of kind of what went wrong with the previous mine contractor. So the red lines indicate how it looked like from when we took over.
Why this happened, it's a long and complicated story, and I'm not sure we would ever get a really good answer to that. But it is a very big problem for us, where we should have had a normal 45-degree going straight down; it suddenly just straightened out and went almost horizontal. And there was a lot of correcting to do to get back on track. We are now fully back on track, and we have reached... What you see now is the first part of this ore body, which is the orange color there. So our shaft is down to what you see there, so it's the top part of the gold ore.
So now we are in the ore, and we are starting to mine in the ore. Next. This is the first gold day, so our happy mining team. Tsholofelo, the woman in the middle there, is our mine captain, and she was the one leading the team down to get the first gold out. So it's the actual first gold ore rock that they are holding in their hands there. And to the right, we can see the first gold ore being loaded on a truck and delivered to the ultra small plant. Yes, next. And this, I'm almost getting a bit teary-eyed watching this, because this picture came to us just this morning, so it's absolutely fresh now.
And what you see here is a picture from the shaking table. Hence, it's not 100% clear because it's constantly moving. But what you see here is the golden line in the middle there between the black and on the right and gray on the left. That gold is the first produced high-grade gold, and it's a milestone for us to be able to present this and to say it today that we have now reached this level, that we can produce proper gold from our own ore from the resource model. So this is a major milestone for us and for Akobo. And it's also a proof of the concept.
Not only that we have reached the resource and reached the ore, but with that, we can mine it, and that we can extract it and produce it in our plant. So this, this makes us all very happy. Yeah, next. Back to the mine. We see here a few pictures from the operation. I think it's important to show how we're working. On the upper left, you can see the morning meeting. Every day, we start with a safety meeting in the morning, talking through incidents, talking through what we're going to look after in the mine, and having a safe and good workday.
Just as an example, down on the lower left, you can see this is actually when you're standing at the bottom of the mine and looking up, you can see a hole in the roof, and we did not make that hole. That was artisanal miners coming down to quite a deep depth. That means that miners with only their hands and tools have been able to dig a hole down to more than 20 m, which is quite impressive. But these things cause some issues for us, of course. We really haven't planned them to be there, but they are certainly there. But these are the things that we have to plan for and overcome when we meet them.
On the right, we see the face of the mine right after blasting, and then we have geologists investigating the face to look for the ore and, yeah, look, see also check the stability, et cetera, of the mine. Yeah. The ramp up for the mine is going to be around May. That is when we get the normal route out for the ore, with the incline shaft being worked on and properly installed. So, until then, we will produce gold in a limited quantity out of the western and eastern winzes, as we develop these two parts of it. Thank you. Next.
For the processing plants, we have now, now all the major structures up. As you can see in the pictures, it now starts to look like a proper plant, with connections, pipeworks, and everything done. There are a few remaining tasks. The main ones are the electricals, generator set up with diesel infrastructure, water pipeline, and the tailings storage facility. Next. The electricals are the ones that are fast progressing now. We can see here, this container units, which is the MCC, the Motor Control Center. So every motor, every engine, everything goes into this unit and is controlled from there. This is a quite manual controlled operation, and there's a good reason for that.
It is easier to run a manual-controlled plant like this when you're very far from all kinds of help and infrastructure otherwise. So this makes it better to run, and we'll have a good team on the plant to run it once it's up. So we have several kilometers of cable being pulled right now every day. This is now when everything is then connected up, and we have the generators up and running, then we will go into the commissioning phase. Next. Yeah, here is another picture showing the crushing circuit.
The key metrics of the plant is that this is a 10 tonne per hour plant, and it is built so that it's easy to upgrade to a 20 tonne per hour plant, if you want to. The recovery of the main plant will be 97.2%, and it will have a peak production rate of 4,000 oz per month. The pilot plant, in comparison, has a capacity of around 1 tonne per hour. It is estimated, but this is a very ballpark figure, that we have around 50% recovery of the gold there. We will take care of the tailings and run the tailings from the pilot plant through the main plant later to recover the rest of the gold, so nothing will be wasted.
The main reason for the lower recovery is that we have no in the pilot plant is that we have no chemical part of the plant. It's only a gravimetric separation there. Okay, next. These are some pictures from the ultra-small plant. And this is now where we have been able to extract the gold that you saw in the picture just now. We have some possibilities to escalate the or make it a little bit more capacity on this plant, but we are still waiting to see if that is necessary in this time. Next. Yes, finally, I wanted to show the tailings storage facility.
We have, we are now building this, and it's going to be complete when we start up the plant for the commissioning. It also is a good example of how our team works together with the ESG team and everybody in the Akobo team together to get this permit for this one in a record time. It just took a few weeks for us to get this permit because it had no errors. Everything was filled out as it should be, and everything was in order. So we have the full competence in-house, and we have all necessary to run this safely, and avoid any incidents of spillage or anything like that in the future.
So this is an important part to keep our promise to be green and not have any pollutions or anything like that in our vicinity. Yeah, so there you see our lead civil engineer, Faisal. He's proud of the work he's doing with TSFs and all the other construction work around our area. I think that was it from me, Jørgen. Muted.
I think I'm taking over now.
Matt, you're taking over.
Yeah.
Please do.
Great. Thank you, Jørgen, and thank you very much, Helge. It's fantastic to have Helge running the mining operations team, because this has enabled me to refocus back onto growing the company, which is obviously a very important pillar of our strategy. As many of our regular viewers will know, we have the ambition to become a leading player in the Ethiopian mining industry, and we're certainly on track for that now. At this point, I think it's good to talk a little bit about our exploration strategy and why we believe we will become a leading player in the Ethiopian mining industry. Many exploration geologists know this, of course, and this is standard knowledge for us.
But I want to elaborate a little on the strategy behind this. So there are three things that we have to do in order to grow the company, produce more mines, and to have a larger resource base. We need to be exploring in the right places. We need to be what I would say tipping the table to success, which is all about you know having the right flow of projects, and also we need to have the right technology and the right logistics. So firstly, we're exploring in the Arabian-Nubian Shield, which is a very exciting place to be doing our work. I'll talk a little bit about that later. It's an unexplored greenstone belt. And we're also doing a review of acquisition for possible licenses countrywide as well.
We're not just focusing on southwestern Ethiopia. We already have a pretty large exploration license with 182 sq km, and we have a large flow of new targets. We're also working on acquiring new licenses, not just nationwide, but also further north along in the Arabian-Nubian Shield. And with regards to tipping the table to success, using probability correctly, we're also doing an intelligent review of our projects to make sure that we're investing our money in the right places. With regards to technology, we have our own company-owned drill rig. Many exploration companies don't have that, but we operate our own with less than half the cost, the operating cost for operating that.
We also have our own, some of our own geophysical equipment. We've also just taken delivery of our own laboratory, and I'll talk about that later. And of course, we have a fully operational camp and transportation system, and all this is located in the Arabian-Nubian Shield. And because we've been working for 15 years in in this area, our team has geology knowledge and experience of, of the geology and the structures, and the alteration, and the mineralization that exists there. So we're very, very well positioned in this part of the Arabian-Nubian Shield. When it comes to tipping the table towards success, what we're talking about here is having the right flow of projects into the company. Now, on the left-hand side, you'll see, you'll see sections for concept and desktop targets.
We have a lot of targets that are in target generation and early stage drilling category. Of course, between the early-stage drilling category and having a mine, you need to do advanced drilling, resource definition, and feasibility studies. We've been through all this with the Segele mine, and now I'm very, very delighted to see that it's actually producing gold. So, we have a lot of targets in the target generation and early drilling phase, and then we have a mine. So what we need to do is to... What we will be doing from now onwards is doing a very careful prioritization of our drilling targets, to analyze which ones are the most likely ones to take us towards the next mine.
And that will be using expert knowledge, careful numerical analysis, using a system called Resource Range Analysis, which is a system that was developed by major mining companies. I was involved in using it at BHP Billiton. And this will allow us to prioritize our targets and decide which ones we should focus on in order to move them towards advanced drilling and resource definition. What we will also be doing is we'll be filling up the left-hand side of the funnel as well. And that means developing more conceptual and desktop targets, and also claiming more licenses, as I mentioned earlier. Obviously, we've had some great success with gold. We're also looking at extending that to copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium.
Many of those are considered to be battery metals and critical metals. We believe that there's opportunities for those in the area, both nationwide and nearby where we're working now. So we have some exciting news, which we're hoping to bring out about that soon. With regards to the Arabian-Nubian Shield, this is considered to be one of the best regions of the world to explore for new gold deposits. There was 1,000 kg of gold extracted in the 18 months in a period of 18 months right above where we have recently produced gold. And that was done by artisanal miners in an informal manner.
400 km to the east of our project is the Lega Dembi Gold Mine, which is the only other operational gold mine in Ethiopia. The Segele Mine is the second-ever commercial gold mine in Ethiopia. 400 km to the north—300 km-400 km to the north, there is the Allied Gold project and the KEFI Minerals project, both of which are very close to finalizing their financing now, and they are large-scale gold mines with several million ounces each. In between our project and the KEFI Minerals project, Tulu Kapi, there's been very, very little exploration. In fact, almost nothing at all. And as I said in the previous slides, we have this position whereby we have geological knowledge, all the equipment needed, all the logistics set up, ready to explore that area.
I can confidently say that there are very, very few companies that are positioned with this logistics and this capability and knowledge in a Precambrian terrain that is prospective for large-scale deposits. We've had a head start doing this in 2010. So now we're looking to leverage our position to be able to make new discoveries. I'm very pleased to say that I'm going to be pushing very hard for this during the next calendar year. Just an update about the targets that we have in our current license area. These are the dots on the funnel diagram that you saw in previous slides. We obviously, each of these coloured rectangles shows a different target. Some have been drilled, some haven't.
We have high-grade results from grab samples and from drilling, and these are the targets that need to be prioritized now in order to decide which ones of these have the highest likelihood to move towards actually mining... you know, we have indications of fantastic grades in the same way as we have great, fantastic grades at the Segele mine, and we have some indications of possible large-scale resources that could be found in some of these. So it's a matter of prioritization, analyzing where we are most likely to spend, where we can get the most bang for our buck, as they say. One target that we haven't talked about much recently is the West Segele target, and that's been the subject of intense exploration in the last couple of months.
We did put out some news on social media that we'd found a 24 g gold nugget in a trench at West Segele. There's a photograph of it here. What we find in West Segele is tantalising. We've done quite a number of trenches, 600 m of trenching, and what we find is a sheared form of ultramafic rocks, which has gold nuggets associated with it, and we found this from panning of these sheared ultramafics. We see very similar sheared ultramafics with gold right next to the Segele mineralisation at the mine.
This project is 1 km-1.5 km from the Segele mine, and our job now is to unpick that puzzle in order to be able to find out where to drill in this area, in order to discover any mineralization that's nearby or at depth or somewhere around here. It's an exciting puzzle that we are working hard on. I've obviously talked about Gingibi l before. This is obviously very exciting as well. Just to recap, this is a 10-minute drive from Segele. We did some bulk sampling on this before, and it produced interesting results.
When we analyzed the results, we, you know, if you take account of dilution and the recovery levels in the ultrasmall plant, you know, we should be looking at open pit grades much, much lower than the Segele mine, but nevertheless interesting. So at the surface, we have loose quartz fragments that have these grades in it, and at depth, we've also managed to correlate some of the intersections that we've found in the drilling. And this information will be put into our prioritization and assessment, analyzing all our projects against each other in order to decide where to allocate our resources best to. When it comes to the mineralization at surface, we've got a full trial mining plan ready to go.
Essentially, we're looking at extracting 6,700 tonnes of the loose material at the surface. This just covers the loose material that you can see in the picture on the left-hand side. And once we decide to press the button on that, we will extract it using excavators, do some assessments of the operation cost for extracting that from these gold-bearing quartz floats at surface. And essentially, we can put together a cost analysis of this project by producing and extracting gold from that 6,700 tonnes. So that's obviously exciting, and you know, once we've got that going, it could possibly produce a new feed of ore for the processing plant at Segele.
Another part of our strategy, and the last thing I'm gonna talk about in this section of the presentation, is the way we're using technology. We obviously have our own magnetic equipment, which that's been recently used at Gingibil . That helps a lot, and we have our own drill rig. And we have just taken delivery of a system called the DetectORE system. Many of our current shareholders will know that we have to wait two or three months to get the analysis, the assays of the gold from the core and the samples that we take, because the samples previously had to be cut from the core and shipped to various different countries around the world to have specialist analysis done on this.
That takes two or three months. This DetectORE system that we have here is a brand-new, award-winning technology, which will be used for, firstly, for process control at the mine itself, in order to make sure that we have rocks with gold going into the process plant, but it will also be used for exploration. And rather than taking two or three months to get the results back, this takes even 24 hours. What that means is that rather than waiting two or three months to find out if an exploration project is good, if we've got gold in the core, this means it takes days. And there's an illustration of what this means here.
Potentially, we could take samples on a Tuesday, we could have a few results on a Wednesday, and we can go back on a Thursday and take more samples. What this means is, you cut down the development time of an exploration project by enormous amounts. Now, this is not a system which is JORC-compliant yet. What that means is that at the moment, we can't release the results of this publicly, but it does mean that we can prioritize targets quickly, and we can analyze targets quickly, and we'll know internally which ones are good enough for mining much, much faster, but then afterwards, we'll have to do the JORC, the JORC-compliant analysis.
So, many of us will know that it's taken quite a number of years to get from the initial discovery of the mineralization at Segele all the way through to the mining site, and a lot of that time was spent doing resource definition. Potentially, we can accelerate that process a lot. So that means that we have- we now have the ability to advance many of the exploration targets that were in the early stage drilling area into resource definition much, much faster, and so I'm very much looking forward to seeing the results of this. So thank you very much for your time, and now back to you, Jørgen.
Thank you, Matt. That gives a very good overview of where we are right now on the exploration side. We're stepping a bit back, we're taking a broader overview, and we're thinking a bit more long-term than we've done previously. So I'm very happy that Matt is now taking control over this area, and we'll continue developing good strategies on this side. So on the financial side, we'll go through some of the key items here. I will not go into all the details. I suggest if you have any questions, you reach out to me. This, you still can see, we're in the development phase. I assume in the next reporting, we'll report revenues, since we've already now seen the gold. But so far in Q3, we will have...
We only do have cost operation, and the changes here is also reflecting the fact that we're now putting all the operating costs into the profit and loss statement and not in the balance sheet, as we used to. There is a development in the equity and debt development. We have a negative equity as of Q3, but I am not concerned about that. We will work through that, so nothing that should worry too much. We do have a good solid base, and we do have good shareholders, and we do have a good project, and I think this will continue as it is, and we will find good solutions going forward to solve this. Next slide, please. And just a recap on the corporate structure and the top shareholders.
We're listed again, as we said earlier, on the Euronext Growth, and we also have a listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. We're now trading at the OTC Market. Just to give a comment on that, we did our first investor presentation yesterday to the U.S. market. So that's the first marketing effort we've done towards the U.S. market. So, we'll see how that develops. This is not something that will happen overnight with a huge increased liquidity from the OTC market platform, but it's a long-term investment into that market. And it fits well with where we are right now and the stage of the operations, and we will continue to work with the OTC market to get our information out. And I can just give a...
Just to mention that we'll do Indaba Mining in February. That's a big event, and we'll also participate at the biggest mining conference on the mall, PDAC. Toronto will have the booth there also in March. So we'll have a lot of activity going out towards the market over the next quarter. You can see top shareholders, nothing's changing, so we have a very stable and supportive shareholder group. Next slide, please. Yeah, so I'll leave the key metrics here for you to read, and I think also, given the time here, that you can look into the details, also the financials that will be following on the next few pages.
You can also read more about that in our report, the Q3 report, that you can find on our website, but also together with today's release. So I, with that, I think we move to the Q&A section and go through any potential questions that have arrived.
I can read out the questions?
Yes.
So we have a question here which says, it just says, "Size and value of first sale and practical logistics. Sold locally or internationally? Payment terms." So a big, big wide-ranging question.
Okay, I can answer that. Well, in terms of the size, and how much, we'll have to get back to that. But on the logistics sides, we have now an agreement with MKS and Brink's, the biggest logistic and security, well, provider, in the world. We've done some test flights, we've done the travel. So what it looks like is, well, we can produce and have gold ready on a Friday. It will be transported all the way to Switzerland, it will go to the refinery, it will be refined, and we will get the money back, maybe then on the Tuesday. So that's the cycle. It's a pretty quick cycle. This is not very difficult.
It is an option, of course, to sell locally to the National Bank. But the setup we have now, right now, is to sell it through MKS PAMP, which is an LBMA-approved refinery. This is important to take note of, because if you don't have LBMA-approved gold, you're not able to sell it in the spot market at the stock exchange in London. Selling to a non-LBMA-approved refinery or someone else means that you will lose a lot of money on the sale of gold. So this is an important part for us, and it fits with the ESG profile and doing it right.
This is an important part of our business, and, you know, just 10%-15% discount of not being able to sell it at spot makes a huge difference to us. So this is a very good setup that should not be an issue at all for us going forward.
Great. So the next question: How many drill rigs do we have running right now? So, we obviously have one operational drill rig that's working, and, that's actually just been temporarily shut down just to focus onto the mining operation. And obviously, like I said in our presentation, in my presentation, the focus now is to prioritize the targets in order to line up the right ones for advanced drilling. Yep. So we've got one more question here, which is: What do you think of other international miners and the potential of the Ethiopian mining sector in general? Jørgen, do you want to answer that, or shall I?
Sure. No, no, I'm happy to answer that. We have a good relationship with a lot of the other... Well, there aren't that many, but those who are working with us in Ethiopia, we're definitely seeing changes and improvements from the government and the legislation side all the time. This mining sector is high priority. It's one of the pillars in their ten-year plan that will help alleviate the troubles they have with the foreign currency exchange. So we get all the support, and everyone else gets all the support they need now to move their projects forward. So if you look at the map right now, if we look at ourselves, we have as a producer now, we have Lega Dembi already producing.
KEFI, Allied Gold, they just went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange here a month or two ago, $1 billion valuation. Their Ethiopian project is the number one priority for them on the exploration side. We still see big companies like Newmont having licenses in Ethiopia. So I think we're at the beginning of opening up the Ethiopian sector and more and more. Once someone starts, this is how it works in mining, once someone starts, the rest will follow. And the fact that we have the position we have, I think will make us an interesting partner for potential future companies wanting to look into Ethiopia.
Great. So that's the last question, then.
Good. Okay. Just to summarize a bit, we a bit, of course, mixed feelings. We're extremely happy with hitting the ore body, producing high-grade gold. That's really the most important from the operations side. It tells us that the gold is there, it tells us that we can produce it, and we're very, very optimistic on the long-term production capacity and results of the operation. The flip side, as we discussed, we are a bit late with regards to getting enough tonnage out of the mine to really start the main plant. So the main plant is really not... I know a lot of people out there are focusing when that will be up and running.
Well, it's very close to completion, but the limiting factor here is actually the delay on the mining side and the fact that we need to ramp up to a certain level before we can start the main plant. So right now, we're focusing all our efforts on developing the underground mine and getting tonnage out that can support startup of the main plant. And to finally finish off, just the consequence of this is that we've started a funding process. We have good dialogue with all shareholders regarding this. We will find a good solution as we've done previously. This will not stop the project as such. We will move forward, and I'm quite sure and confident that this will be resolved very soon.
We'll get back with more information on that. So I think with that, we did a very long presentation today. This was needed also to present Helge and to present some of our new thoughts and ideas around the exploration. But with that, I'd like to thank everyone for participating, and we'll close off with, yeah, with the recent movie or what film that Matt made, with his camera at site, not long ago, which will give you an impression of what it's like at site, and building the processing plant. So thank you all.