Hello, this is Craig Brelsford with RedChip Companies. Thank you for joining today's event with Clinch Resources, which trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker CLCH. Joining us today is Bobby Gaylor, Executive Vice President of Investor Relations for Clinch Resources, and Thomas Marks, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. We will begin with a brief presentation in a moment, and then we will open the event to your questions. Welcome to everyone joining us today on X, YouTube, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms. To submit your question, we invite you to join us on Zoom. Use the link provided. Once in Zoom, click the Q&A button at the bottom of your window and type your question into the text box. Before we begin, please allow me to read the safe harbor statement.
This call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements pertaining to future financial and/or operating results, along with other statements about the future expectations, beliefs, goals, plans, or prospects expressed by management, constitute forward-looking statements. Any statements that are not historical fact should also be considered forward-looking statements. Of course, forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. Bobby, go right ahead.
All right. Can everybody hear me okay? Fantastic.
Yes. Can hear you just fine. Thank you.
Fantastic. Welcome everybody, and thank you for joining us today. We are Clinch Resources Limited. We are a newly listed Toronto Stock Exchange company. We did an RTO on the exchange on March 20th. We did a CAD 46 million IPO prior to the RTO. We spent the last three and a half years and CAD 100 million getting ramped- up on four different properties in West Virginia. We are a metallurgical coal company only, and we have over 111 million tons of resources under our NI 43-101 reserve report, 22 million proven and probable. We are currently fully permitted across all four of our properties, and I am happy to say that since the March 20th RTO, we have spent CAD 33 million on beautiful yellow Komatsu and Caterpillar brand new equipment that is currently at our mines and in working.
We have also bought a highwall miner that went to work a couple of weeks ago, and we bought a continuous miner for our first underground mine, Mine 8. All that equipment, which again, is critical to hitting my projections for 2027, which is 2 million + tons of production and sales, is in place, in situ, up and running. We have had also our first sales since original production began in May, which took place at the beginning of August. Obviously, we have sold several trains, and we have also sold our first 65,000 ton vessel, which is heading over to Europe as we speak. I will get into the presentation now. Again, our stock symbol is CLCH. We are currently on the TSX. We have started the early discussions with some U.S. banks for the dual listing into the U.S.
Our hope and anticipation is that we will be dual listed by the end of first quarter 2027. Again, about us at the high level, all of our assets are spread across 54,000 leased acres in West Virginia. We are located in the southwest part of West Virginia, in the triangle, as they like to call it, where West Virginia, and Kentucky all meet. This is where the Sewell seam is located and produced for this high-quality metallurgical coal. We have over 111 million tons on the recurrent reserve report. Additional at the RTO, we purchased 39% ownership of a sister company called JJ Resources that is being run by some of our former people, and the rest of the 60% is owned by our Founder, Jon Nix, and CEO, and some of his early investors that have been with him for the last 20 years.
The JJ Resources asset is the old Sewell Mountain complex that Jon and I owned on our previous life with Xinergy. So in some form or fashion, we have had control of this asset for some 17 + years. The asset is a brownfield project. It originally was developed by Pittston Coal Company back in the 1990s, and it was a direct feeder to United States Steel Corporation for some 30 years. This particular asset has 51 million tons of pure single seam mid-vol coal, which in the world of coal is the most coveted coal product out there. It fits any blast furnace in the United States and worldwide, and it is also a wonderful product for the specialty coal market, which is again, one of the areas that we plan on selling into. Corporate structure.
Since the RTO, obviously Clinch Resources is the new co that sits at the top. Active Resources is all of our U.S. assets located in West Virginia. Of this complicated looking little chart here, I just want you to focus in really on Aster Resources. One of the things we talked about going back 13 years ago is some of the ways we could do things differently in the U.S. coal market than historically has been done for 100 + years. One of those main things was to bring in some of the marketing arms of our product in-house versus hiring brokers 100% of the time or third parties and paying those fees. We'd like to capture that in-house, develop relationships with the end users ourselves, and more importantly, capture some of that income and keep it in-house.
We hired a 25-year veteran in the commodity space out of New York City. We moved him to Nashville, Tennessee, Franklin, Tennessee, to be specific. As of about two or three weeks ago, he's up and running and marketing our coal force, actively seeking our first recurring monthly contracts with end-user blast furnaces and also in the specialty coal space as we speak. We're hopeful to be able to announce those first contracts before Halloween. That's Aster Resources. That's something that's different in the coal space, and I think it's very important to develop those relationships with the end users ourselves and eliminate the middleman. Besides the fact that he's a 25-year veteran in the commodity space, not only market our met coal, but he could also market specialty coals and then other inputs that go into a blast furnace.
Everybody knows about the two main ingredients to make high virgin tensile strength steel, and that is iron ore and met coal. There's eight other ingredients, including limestone, dolomite, sinter pellets, for example, all profitable products that Cesar could also market for these end users, and that way, again, save them some time and efficiency and money as well. Of course, us capture some of that business. There's the JJ ownership. Catalyst JV is a blue gem mine in Kentucky that came with some early investors into our company. VCP is Virginia Carbon Products. That is a manufacturer of those sinter pellets. These sinter pellets are little 3-inch super high charge carbon pellets that are feedstock into blast furnace and the ferroalloy and ferrosilicon markets. A very profitable product that can be sold not just in the U.S. but internationally.
Again, another product for Cesar to sell through Aster. I'll touch briefly on the critical minerals. There is a slide that we'll gloss over here shortly on the critical minerals. Our plan for critical minerals is that being a met coal company of a brownfield project, we have a 30-year gob pile refuge, if you like, on property. I'll show you a satellite photo of that shortly. Inside of that refuge pile, as any met coal producing company has, is 17 critical minerals, and four of those minerals of size that the United States government, specifically the Department of Defense, has a very keen interest in right now. One of the reasons that met coal companies was added to the critical mineral list in the United States back in November of last year.
Our plan there is to partner with a third-party extractor, have them come to site, piggyback on our existing water and air permits, which saves a couple of years, and start running material through their patented technologies and extracting these minerals. We will do an 80/20 profit split with them. We are in the process of vetting out the final few candidates for that, and soon we will make a decision. Again, another income source for Clinch Resources. Why met coal? For those that are not terribly familiar with coal, there are two types of coal, thermal and met. Thermal is obviously used for electrical power generation solely. Met coal tends to go into the blast furnace market, which is still the only way to make virgin high tensile strength steel for all critical infrastructure products.
What we call critical infrastructure products can be everything from bridges, buildings above two stories, Department of Defense applications, and of course, more timely, if you want to fast-forward to today, things like cargo vessels, Super- Panamax vessels, which there has been over 50 sunk in the last 10 months in the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Arabia. Some of these Super- Panamax vessels are 1,000 ft long, double hold. The world was short Panamax vessels going into the war. Now they are 50 more short. We anticipate that that is going to be a robust industry. Again, that is going to all take virgin high tensile strength steel to produce, which bodes well for the met coal market.
The met coal market, if it is a certain quality, and all the assets that we put together meet this certain quality, that will qualify it for the specialty coal market. That is the ferrosilicon market, the ferroalloy market, all the way down to activated carbon, which is used from your municipal water treatment facility all the way down to your Brita water filter at home. Activated carbon is a burgeoning market that is exploding. Again, met coal can be turned into this specialty product, which again becomes things like activated carbon. Again, it is a great market. It is a very profitable market. It is a market that Jon Nix and I participated in heavily back in the days of Xinergy, so we have experience in it, and we expect 20% of our production to go into specialty coal sales.
Touching briefly on the fact that last November, a nice little tailwind for the met coal industry is that we were added to the critical mineral list. Finally, Washington got smart enough to realize there are different types of coal. While everybody was attacking electrical power generation, and of course, I would argue they should not be doing that, they finally realized that met coal is a different product and is critical if you want to grow a country, a city, a town, and an economy that takes growth, and growth means building things, and building things with high tensile strength steel is where it all starts.
By being added to this list, this section right here that I am circling specifically opens us up to a pot of money out of Washington, D.C., out of the Department of Defense, of over $2 billion that is being put to ensure that we onshore critical minerals and onshore critical manufacturing. Of course, the Department of Defense application is pretty high and pretty important, specifically talking to today. We have had our inroads into those discussions with the DoD already, and we have actually talked to third parties that help you with the process. Obviously, a pretty complicated process of filing, submitting paperwork to go after that stuff. This is the type of mine that we can use not only to grow Clinch, but also develop the JJ Resources opportunity as well, including capital to build the wash plant, prep plant, load out, and rail line.
That is something that has begun, and hopefully in the next quarter or two, we will have some pretty exciting announcements on that front. This chart right here is something I commissioned Skyline Corporate Communications to put together for me back in December last year. An important thing to know is that was pre-Middle East war. It showed why, I was trying to put some teeth as to why met coal pricing has had this nice little steady incline, even since when I rejoined Jon here at Clinch three years ago. It has gone from $160 to $275 a ton today, and there has got to be a reason why. After putting together this chart, the dark blue shows met coal production worldwide forecast for the next 10 years, and obviously it is in a pretty steep decline.
Why? Because of ESG for the last 18 years and this whole push for green power, i.e. solar and wind, which got hundreds of billions of dollars plowed to it, not much of an ROI. The lack of capital investment into new greenfield met coal projects worldwide declined or basically fell off a cliff. I think Australia has issued one new greenfield permit in the last eight years. The U.S. has also issued one new greenfield permit in the last eight years. You cannot just flip a switch and crank that over with the permitting regulatory environment that we still live in today, and start a new project. If you did today in the United States, you are talking from today, first train probably seven years.
There is a decline of production, which answers why you are seeing this pretty precipitous increase in the price of met coal that is going on $275 today as of this morning. We will be recommissioning the same group to put this chart together with IEA and EIA , which again, unfortunately only comes out for annual every December. With the advent of the Persian Gulf War, all the destruction that has gone on there, that obviously all this critical energy infrastructure that is being destroyed over there right now will have to be rebuilt. I anticipate this to be a much more drastic chart here in a couple of months when that comes out. Again, in a high level, we have 54,000 leased acres.
You add in JJ Resources, we have about a 120 sq mi imprint in West Virginia in the Sewell seam, metallurgical coal only. The basket of assets that our founder, Jon Nix, put together over the last seven and a half, eight years, through the bankruptcy process. We obviously had some prerequisites, and one of them was be the high quality metallurgical coal with certain chemical components that would qualify it for the specialty coal market as well, the blast furnace. Also, we picked out assets that didn't come with any hair. By hair, I define that as no asset retirement obligation liabilities we had to inherit, no health or black lung liabilities we had to inherit, and no reclamation bond issues that we had to inherit. We have zero.
That portends to a lower lifting cost, which we're projecting to be on the high- end at CAD 90 a ton. We're very hopeful that's going to come in once we get to critical scale, which is running 40,000 tons a month through our process recurring, that we're going to come in better than that. This is out of our NI 43-101 reserve report that came out last December. It shows you that we have over a 20-year mine life. Again, very conservative report, conservatively done, not using any extra spreads of equipment. How we could produce up to 900,000 tons a [month]. Again, we have three spreads of equipment at our first service mine already, so we're already beating that. We're contemplating purchasing the third set of surface equipment at the Lanes Branch right now, as of today. We're ramping that up pretty quick.
Lanes Branch is operating, is producing. We're selling out of it currently. Our first underground mine is Mine 8, and Mine 8 should be online and producing very shortly inside the month of October. That's exciting, and the first continuous miner will go to work with that, and that continuous miner has been purchased, is also on site. Here's some pictures of some of our actual infrastructure. That is our prep plant on the left. There's our load out, which is on the Norfolk Southern line on the right. All these assets are located in Gilbert, West Virginia, Hampton, West Virginia. The prep plant load out is 4.2 mi, separated by 4.2 mi, so very close. Our first underground mine is actually across the street from our prep plant.
We belt our coal straight from the mine mouth to the prep plant, so that saves me some more money on trucking right there. Mine 3, our second underground mine, which should be coming online towards the Christmas time, early to 2027, also exits out on the north side of the prep plant about 300 yards away from that facility you see right there. It'll also be directly fed into the prep plant. Just from luck of topography and geography, the first two of the first three underground mines are located in such a proximity to the prep plant that we can avoid the trucking.
Again, a very short haul down to the load out 4 mi away. Again, from the reserve port to show you where we get the 111 million tons of measured and indicated resources, the 22 million tons of proven and probable. We are currently permitted at all four sites for right at 7 million tons right now. We're producing out of that. How it works in West Virginia for not just us or typical met coal companies, is you want to keep a bullpen here, and depending on your company and your size and what you're producing annually. So where you have the next four plus years of production is fully permitted, so you're not worried about permits. We've actually filed the next two permits back in April. About this time next year, we expect those to get issued.
So as we increase production and we start to draw down on this, we are pulling from the 22 proven and probable and always having this bullpen ready to go. You always have that four-year cushion of permitting. I get asked all the time, is permitting still difficult under the Trump administration? Under the Trump administration and under now being on the critical mineral list, permitting has been streamlined in half. It has gone from a four-year lead cycle down to under two years. Very happy with the permitting situation. We have had no hiccups or issues on the permitting situation so far and do not really anticipate any Overview of that JJ asset. Again, it is 24,000 acres on its own, so it is a massive complex being a single complex. Again, this is the old Pittston Coal Company that operated it for 30 years.
Pittston Coal was, of course, famous for breaking up the unions and the coal, and it crescendoed with union members on strike and Virginia State Police shooting each other, and a few people getting killed, which was the death of Pittston Coal Strike. Jon has grabbed this asset, and it has been under control from different companies like Xinergy really since about 2008. It is a wonderful asset. I can tell you that the blast furnace industry in the U.S. is very excited about this asset coming back online. It does need to have a new slope and shaft built, a prep plant, and a load out. The rail tracks will have to be relaid again. We are anticipating, or I should say JJ's team, which is again, a bunch of our ex-guys, anticipating that to be an $80 million-$90 million type CapEx.
Again, this is where being on the critical mineral list and Washington, D.C., money could come in very handy. That process of restarting, excuse me, JJ Resources has begun. One of the first steps is commissioning Marshall Miller to do an updated NI 43-101 report. Simultaneous with that, they are drilling 16 additional boreholes on this property to drill past the Sewell seam into the Fire Creek seam, which there is a core sample from 37 years ago on that seam that shows it is the same similar quality to the Sewell seam. So we want to verify that, and we also want to verify through volumetrics how much is there. This would increase the 51 million tons known to be there and obviously make JJ more valuable, especially at today's pricing.
Again, straight from their historic 2017 report, which is the latest one, 51 million tons, 16 million proven and probable. Again, the core drilling is going to obviously hope to increase these two numbers right here. There is a page about Aster Resources. You can get our PowerPoint off our website under the investor tab, and then you can read about Cesar's background that we hired. He is ex-Cargill, he is ex-Jefferies, ex-Argentem Creek Partners. Been a commodities trader worldwide for the last 25 years, and this is how we are bringing in-house our marketing and sales and hoping to add an additional nice EBITDA stream to the company. There is an actual satellite photo of my refuse pile in situ. In the very front section right here is about a 4.5-acre footprint. Plenty of room for a third party to come in, bring in their technology.
There's 40 million tons estimated to be in this gob pile currently, and we're adding to it every day with production from Lanes Branch, soon to be adding production from our underground mines. They're never going to run out of feedstock. Our plan there is to partner with them, let them piggyback on our existing air and water permits, which saves them two years, and just do a revenue share. That way, I don't spend any of my CapEx. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert in critical minerals extraction. I'm not. We'll let them use their technology, their expertise, do that, and we'll just revenue share with them. Again, another way to add EBITDA to the company. This is an actual picture of the Fischer-Tropsch system that exists in Louisville, Kentucky, that we own 30% of.
Love to own the other 70% as well. This is the system that takes anything from wood chips to met coal and turns it into those sinter pellets that I talked about, another feedstock item, into the blast furnace and the ferro silicon markets. A very highly profitable product. It can be sold not just U.S., but worldwide. Again, another product for Cesar Canali to market through Aster and add, again, additional EBITDA to the company. This we hope to be fully functional in operation sometime in early 2027. Again, obviously, this particular patented system could be replicated as sales grow and it needs to grow. We just simply will build another unit. So upcoming momentum. Obviously, the CapEx that we've spent prior to RTO, people tend to forget that this company has raised over $100 million prior to the RTO.
A lot of work was done on getting some of these brownfield projects to the position they were in at RTO. The RTO money was used primarily, number one, most of our early investors converted to stock. Approximately $5 million didn't, so we paid that off from proceeds. The money went to securing the $33 million of equipment that we've purchased, that it's now in site, that we need to hit our milestones for next year, which is 2 million + tons. So that's the first big check mark. Easier said than done, obviously, last five months of work to secure that equipment, get it on site, get it ready and rolling. Obviously at Lanes Branch, it's producing, and we have sales. Next up will be mine number eight, which again, should be online shortly.
Then we have just started the early efforts of Mine 3, a much easier rehab project than Mine 8. Mine 8's a very large underground complex. So we've been working on that for the last two years, and the final steps of that are taking place right now. Then we'll move on to Mine 6, our last underground project, which should commence early first quarter 2027. JJ's timeframe is a little bit longer because there's more work to be done. The good news is it's a massive footprint. It was previously producing, so all the dirt that needed to be moved has been moved 35 years ago. I've been there several times. It's flat, it's ready for production.
Where you are going to have the open mine mouth, where you are going to have the load out, and where you are going to have the prep plant are far enough apart that all three can be worked on simultaneously. It is an about 20-month project from commencement, which has begun, to first sales, so that project has begun as well. Again, I am going to skip on this pretty quick, but I still have that same chart in there which shows the decline of met coal production. This particular slide speaks about the basic bull case for met coal going forward. I think, this is one of the reasons I came back to coal, specifically met coal, Jon, three years ago. You saw the world heading in a direction that it is now there, it is in, so we called that right.
If it does go that route, the use for high tensile strength virgin steel is going to be pretty strong for the next three, four decades, and the rest of my career for sure, and your children's career. That is why I came back. The proof in the pudding is the price. It just continues to nicely climb. As I told a gentleman, a broker earlier today, that he was telling me, we will see a three handle on met coal before we ever see a one handle again. So I like the sound of that. You can see just by organic growth, there needs to be more met coal production to meet demand, and that is starting now. That is not something that is five years off. That is a demand that is starting to pick up right now. A very unique situation.
I do not have any slides or any data to back this up because this all has been so dynamic just in the last three, four months. The repositioning of old relationships of import/export of met coal is all reshaping in real time right now. The U.S., which was not a player for such markets like India just a year ago, let alone 10 years ago, is all of a sudden in play. Some of the inquiries that we have are coming out of the Indian markets, the European markets as well. In fact, we believe that vessel that we sold to the broker is heading toward Europe as we speak. Current management bench looks like this. Jon Nix, Founder and Director. This is his third public met coal company. Brett Young. Brett Young came from Ferroglobe and Globe Metallurgical.
Interesting little fact here is our last couple of specialty coal contracts, we sold to Brett Young when he was at Globe Metallurgical. So we figured let us bring in one of the easy sources to access that market, and we brought Brett Young in, and he is heading that up as well as serving as our CFO. This is my third public company. I have been on everything from the New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq, my second go-around on the TSX. I am a capital guy. I like to say I do IR for fun and an operations guy. We have bought, I am proud to say, CAD 12 million + worth of Komatsu equipment in the last few months, and our family owns Power Equipment Company, which is the largest Komatsu dealer in North America.
Hopefully, we've been a help in getting very favorable financing with Komatsu Finance and Cat Financial through those relationships. All of our equipment brand new, with the exception of the high wall miner, continuous miner, that you buy used equipment there and refurb them. All of our equipment is new, under warranty, and under maintenance programs. That's outstanding because your lifeblood of any mining is the uptime of your equipment, and nothing stays up better than brand-new equipment. The key with Komatsu is Komatsu's worldwide parts distribution center is located in Paris, Tennessee.
If the worst-case scenario happens to one of my 100-ton, $2 million trucks, is the engine blows up, and it's under a maintenance and a warranty program, and those engines are sitting in a warehouse seven hours away, I can get one of Power Equipment Company's trucks to go pick it up and have that engine on site the next morning installed. We're very happy about that. One of the first big boxes to check for me to hit my targets for next year is to have the equipment to do it. I'm proud to say that we've got that equipment in place now. Again, highlights. I got high-quality metallurgical coal assets, including Mid-Vol. I qualify for the specialty markets. We're going to be selling at least 20% of our production into that.
We have a team, which is led by Jon Nix, fourth generation coal miner, third coal company that has experience in the coal patch, and specifically in West Virginia. This is my second go-around. We're going to be a low-cost producer. We've got 111 million tons, so I've got enough coal to mine under permit for the rest of my career and my children's lives. It's all about now at this point, executing, blocking, tackling, securing those first recurring monthly contracts, which I think that's what the next step that the marketplace is looking for, and hopefully we'll have those announcements out before Halloween. Existing infrastructure. We spent the last two years on these brownfield projects, fixing and refurbing all the critical infrastructure, like the prep plant and the loadout, all the way down to rollers and new belts. A new hopper at the loadout, for example.
All that stuff is computerized and brand new. We're ready to roll. We can load an 11,000 ton train in four hours, four to four and a half hours, so that's nice. That's critical as well. For example, this vessel that we just sold, we can store all that coal for that 65,000 ton vessel that we sold at the loadout. In the course of one day, we can load all of that coal onto a train and those trains, and head out to Hampton Roads for shipment. That's something that's nice to be able to talk about to an end user as well. Let's see here. There's a better picture of where we're located in West Virginia there at the three corners where West Virginia, and Kentucky meet. Or as we like to call it, Bigfoot Country.
It is beautiful topography, very challenging topography. It does get winter. It also, we had a rain event there, just a month ago. Once every 50-year rain is like they call it. Occasionally you get some weather to deal with there, but again, we are built to handle it, so it did not stop us too long and we are up and mining since. Board of Directors. Being currently a TSX company, we have a couple of Canadians on the board. That is Marc Marzotto and Belinda Labatte. The one I would like to point out here is, being added to the critical mineral list, being eligible now for 30 and 50-year 3% government money, by being added to that list.
General Russel Honoré was very critical in making some very key relationship introductions at the highest level, which have already been made, and the first couple initial meetings have been had. General Russel Honoré made his name. He was in charge of Hurricane Katrina cleanup, and obviously did a wonderful job there, and has a fantastic reputation in the military community. These are some charts, again, out of our NI 43-101 report, and I am not going to go over those. We currently have 355 million shares outstanding. Approximately 10%, 11% is insider held. Most of that is Jon Nix. People like the CFO, Brett Young, and myself are incentivized through options. My options are currently underwater, which is what you want to hear, because I am incentivized to execute on next year's plans to hit that 2 million ton production.
Our met coal company in the U.S. is valued on EBITDA and a multiple of that EBITDA. If we hit that 2 million ton + mark at today's pricing, I can easily do north of $200 million of EBITDA next year. The multiples in the met coal space, I am happy to say, are 6x-7.2x range. Obviously, if you do the math there, that is how I grow a stock from a $1.10, I have not looked at it today, so do not quote me on that, $1.10 to a $3.50 stock in 15 months. It is about, at this point, the hard lifting has been done. We are in production. We are opening up the second mine here shortly. It is about growing from 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 tons.
Hit that magic 100,000 tons a month, which that is where you get your big boy pants on in the coal world, on our way to 180,000 tons a month, so I can get north to that 2 million+ tons a [month] north target for next year, and then enjoy that multiple, and that is how I grow my stock. I think that is it. I would like to, I guess, do we open up for questions now, Craig?
Yes, Bobby. Thank you. Thank you for that excellent presentation. To submit your question, we invite you, first of all, to join us on Zoom if you're watching on the restream. Use the link provided there, and then once in Zoom, click the Q&A button at the bottom of your window and type your question into the text box. We already have several questions submitted, Bobby. Has the 65,000 ton shipment now taken place? Has the high wall miner commenced production?
The high wall miner has commenced production. Tomorrow will be two weeks. There was a little delay there. It's not a funny story to me, but it is a funny story of how it was delayed being shipped from once we purchased it to our site. A little thing like the road that we had to pull it out on got covered over by some dirt, and the state of West Virginia deemed that as a reclaimed road. So we had to actually file a new road permit, which delayed it for two months, believe it or not. But it's up and running. We actually did some good maintenance on it once it was demobed. That's the perfect time to do it. Most importantly, we put a brand-new electric motor on there.
But it's been producing for two weeks now, I'm happy to say, and that's obviously going to help drive Lanes Branch alone. By the end of October, we're targeting 80,000 tons a month being produced just out of Lanes Branch. 65,000 ton vessel. I have not gotten updated information this week because Thomas Marks, who's joined me, who's under me at the IR, we've been on some virtual conferences this week. But as of Friday of last week, four of the six trains for that have already been shipped. We get paid at the hopper once it's shipped, so that's nice. I would assume the last two trains went out this week. I'll probably get confirmation of that tomorrow. Goes to Hampton Roads, and obviously, after that it's a broker's responsibility to load the ship and off it goes.
It's going to Europe, and I found out that it looks like it's heading to Poland. That's very interesting to me, because if anybody's kept up with geopolitics, and hopefully you do, you know that Poland's gearing up. Gearing up for what they anticipate to be a confrontation with Russia, and of course, it makes sense that all of a sudden they're pulling in some met coal, high tensile strength met coal, probably for defense reasons as well. Yeah. All that stuff's happening.
Thanks, Bobby. Many people are using the raise hand feature. Thank you very much for your interest. We ask that you use the Q&A button. Click that. A text box will appear that you can then type in the question that you have and submit it that way. We cannot take spoken questions today because of the great interest out there, but we do appreciate your texted in questions using the text box in Zoom. Bobby, what are the sale terms of the 65,000 ton shipment, DES CFR? Does Aster manage the on-the-water freight, or is it the buyer?
It depends on how you sell it, and we are not releasing terms of the deal, but they were good terms. It was through a broker, and obviously, Aster did have a hand in that. It was actually a broker that reached out to us that was in a bind and needed this particular quality of coal and wanted to know if we had the quantities to produce, and we did. We cut a quick deal. What we are hoping is that you get them this quality coal, they get pregnant, and more orders come in. That is why we fulfilled this order. Obviously, it is a good payday for us as well. That particular deal was an FOB price. Again, I get paid at the hopper.
It is the responsibility of the broker once it leaves on the train to handle all the logistics from leaving this site you see on the picture in the background here to Hampton Roads, load the vessel. On this particular sale, that is all on the broker himself. If Cesar negotiates the deal himself and there are no brokers involved, yes, he will be handling all the logistics.
Great color, and congrats on the progress from the train to the full vessel. Can you give some color on volume expected in the first quarter and fourth quarter run- rate and 2027 expectations?
Yeah. We are ramping- up. Again, any mining process, you do not flip a switch and hit 180,000 tons production. It is all about ramping up each spread at a time. I am very happy with the progress at Lanes Branch. It is actually a tad bit ahead of schedule, even with the rain event, mainly because, unlike the reserve report, which only assumes one spread of equipment at each property, Lanes Branch today already has three spreads of equipment, a high wall miner and two surface spreads. The third surface spread, I just found out this morning, is being contemplated to be purchased already. It is a big footprint at Lanes Branch, so there is room for five spreads to be spread out, and nobody is running over each other. We are ramping- up as fast as we can.
We hope that particular property be on its own at 80,000 ton run- rate by the end of October, in 30 short days. Mine 8, which is our first underground mine, electric powered continuous miner, is literally weeks away from commencing operations with its first continuous miner, and then we will be adding a second continuous miner around the Christmas time, early 2027. That gets Mine 8 to around 45,000-50,000 tons a month production. Mine 3 has just commenced that rehab. It is a much shorter, easier rehab than Mine 8. Mine 8 is a very large underground complex. Mine 3 is substantially smaller, so it will be cheaper to bring online, quicker to bring online. That also will be a continuous miner operation that we anticipate another 40,000-50,000 tons out of it. Then we move to Mine 6.
It is pretty much a carbon copy of Mine 3. Start off with one continuous miner and moving into two. I hope to have that online and producing by the end of first quarter of 2027, another 40,000-50,000 tons. All that math adds up to well north of 200,000 tons. What you do is we are going to produce for what we are selling. Let us let those contracts come in first to meet that demand, plus a little bit so you have surplus to get the next contract. Then, of course, you can dial back so you are not running everything full tilt to meet production. Our ramp-up schedule is to, by the end of this year, exit north of 100,000 tons a month of production from the mines, growing to north of 180,000 tons a month by the end of first quarter.
Thanks, Bobby. Coverage has highlighted brownfield assets without legacy liabilities. For viewers who do not know Appalachian Coal, what legacy liabilities are you avoiding, and why does that matter?
A lot of times when you buy some of these assets, it comes with the liabilities of the bankrupt or reorg company, including previous health issues or black lung liabilities. The company didn't do reclamation, so they have reclamation liabilities. We have some peer companies that are very good companies, but their reclamation liabilities are just shy of $1 billion. When you have that, you have to burden all your production for these liabilities, asset retirement obligations, et cetera. One of the prerequisites for Jon Nix putting these assets together was we had to be able to buy these assets and leave those liabilities behind at the bankruptcy court. That's what we've done. We literally have zero asset retirement obligations, black lung health, reclamation bond.
As you saw in that satellite photo of our refuge, we reclaim as we mine. You could see the growth of new grass going up the hill as we expanded that refuge going up the hill. As we expand, we reclaim the previous sections now. There's no better time, there's no more efficient time, there's no more cheaper time to do it than today. While the equipment's on-site, in situ, go ahead and reclaim, put it behind you. We did the same thing at Xinergy. As we'd open up one new section of a surface mine, we would take that overburden and fill in the previous section and spread seed and just reclaim as we went.
Please tell us again your 12 and 24-month earnings estimate and reasonable multiple expected.
I can give you the 12-month because I don't know a 24-month forecast yet. 12-month, we are expecting to do north of 2 million tons next year. At today's coal pricing, that portends to be somewhere north of $200 million of EBITDA. U.S. met coal companies today are a multiple of anywhere from 6x to 7.2x. The differentiator of where you fall in that category does go back to what other hair or overhang do you have on top production, like asset retirement liabilities, reclamation. All these liabilities that you have to burden can also affect your multiple. We anticipate that it'll take a quarter or two for the market to realize we don't have that before we start getting it, and we expect to be on the higher- end on that multiple. Proof will be in the pudding once we get there.
Ask me in six months when we start to see what kind of multiple we get. If I got a lower multiple, I would be out there arguing that we should be qualifying for a higher multiple just because of the fact we do not have some of this overhang and hair. Again, proof is in the pudding after a couple of quarters to show what our lifting costs actually are going to be. We are forecasting $90 a ton. By not having those liabilities we talked about, that probably right there is saving me anywhere from $15 - $18 a ton right there. I have got to demonstrate that in real time with announcements. That is why it is so critical.
Get up and running, get this coal sold, get those numbers out there each quarter so we can start taking advantage of the marketplace knowing what we do not have to burden our lifting costs with.
You are a Tennessee company with West Virginia mines listed in Toronto. Why the Toronto Stock Exchange?
The Toronto Stock Exchange and the Australian Exchange are the two best exchanges for mining companies on the planet, number one. Number two, Jon's first two public coal companies were taken public by Canaccord Genuity, and specifically a banker named Graham Saunders, who is still with Canaccord and still in business. That was an easy phone call for us to list on the TSX with Canaccord as our banker and Graham as the lead. It made just too much sense to do that. This is my second go around the TSX. It has been a different ride than 13 years ago, unfortunately not in a good way. They have tightened the ship up there from a regulatory standpoint. Canada itself is in change mode right now, as everybody obviously knows about.
It was an easy uplist, and it was time to get public based on some financings that we did to get to this point, that some notes and stuff were coming due, and it was time to get public. That said, the discussion of dual listing into the U.S. had been going on since we went public. Once things calm down on the equipment purchases, getting mines open, getting the first sales, we have pivoted to discussions with some major U.S. institutions about leading us in a syndicate for a dual listing into the U.S. My preference, having been on the New York Stock Exchange before in a prior life, is to always be on the New York Stock Exchange. That's something we'll be shooting for. Just know once we start, it's at least a five-month process. It's an F-1 filing.
That alone is a couple months, and then once you submit it to the SEC for comments, that's the big black hole. That can be another two months to three months. It's a five to six-month process, but we are looking to make some decisions on that here coming up shortly. If we can pull that off, then we're looking at uplisting at the end of first quarter 2027.
Thank you very much, Bobby. We're running out of time. We're going to wrap this up before the top of the hour. We only got another minute remaining. Bobby, if you don't mind, I'll give some information on how participants can get more information about your company. That would be to reach us at 1-800-REDCHIP, or email us at clch@redchip.com. Please also visit the investor information page for Clinch. It's clchinfo.com. There you can view and download the investor presentation and fact sheet and sign up for news alerts on Clinch Resources. Watch Small Stocks, Big Money, RedChip's program featuring exciting small cap companies on Bloomberg TV every Saturday night at 7:00 PM and on CNBC every Sunday at 11:00 AM.
Finally, join RedChip's next webinar with 60 Degrees Pharmaceuticals Tuesday, September 29th at 4:15 PM U.S. Eastern. Register for all RedChip webinars at redchip.com/events. Thanks to our many participants today. Thank you, Bobby.
Thank you. Thank you. Always enjoy it.