Go through some highlights. He'll hand over to Ellert, who will take you through some of the financials. There will also be a short couple of slides on the MRE announcement from this morning, and we will follow the usual course of coming back and doing Q&A at the end of the call. If you have got a question, use the Q&A tab in the bottom row of symbols down there, and I will coordinate those at the end of the call. Thanks very much for joining. I'll hand over to Eldur; he'll take you through.
Thank you, Edward. Good morning, everybody. I do not think it is afternoon for many of you, so I am very pleased to be with you. I have just been off-site from Greenland just now and with the team here in Iceland. Today it will be me and Ellert who will be doing the presentation. James Gilbertson, our VP of ExpLORANion, is actually currently en route from Greenland, where he has been on-site, so I will do all the expLORANion update. I am just going to get it out. The first thing is just to kind of draw us all back into our focus as a company. Now, Amaroq is a company that has four businesses: Nalunaq, which is our gold business. This is all situated here currently in South Greenland. Gardaq, which is our strategic mineral business, where we are looking for copper, nickel, rare earth, and other base metals, I should say.
Suliaq is a two-form servicing business, which we will speak about later in the presentation. It is to make sure we can do all of the work we intend to do in Greenland. We can operate well because what Greenland is, and we have seen most of us during the past few weeks, is that it has a lot of resources, both confirmed but also potential. It is a good jurisdiction. It is a sought-after jurisdiction. It is important to know how to execute, how to do things there. Suliaq speaks into that, and I will give you more background on that during this presentation. The last point, which is Greenland is one of the, if not the, biggest potential for hydro resources in North America and/or Europe that is left to be harnessed.
For our mining activities, we have an opportunity to reduce our cost in diesel fuel, reduce our emission, and make more operational security to our assets. More importantly, we can also hedge ourselves against any energy inflation and cost in energy in the future. Therefore, we have already finalized the first feasibility study for approximately 1 megawatt hydroelectric plant, which we intend to commission in 2026. This makes our holistic focus on Greenland. We have built up a business which is now, I would say, yeah, the largest, one of the largest individual private investors in Greenland. We are employing a lot of people, a lot of different companies, and this puts us in the position to be able to give investors all around the world exposure of Greenland.
On that point, what is important and what we have obviously seen in the news in various different media outlets is, you know, why is Greenland so important to the world? There are things like security, shipping routes, but most importantly to us, it's the mineral wealth and energy. This has been seen by both the European Union and the US. There's a vast amount of rare earth minerals, which currently is completely cornered by China. It is a country that is governed by Denmark. Governed by Denmark, I should say, it's under the Danish Kingdom. However, it has self-rule government. It is a country that is one of the last frontiers left to be explored. It is particularly good for expLORANion because there is not much vegetation in Greenland.
Therefore, much of the resources are close to surface, and you can use modern technology to find them. There is an interest by the majors on expLORANion states. What needs to be told, though, is that majors are not particularly focused on being in expLORANion these days. They are very much more focused on their big mines, expanding their big mines. They have left it to mid-tier or mostly junior to be the explorer. That has been an issue because there has been little capital going into the mining industry and resource industry for many, many years. However, in Greenland, we are seeing increased expenditure year by year in country expLORANion. There is growing demand. That also speaks again to us being able to execute, deliver on expLORANion, not only for us, but also for other opportunities.
Our asset base, we own all of the known gold targets in the South Greenland Gold Belt. We have all of the licenses that we want in the kind of critical and rare earth area in South Greenland, except for the known deposits like Tanbreez and Kvanefjeld and Motzfeldt. However, there is a lot more potential in the rest of Greenland. We have actively been looking and exploring those opportunities to build on the success we've already done to further grow the company in Greenland. I should say as well, Greenland has this fantastic relationship with the Nordic, being one of the Nordic countries under, obviously, Denmark, but part of the Nordic family, which means that Greenland, Iceland, Sweden, Faroe Islands, Denmark, Norway, we all have very similar legislation.
It is easy to travel between these countries in terms of work permits, in terms of utilizing social services, invest ability between countries. Banks can invest across these different countries. Within these countries, they are very strong in mineral extraction, processing, energy development. They have very good infrastructure. Most importantly, they have extremely strong national funds and/or pension funds or institutional funds per capita each and every one of these countries to support mineral development. Greenland is the one that has been completely, I shouldn't say completely, but largely untouched from mineral development and is very much needed as an economical contributor to the Greenlandic government. That is kind of what holistically gives our strategy and why this is very interesting, the position we've built in Greenland so far.
If I go back to last year, we had obviously a transformational year where we built our first mine. This was based on internal feasibility study that Hatch did for us. Hatch is a group out of Canada that designed, engineered, was in construction management, and then in commissioning at the moment. They have taken care of all of that for us, as well as our team, which resulted in first gold in December. When we did our first gold, we obviously tested the equipment. The first quarter has been very much about commissioning, seeing how things operate during this winter period, finalizing various different construction bits around the plant to the greatest extent we do, and then start commissioning each and every equipment to get into a steady-state production, which is the key that the plant operates like that.
We've gotten all of our permits approved in terms of environmental impact assessment, social impact assessment, all of the, I call them smaller permits. They're obviously equally important, but these are more kind of short-to-process permits, have all been finalized. Our impact benefit agreement is due to be completed by 30th of June. By the way, we have built our impact benefit into our current social impact assessment. We see that as a very straightforward thing to finalize. I want to say that, and I want to thank the Greenlandic government for a very good cooperation between our team and them during this whole permitting process. It has been very beneficial for us and them in terms of process. We closed a successful fundraising of approximately GBP 28 million in December. Following that, we had Nanoq drilling result.
Nanoq is our next potential mine, which we intend to be drilling next year. We just announced this morning after very, very, very many years and hard work of drilling up at 700 meters above sea level in the middle of a mountain, underground drilling, setting up mine, a considerable increase in our resources. I have to congratulate our expLORANion and geological team led by James Gilbertson. We went from 320,000 ounces to about 489,000 ounces. We declared indicated resources, which I'll speak about a little bit later. That was absolutely fantastic. Last but not least, last year, we drilled 5,500 meters in various different locations in our copper, sorry, copper, nickel, copper, and gold licenses for further search for new minerals and world-class deposits. I'm going to hand over to Ellert here, our CFO, to walk us through the financials. Ellert, please go ahead.
Yes, thank you, Eldur, and good morning, everyone. If we start by looking at selected assets and cash movements relating to the Nalunaq Project specifically, we see that capital assets, which is capitalized expenditure related to the restart of the Nalunaq mine and associated development of the processing plant, increased by around GBP 44 million in Q4 and stands at GBP 161 million at year-end. As construction advances, we have continued to draw down on prepaid expenses. They are mostly due to advance payments to suppliers and mining contractors. That was down GBP 7.6 million in the quarter. As part of inventory, our stockpile is now being recorded for the first time, which accounts for the cost associated with that stockpile. The cash movements and the table below reflect the changes in the asset base just mentioned, which is predominantly related to the project costs at Nalunaq.
Now, if we go one slide further on the liquidity side, at year-end, we had cash on hand of $45.2 million. Aside from that, we had undrawn credit facilities to the tune of $23.7 million. That sums up to about $69 million in liquidity. Subtracting our payables of $18.4 million, we get short-term liquidity, as we define it, of $50.5 million at year-end. The company's total assets at year-end equate to $256 million. On the liability side, it is mostly three items. We have the payables that we see here on the table and our ARO liabilities. The only interest-bearing debt the company carries is a construction loan to the tune of $28.6 million. At year-end, we have a very healthy 78.5% equity ratio.
On Gardaq, the carrying value of our investment there, the Strategic Metals JV, where Amaroq holds a 51% stake, is GBP 14.9 million. The receivable balance amounts to GBP 6.7 million. As a reminder, this receivable balance represents allocated overhead and G&A costs to manage the expLORANion work programs and day-to-day activities of the joint venture. This balance will eventually be converted to shares in Gardaq no later than in April 2026. Apart from that, the Gardaq JV's cash balance sits at roughly GBP 5 million, GBP 4.8 million, which will be used to conduct expLORANion activities in 2025, which we w ill cover later in the slide deck.
Thank you, Ellert.
Back over to you, Eldur.
Thank you. Thanks for that. Right. I'm going to walk through our operation at Nalunaq primarily, and then general our gold portfolio. First thing, I want to kind of set the scene on what our focus is in doing in this Nanortalik Gold Belt. The Nanortalik Gold Belt is about 200 km long in total from here to here. It goes from southwest coast of Greenland to southeast. Nalunaq is in the center there. The town of Nanortalik is here to put this into context. And we have the three most advanced assets is obviously Nalunaq. Then we have Vagar, which just sits here. And then we have Nanoq. These are the three most advanced assets. What we are focused on and our strategy is that in Nalunaq, we are starting to commission and with a view to have a fully commissioned mine by end of 2025.
We want to then be producing from a 300 ton per day on as high recovery as possible into 2026. We then feel, and we are focused on and are assessing if we can then continue increasing the throughput of the plant that we already have at Nalunaq, both now that we have larger resources at Nalunaq, so we can produce more. The potential opportunity there is to increase the throughput up to 450 ton sooner rather than later. I will speak to you about that in a minute. We are then drilling Nanoq this year. We have planned to drill Nanoq this year to define resources there to a maintenance resource, again, to then have a potential to start mining there as well, as well as in Vagar. There are actually more targets within this whole gold belt. Why do we do this?
For majors today, they look at belts and selection of mine that sit close to each other with a view to produce somewhere between 300,000-500,000 ounces from one single location or a belt. We do not particularly see majors getting any interest in anything up to that level. That can be built up from collection of mine. How we see these targets is that they can be a minimum, because they are all very high grade, such as Nalunaq, they can be a minimum 50,000 ounces. They have the opportunity to grow considerably higher with more and more resources defined to actually deliver more and more cash flow and more and more ounces through not only Nalunaq plant, but also within the Nanoq and Vagar area. There are several other targets that have the potential to be even larger.
This is quite important that we build up the scale, we build up the resources for the longer term to build up a new gold camp like we've seen in Western Australia and/or in, for example, in Canada. We say target gold production, this is obviously, to some extent, a thumb-sucking exercise. I said maybe not Nalunaq because we are still in expLORANion phase. This is the purpose of why we are developing this whole play here. Hence why we put so much emphasis on growing our resources within the belt. For Nalunaq, where are we today? We are at 484,000 ounces. Our grade is higher, 30 gram per ton. This puts Nalunaq to become one of, if not the highest grade gold mines in the world. We've already declared maintenance resources of 151,000.
Maintenance resources means that the confidence level of the resources is higher. There are three categories that inferred with majority of the resources are. Then you have indicated, and then you have measured. We have now moved approximately one-third of our resources to indicated resources. This is important because once you have indicated resources, we are now working on our reserve statement, which will come out hopefully in the end of this year. With the reserve statement, it opens up the company to a lot more opportunities for, for example, liquidity in terms of various different options of debt, as well as further confidence in our production profile. Our current plant is 300 ton per day. We are assessing right now with the larger resources if we should expand that to 450 ton per day, something we are looking at at the moment.
We will update you on those studies and thoughts we are looking at in our Q1 update in six weeks' time. We are mining on a long-hole stoping method. We have a headcount of about 100-150 people there. I say 100-150, it ranges a little bit based on the construction activities we have. Approximately 50% are Greenlanded. When I say approximately, it is our goal to have it as high as possible. Sometimes we have certain groups coming in doing certain things, especially during construction, so this can go up and down. Historical production from the mine is 350,000 ounces. This is very important in mining. This means that the mining methods have been confirmed, the processing can be done, the infrastructure. There is a saying in mining, where do you start mining, where they stop.
This is kind of what gives you an opportunity to think about that, that we have taken or addressed many of the risks in this. Current mine life effectively goes from 6-10 years. That increases obviously our longevity of the project. We address, and I may be speaking to various different markets now, but we address health and safety stats. Health and safety to us is more important than profit. It is really important, but it is actually also linked to profit. We have 19 lost time injuries. Most of these things are maybe someone cuts his finger, he loses time because he needs to get a bandage, he needs to go through safety briefing, he needs to go through various different things. It reflects the total man hours we are working.
If anyone is having any small, tiny bit of issues like that, it actually has the potential. More importantly, it is really important to us that our people and coworkers make sure that everybody can get safe home because they are all supporting their own families. They are obviously supporting us as shareholders, but overall, it is mostly important to the whole operation that this is a key factor for us. We will be reporting and have been reporting these stats in every single quarter and give you a full update on that. I want to dig a little bit deeper, mostly into this quarter, to give you a little bit of an update of how we have been doing on various different aspects here. We spoke about the permitting. We effectively only have the impact benefit agreement left to finish.
In permitting, yes, there are these headline documents like EIA, social impact assessment, all of these various different things that you have to finish. Underneath permitting, there are various different permits that we have to fulfill and make sure are done. There needs to be monitoring as well that we're doing. There needs to be site visits by worker unions of Greenland, the government. They look at everything we're doing. They make recommendations on what we could do better. They also give us feedback on what we are doing well, et cetera, et cetera. I want to congratulate our team on permitting, which is kind of led by Joan Plant, on how well this has been done. I also want to thank the government for their extended cooperation there.
In terms of EPC, which stands for Engineering, Procurement, and Construction, we have basically done everything for phase one, which is our gravity processing. That is to buy all of the equipment, of course, because it has been built, but piping and various different things. What is left there in terms of various different construction is then just man hours to finalize bits and pieces here and there and make sure commissioning works as it should do. In phase two, which is our flotation, that is a building and equipment flotation cell, which increases our recovery from 70% to 90%. The procurement is well advanced.
What we have said is that we want to focus on seeing if we can increase the throughput of the plant and make sure we take that into account before we finalize full construction of phase two, because it can be hard to turn around and finalize phase two as we have it right now and then start to increase. That is something we are actively looking at at the moment. In terms of construction, the site construction schedule and oversight is overseen by Halyard and actually the commissioning as well. During this, I should say, December, January, February, March, we've had a very, very cold period, and especially in December and January and February in Greenland. We see it also here in Iceland where I live.
Therefore, we decided mid-February that we would bring a large portion of our construction crew off-site and hold because we do not want to be in a position where people effectively have difficulties getting to and from site. That part about getting to and from site, what we are seeing now when we are getting into steady operation, last year, we had an ice issue, which we kind of looked at and have been assessing, and I will come to it in a minute, how can we make sure we can operate during any kind of ice condition that relates to maritime equipment such as icebreakers, et cetera, et cetera, that we have been analyzing and looking at.
This year, because we are going from effectively construction where you bring in a team for three to four weeks, and then the next team comes in for three to four weeks, and going into more of an operational mode, one thing that we are doing now is to move away from selective big 50-people chapter coming in and out to more of a hot rotation where there are smaller groups. This is because we do not want to be in a position going forward that we maybe lose half of our staff off-site. Everything needs to operate on a very kind of a slow level. There is maybe a delay of bringing in one or two individuals, sorry, 50 or another individual because of either the weather delay or the plane is not flying that day, et cetera, et cetera.
These are the particularities we see now that we've operated during this winter into the operational mode that we need to make sure that is maintained. This is partly weather. We've seen this in Iceland. It's not actually, but it's also availability of aircraft, availability of the Icelandair aircraft, charter aircraft we've been using, or even with Air Greenland. What we know from Greenland ever since Greenland has been built up, I'd say, after the Second World War, is that the more control we have on logistics, services, the more operationally safe we are, we lose less time, and we gain more throughput and more profit.
This is, again, why we have presented now for the past two years, which has often come as a surprise to our investor, this feature of having a servicing arm to Amaroq to be able to make sure we can conduct all of our operation well. In terms of plant commissioning, we obviously produced our first gold when we started the plant and tested it in December. Since then, we have been going through various sections of commissioning. How you process commissioning is you test certain equipment first, then you do the pumps, then you do this, and then you put everything together. Overall, this has been going well. We are kind of having normal things, pump breaks there, you replace it, you bring this pump in, you put the critical spares up, and you start kind of pulling all of these things together. That is coming together.
Where we have seen maybe a design, I don't want to say a design flaw, but more what could have been designed better or something that was unforeseen and we've now fixed is that this whole thing is designed by an Arctic condition in terms of building and everything else. However, during the very cold month, the whole design was designed based on the minus 20, but there is a chill factor with wind, which can have an impact on just piping. Therefore, we have had to increase the heating in the building, and we've already kind of supplied all of that. We've had to increase and insulate a certain type and make them deeper. Tiny bits like that did have an impact on the throughput, which has now all been fixed.
Those are the kind of things that we will be very honest with the market when we're going through the commissioning and all of these things that we have to kind of go through and make sure are done correctly. There is also we have been operating and moving effectively construction team out and starting building our own operating team on site under the leadership of Dave and Hank, who are now operating there. We are bringing in local people also to teach them. This will take the remainder of the year to get all of these SOPs and everything finalized while we are commissioning under the leadership of Halyard.
Last but not least, we want to be running the plant ideally on full capacity, meaning when we run it, we kind of want to be running it on almost 300 ton per day and then rather stop it in between rather than running it on lower throughput. We try to run it on lower throughput, but we feel it's better for recoveries and everything to run it on a full recovery. All in all, this is going really well. The guys are getting a good hang of it and operating well, and it looks good from that perspective. In terms of mining, last time we spoke in the last quarter, with mining was we were getting about five, six meters a day, which was too low. The contractor has increased the performance to 10 meters a day.
However, part of it is the fact that we have only gotten all of our equipment, stopping rigs, jumpers, which are drilling machines, trucks, et cetera, et cetera. They were all delivered now by end of February. Now we have a full kit on site. Secondly, what we have improved a lot is that most of our equipment is Epiroc. We now have a full-time Epiroc mechanic on site. We have increased our spare packages, and we have increased our equipment availability, meaning we have more equipment than is needed for our mining operation. This allows the kind of maintenance and also if there are any breakups because that is important that we keep the development rate. We are increasing the team there on site as well, effectively to run about 25 people on a shift and total on site about 50 people from around end of April.
This means that our target rate of development will be about 18-20 meters a day just from the mountain block. During the summer, we are assessing the opportunity to start developing into the valley block as well. During the next six months, we will be putting into effect currently how we built up the mine because we were in the trial mining process. We were using, you could think of it, many smaller generators here and there in the mine. We are now looking to electrify the mine completely with one generator. That will take our six months to do that. We will look to see if we can put Wi-Fi also underground to kind of start gaining more and more information system.
In the future, we want to be in a position where we can use technology to have as much efficiency as possible. On mining as well, we have defined very well now that the mine has been set up and people are there, the KPIs with Thyssen, which we are finalizing, which would give us further assurances on bonuses and penalties on meeting all of these mining KPIs. We will be issuing them to the market once that has been finalized and agreed with Thyssen. That is going well. Water infrastructure and support for efficient operation is also important. We have our 12-month mining plan, of course, in place for the mountain block. This is all coming together. What is important on a site like this one as well to know is that one thing is to have the equipment.
We have Thyssen, we have Halyard, we have these experienced companies working with us. It is also to make sure all of the systems are put in place, all of these time management of people, health and safety system. This is all part of the commissioning and make sure that happens, stores, which is how you keep your maintenance equipment, et cetera, et cetera. There are policies if I go into the most detail, but this is all what is part of commissioning and looks very good. As for the Nalunaq resource growth, we do not touch on it here, but before I go into the numbers here, which is obviously we are really, really happy about, and this is fantastic news for us to increase the value for our shareholders in terms of contained gold.
I also want to say that during our mining now, we have effectively developed three levels up ahead of us. We have been doing ramp, three-level ramp is how you get access to the resources. This means six phases which supports the development that we want to get. In the first few development drives we've been doing, our mine grade from our model was around 13 gram per ton, but actually the reconciliation from the first has been higher, somewhere between 15-18 gram per ton, which we were expecting. That is a very good sign that the mine is there, the rock condition in the mine is good. This all looks correct, which we are very pleased with.
James and his team, they have been drilling, drilling, drilling, defining, defining, defining, underground sampling, underground drilling, and we've now increased the resources to that 484,000 ounces, 51% increase, and we will be continuing this. Our aim is to continue drilling, believe South Block, and to focus on developing into Valley Block this year, as well as here in the Mountain Block, which will also have an impact on expanding the resources going forward. All in all, there's not much more to say about it other than the fact that we now are not only in third category where we used to be, we also have an indicated category and a combined resource statement of 483,000. I want to congratulate my team again for this amazing effort. In strategic minerals, as I said earlier, we drilled a little bit more than 5,000 meters in that area.
We have already, over only two years, which is a very short time, defined a whole copper belt, which sits from Josva, Target West, Target North, and Johan Dahl Land. A few weeks ago, we sent out the initial result of Johan Dahl Land, where we had 12 gram per ton gold and about 5% copper on surface. It is absolutely staggering how interesting it is to have such a large copper belt with a commodity that is so much needed. Even major companies who are either exploring or more producing copper have now acknowledged that in older rocks, like in Greenland, we call it Archaean age rock, you can find big copper deposits. This is being explored in, for example, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and these countries. That is very exciting for us. This is early stage.
Think of it, we are drilling one or two holes in various different places where we see copper showings. Scott, and we are building up our pictures to be able to then locate, is our hope, a large deposit. In terms of rare earth, they sit here next to in these fields here where my mouse is. We have continued applying for licenses in this area and actually also on the East Coast and in the North, not only for rare earth, but also copper, but that is ongoing expLORANion. In Stendalen, we drilled six holes, which we've yet to receive results of, as well as from Josva. We will continue this work. This is obviously extremely important work.
This is, again, the big interest in Greenland is to be able to define, find these things, knowing how to build them, and then bring this material to the market. As for servicing and hydro, as I mentioned earlier about logistics and so on, we have focused on these, I want to say, five to six categories. Operating an expLORANion program in many places of Greenland, even up in June, July, you are dealing with ice issue, either ice flow issue or ice. That does not have to be a problem if you can break through it or sail through it. It does not have to be a problem if you can operate effectively from a ship. Secondly, to bring in material in many locations in Greenland, you need an icebreaker, just like you need it in Labrador, in Russia, in Alaska.
This is something we have been assessing if the companies should look to, under the servicing company Suliaq, to look at marine vessels that can support that. If you think about it, if you do not bring a, when we are fully commissioned in production, if you do not bring either people, equipment, or anything in for several days, it can have a big impact on your avenue line. Operational readiness is hugely important. Epiroc and Sandvik Mining Fleet, we have more than 25 mining equipment on site. This needs maintenance. This needs spares. This needs all of these things. We need to manage everything. We have to build our own workshops, both underground and on surface. This has already been invested in Nalunaq. It is to say if this is going to be done multiple times in Greenland, we have this first mover advantage there.
We own 120 remote camps, which usually we run them on a 30 camp. So we can run four different drilling programs with these kind of camping equipment. Getting it up, putting it down, it all sits there in Greenland. Drill rigs, this is all in Greenland. It does not have to be moved in, moved out. It is serviced, it is maintained, the consumables, all of these things. Last but not least, we have been supporting, obviously, company who are servicing us, both helicopter company who fly our people in and out, fly these tents in and out, fly these drill rigs in and out, as well as securing more and more support for flying people in and out. Because the big part of our Greenland in building things, 50-70% of our cost is actually related to people.
It's actually not related to any of this equipment or any of the actual buildings or anything like that. There are people who need to build it. Knowing logistics, knowing all of these different things is hugely important. This can be done in Greenland. I'm going to give you an example that I took yesterday in a conference with Business Iceland in Iceland. It was in 1940 to 1941 and 1942, the U.S. government brought in 5,000 people to Greenland, built 26 army bases, being satellite, sorry, a LORAN station and/or weather station, five airports in only one or two years. With the right equipment, with the right people, with the right focus, this can be done. You just need to control your own destiny. That's the key. You're not beholden to anyone else or as much as we possibly can.
To that as well, renewable energy is a critical part. In every single valley in Greenland, you have the river like this one here that you see. Here is our plant. This is the river that goes past it, that goes through and flows to sea. Our plant is 200-300 meters above sea level. It is only 9 kilometers. The elevation goes up very quickly. The biggest cost of building anything like this in Greenland is actually not moving in equipment to generate electricity. That is four containers. It is a pipe that is maybe 100 meters long, and this is runoff. It is actually building the harbor, building the road. Harbor is $5 million. Road is $10 million. That construction timeline takes time.
What we can leverage off is that this road here, we can literally put the pipe in the river, put it in our road, and end up here with four equipment containers to generate approximately 1 megawatt. That reduces annual cost by $2 million. We are looking even higher up river if we can do more of the same because we need about 4-4.5 megawatts of electricity. When you have 4-4.5 megawatts of electricity, that is something that can sit there for a long term. By the way, the town of Nanortalik, which is only 30 km away, needs approximately 5 megawatts of electricity to heat and electrify the town. Over the long run, we can build up these things inexpensively with our own team there to generate lower cost of operating our mines.
This will also give more and more acceptability to building more and more mines in Greenland. We feel this model that we have put in place, the idea is to have start construction of this in the second half of 2026. The feasibility study has been or is about to be finalized. Equipment selection and so on is being looked at at the moment. The outlook is we will continue commissioning the processing facility. We are focused to get to that 300 tons per day, which we have reached in the last quarter. We want to get that steady state, just get that day by day by day and provide all of the ore we need to generate that according to the schedule. Our annual production and processing estimate, we will update that in the Q1 results.
For phase two construction, due to the fact that we want to analyze increasing the throughput, the installation of that phase one, we are now intending to put that in Q4 in 2025. That will then allow us to assess how, well, we will update on the Q1 to effectively increase the throughput to 450 tons per day, which obviously increases the gold production at the same cost base. This is why we're looking at it. It effectively gives us opportunity to get more tons through at the same cost base. We obviously have finalized or are about to finalize the one megawatt feasibility study, which we will update to the market when it's in the final form. The servicing and logistic part of this business is critical.
We are here to prove that you can build a mine, you can operate a mine, you can explore and find minerals, and you can do that by making healthy returns to shareholders and the community. That part of the business is an absolute key, especially taking into account the increased geopolitical focus on Greenland. It's not about a two-man company somewhere where it says, "I have the greatest assets." There might be a lot; there are a lot of great assets in Greenland. It's about how you conduct yourself with your fellow men in Greenland and how to operate it alongside the community there. How do you do things as efficient as possible? What is your track record on permitting and various different aspects of that in relation to the government? How do you conduct your expLORANion program?
How quickly move your drill rigs to a resource to effectively economical resource? We are focusing on leveraging the fact that Europe, the US, Denmark, and Greenland are all interested in making mining work. We will be updating the market on that in not too much distant time, I should say. Part of that is we mentioned in end of December, sorry, beginning of December, we were assessing going on the main market in London, but we are assessing not only main market in London, but potentially other main market as well. That gives us an overall outlook. I do not have anything more to say at this point in time other than maybe just bringing this forward to Q&A. I want to congratulate my team over this month and our expLORANion team. We are extremely pleased with the resource update.
We are very focused and determined making all of the processing and commissioning work. It is very hard work. It takes time. We will be updating you frequently on how that is progressing. Overall, for last year and the first quarter, I want to say well done to the whole team and the organization. Thank you.
Thanks very much, Eldur. I think we'll take questions from the line now. Just to repeat, if you have a question, please go down to the bottom of the menu and type in your question through the Q&A app there. We have some questions already lined up. I'll just go from the top if that's okay. The first one's from David. Following the European Critical Raw Materials Act, will you be applying for this concerning your critical metals expLORANion program? Also, what are your plans for that this year?
I think you've probably answered the critical metals expLORANion program, but I think if there's any detail we can give on the new European Critical Raw Materials Act, it would be good. Eldur, I don't know if you wanted to have a first crack at that answer. I know Ellert's got something to add as well.
Yeah. On the, I mean, all I would say is that these programs, we look at them and our VP of ExpLORANion, James, was part of the discussion when the European Union was in Nuuk quite recently. We are kind of, to be honest, we are reading up on the new act and how that can potentially support Greenland. They have said that they wanted to include that. The new list does not include a project in Greenland other than, I think, a molybdenum project that I know of.
Kind of the key there is that we are keeping active dialogue and looking at how we can gain attraction there as anywhere else. Ellert, if you have anything else to this.
I'd maybe just say that just as important, we are also looking at the same time and monitoring U.S. policy developments there. And funding opportunities that go along with it, with, for instance, U.S. Exim Bank or others. In short, we see meaningful opportunities on both sides of the Atlantic there, and we'll remain agile to benefit as much as we can from those acts.
Yeah. Okay. Thanks. The next question was on detail on commissioning delays, which actually I think we've probably gone through enough detail on now already. I'll take the third question now. How does the recent interest aggression to Greenland from Trump's administration affect Amaroq? That's probably one for you, Eldur.
Yes. I think overall, I think for Greenland as a whole, it puts a spotlight on that minerals in Greenland are important. They are vast. It's exciting and so on. That is a very good thing for Greenland as a whole. Our position in relation to any kind of geopolitical concern is that we feel that or we think Greenland should choose what Greenland wants to do. We do believe, though, however, that, and we can see that, that with the amount of interest, both from Europe, Denmark, and obviously US in Greenland, it will make a huge impact on developing these resources and infrastructure associated to them. Especially because none of these countries want some autocratic countries to do the same thing in Greenland. That will be, in our opinion, very, very positive for our operation as well as other operations in Greenland.
Okay. Super. Thank you. The next question is from Tim Huff. On the resource base, I know it's a year out, but having added so much resource in MRE4, how are you now thinking about MRE5? Is conversion drilling more important to you now than step-out drilling at Nalunaq? Or maybe your approach is for conversion at Nalunaq and resource addition from Nanoq?
Yeah. It is very much true. I think how we see it is that conversion drilling is important. Our underground drilling is up and running and underground sampling. Part of that conversion will also happen when we will start developing in the valley block. It depends on timeline when we can start that.
Once that valley block has a certain grade from drilling, previously with the deposit in Nalunaq, the core factor, basically when you go from a drilling grade to a development grade, has increased the resources quite significantly in Nalunaq. I think through underground drilling and underground development, as well as step-out drilling, so we're looking at below South Block to continue drilling there as well, will be a kind of a combining factor. You're right, Tim, that it will be critical for us from now until the end of the year to kind of finalize all of the assessment around resource. Much of that will also happen through development, if that makes sense. In terms of Nanoq, that is our growth, a huge growth potential for us, for sure. The beauty of Nalunaq, it is a flat area. We understand the structure well, we feel.
Our drilling went through the structure exactly as we had predicted last year. Our confidence level is very high with Nanoq, meaning that with systematic drilling there and definition, we feel we should be able to get to a stage where we have a resource. That obviously, time will tell, and drilling will tell us that. All in all, that assumption is how we are setting it up. Conversion drilling number one, two, and three in Nalunaq, some step-out drilling in Nalunaq, and underground development in Valley Block, which will give us some uplift in core factor, and new resource drilling in Nanoq.
Thanks, Eldur. Next question is from Charles, the analyst at Edison. Have you sold the 39 ounce gold that you produced in Q4 yet?
This is for Ellert.
We did not sell it in Q4, but I can say that we have completed a trial shipping to the refinery wherein this first production of gold was contained. We will provide a further update on Q1 on the 14th of May on that.
Thanks, Ellert. Okay. Next one from Simon Fickling. Can you link the numbers you gave on mining per day to throughput per day? Are you just 10 million tons mining? Sorry. Ten meters per day mining that you are currently doing give you 300 tons per day throughput?
No. It is kind of a, it is a little bit complex than just saying X many meters because we have, on the one hand, a ramp development. Ramp development is waste, but it allows you to access more material. Our emphasis has been on building up the ramp as quickly as possible to be able to access as many levels as possible. Now we have access to three levels, right? Once you then start having three levels, you start having five to six phases or five to six areas where you are mining. That will then automatically increase the potential for developing more meters. When you have more meters and you've done your fill, then you can do your stope meters, right? Stoping, which we don't take into the development meeting.
To simplify this, to a shorter answer to this, our target is really to get towards that 220-300 tons per day is to reach in around, I want to say, 14, 15, call it 15-20 meters development meters a day with a stoping following that of 100 tons from each stoping machine a day. This is a very simplified version of explaining it. There is obviously a mine plan, and you do not do this every day, and you do some time more ramp development and less and more port development. This is kind of give you an idea of how we are approaching it.
Thanks, Eldur. The next one is from Duncan. It is about sort of increased interest in Greenland. Do you expect to see more companies exploring in Greenland in 2025 versus previous years? Has expLORANion licenses awards increased this year?
Yeah. Kind of the answer is yes to both of these questions.
Great. Thanks very much. It's nice and simple. Next question again is from Charles, the analyst from Edison. What gold process recoveries are you achieving at the moment?
Sorry.
What process recoveries are you achieving at the moment? What gold process recoveries are you achieving at the moment?
Yeah. We have not put a statement on. We will update that in Q1. The main reason is that we want to get a long steady state production. This means weeks and weeks because then you get the right throughput, the machinery that has a certain effect of the machinery to make sure that it just stays on steady states to get the right recoveries. The recoveries at time are very good. You have to shut down, and then they dropped in the beginning and so on.
That is part of the commissioning. Again, this is something we will update you on in Q1 once we have even longer throughput to the plant.
Super. Thanks very much, Eldur. Actually, that comes to the end of the Q&A. There are no further questions. I would just say to all attendees, if you have any other questions that you want to ask offline, please get in touch direct. We will be happy to answer those anytime you need. With that, I will close the meeting. Thanks very much, everyone, for joining. Look forward to speaking again in May on the 14th. Have a good rest of your day.
Thank you.