Okay, in Colombia. I think if any of you sat through presentations of other companies today, maybe AngloGold or Aris Mining, if they presented, you heard how great it is. I am up here to tell you that with the new government that came into power in early August, it is even more bullish than my wildest expectations. I will be honest, I had high expectations. This country is open for business. They are calling the new president of Colombia a cross between Bukele and Milei. I think he is actually his own person, and he is doing a wonderful job. They immediately came into Colombia, first thing they did was release 12 areas that were restricted from mining, saying, "These are now open for business. Let us go." Very recently, the U.S. here, this country, came down. Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, came and signed two MOUs with Colombia.
One of them was on critical minerals, and you will see in a second how that plays into us. Although we have mainly a gold deposit, there is tungsten, and as you can see, there are lots of mines in Colombia. This is the oldest democracy in South America. It is the only country in South America that has never been subjected to any kind of a military coup, and it has a government system that is somewhat similar to this country in the U.S. in terms of check and balances between the national government and its departments. I am zooming in quickly to our project. We are in a state or department, as they called it, named Caldas. We are right next door to Aris Mining's Marmato mine, which is currently in construction and expected to flip the switch, so to speak, later this year to produce 200,000 ounces.
Before I go into our Guayabalos project, which we will look at today, that is our flagship project and our big discovery on it. Location, location, and location. We are right on the Pan-American Highway. The hydropower lines traverse the highway. There is actually a diesel that traverses that highway as well, which one could tap into if they wanted to. There are about 150,000 people living within 30-ish square kilometers of the project, and there are about 7 million people living within about 200 square kilometers of the project.
So we have got roads, we have got power, and we have got labor, and that is an excellent place to be starting out. Now you just need to solve the geology and an eventual mine. Let us dig in. So I have zoomed in now to the Guayabalos project to get your bearings. You can see that Pan-American Highway and the hydro lines.
The semicircle at the bottom center of the page, that is not us. That is Aris Mining's Marmato mine. As I mentioned, we will be completing construction to be a 200,000 ounce per annum mine later this year. All the other semicircles, excluding the one that is beige, are targets that we as a company generated through grassroot exploration beginning really in early 2022. The dotted circles, we still consider grassroot targets. Some of them had drilling and have had a discovery hole on them of some sort. The solid circles, namely Apollo and Trap, are what we deem major discoveries. We are going to look in a lot of detail at Apollo because that is our advanced discovery, and we will mention Trap at the end. The beige oval is key. That is where we intend to build the mine in the future.
We intend to build a 15,000 ton per day mill in that location. You will notice a 3-km underground exploration adit. We are going to start construction of that to go to Apollo in November of this year. It will take us two years to reach Apollo. Why are we starting it now? Because we expect to be a licensed project, as I will show you in a minute, in 2028, have a feasibility study in the first half of 2029 completed, and hence start construction. If we had to do a 2-km tunnel starting in 2029, that would push potential production of this project out into a later date. With that in place, we will be able to produce early in the next decade, and that puts us on a very rare path in terms of single asset companies out there in the matrix of mining.
A schematic looking at that tunnel from a section view, you can see the area where the plant will be built on the right. What is important about that tunnel, about 1,000 m below surface. As you can look at our drill results, that is really key because for the underground portion of the project, we want to be in our ramp zone. That is the area shaded in red with the red drill holes, because that is the high-grade portion of the deposit, and accessing that early will drive NPV and IRR of the project. That makes a lot of sense. We will combine that with the open pit at the top that we intend to build. Let us dig in. We announced our maiden mineral resource estimate on September the 8th. In my mind, very impressive.
First estimate out of this project, it came in between you add indicated plus inferred. I will leave you to do that, but the number is north of 5 million ounces of gold. It is broken into 3 sections. The upper section is for the open pit. The impressive part about that is the grade of the indicated is over 2 g per ton. It is 2.06 to be exact, and the strip ratio of that pit is 3.4 - 1. What I am going to show you in a minute is that will be the absolute worst stripping ratio we will ever report here. It is going to get better. I am hoping we will be able to get it down to 2 - 1 with more drilling. The middle section of deposit is the underground below the pit, but above 1,000 m above sea level. Then the deposit changes.
Really, we have two deposits, an upper and a lower. Similar to Aris Mining's Marmato, we go into a reduced intrusion-related vein system at depth. That is what we call the ramp zone, and you can see that, and that is much higher grade. The mainly inferred at this point, it is almost 5.4 g per ton, and this is a bulk system. These are not narrow veins that we are looking at. These are bulk intercepts and will be bulk mined. Let us start with the pit. I mentioned a 3.4 - 1 strip ratio. You can see that in what we call open pit shell 4, which is the bottom one.
When you look at the early life of the pit shell 1, pit shell 2, pit shell 3, the strip ratio is much lower, under 2 - 1 probably for the first three or four years of future production here. The areas that are gray in the block model, those are areas that either had below cutoff grade or zero grade. Most of that is undrilled or poorly drilled. As I am going to show you, we are finding a lot of above cutoff grade metal in that area, hence why I know for a fact the strip ratio is going to even get better as we continue to drill. Let us look at it now. So that dotted or dashed, sorry apologize, outline is the shell of the pit. Anyone technical might ask why does the pit look like that with jagged edges?
That is simply because it is adjusting for the topography. We are in mountainous topography, so that is how it looks when topography is taken into account. Any assay result that you see that has a green shade in the background was announced post the mineral resource estimate. In fact, the mineral resource estimate contained 115,000 m of diamond drilling. We have already drilled about another 45,000 m since. We have 13 rigs on site, and we are drilling at a rate of about 8,000 or 9,000 m per month. All of those hits that you see in green were into areas that were deemed waste in the pit. In the north part, we are finding not just above cutoff grade, but high-grade material, including 135 m at over 2 g from just above surface.
Interestingly, this is the shallow halo zone surrounding a breccia body in the center, and most of that material or that metal that we are hitting, it is an oxide or partially oxidized rock. We will not be building a heap leach here. It will be a conventional gravity CIL circuit, but that will be very cheap, obviously, to mine, given how soft the rock is because it is weathered.
I cannot say to you that as we drill the circumference of the pit over the next six months, it is all going to be mineralized, but a lot of it will be over a 0.3 g per ton cutoff, hence why we are really bullish on this pit. Because when you look at open pits, it is not the grade of the pit that matters, it is the grade divided by the strip ratio that matters because you got to mine all of that.
This will look very attractive. Moving into the middle section, this would be the lower grade section of the deposit. If you look at the resource, the average grade is about 2.1 g per ton. The mining method for underground here that we are planning will be something called sub-level open stoping. This is a very bulk method. Many mines that use this method have cutoff grades at current gold prices of well under 1 g, so margins, even in this midsection, will still be robust. You can see the block model. That is where it is gray with a bunch of colors. Where it is white is where we have either no drilling or not enough drilling at this point to qualify for the block model. The outline that is black and the dashed blue is the outline of the breccia body that hosts the bulk of our mineralization.
That blue dashed area is a new extension. This is post the resource. The discovery of that extension was a surprise. The highlight of that was 141 m at almost 5 g per ton gold equivalent, including 38 g at north of 15 g per ton. We have one of our 10 rigs focused on this area, 3 rigs on the pit. The balance is drilling the ramp zone. We are looking at a plan view at depth. It is 750 m above sea level. What is exciting about this besides its high grade? This is a reduced intrusion-related system. It is the veins related to a reduced intrusion that are driving the gold into the breccia matrix and bringing out this bulk mineralization. You can see where the block model. The circumference of that breccia, we estimate to be about 1,500 m around.
The block model covers 315 m or only 20% of the area of that breccia body. We have a horrible delay with assays like most of the industry right now, 90 holes outstanding, including about 20 from ramp. Most of them around that circumference that we have drilled have hit visible gold, some of it quite impressive. Those two assay results on the left that you see, those are post mineral resource. Those were not included. Our bet and our hope is that we have only tested 20% of the area of potential of ramp, and then this can grow by leaps and bounds as we continue to drill around this circumference. The second piece to the ramp zone is the vertical. On the left side is the Apollo system, on the right side is Aris Mining's Marmato Mine and Deposit.
Their Marmato Deeps, that is what they are in construction on and about to start production on, where they will produce most of their ounces, has been drilled by over 750 vertical meters, and it remains open. They have more than 6 million ounces of total resources in Marmato Deeps. You flip over to us, the block model for our resource estimate only covers this part that is shaded in a salmon color. It only goes down 350 m. Obviously, with the caveat that I cannot promise what the assay lab will bring back, if you look at those drill holes, those yellow stars indicate visible gold intersected. If the deep one on the left-hand side comes back with grade that might be mined, we will effectively have doubled the vertical dimension of the ramp zone.
My bet is that both these systems are going to go well over 1,000 m vertical because that is intrusion related, and that is typically what happens. Big systems, Marmato's total resource in all categories is about 8.7 million ounces.
It has been in production for more than 500 years. We do not know the historical production, but it is millions of ounces. 1.75 km away is Apollo Brand new greenfield discovery. It is virgin on the ground, no artisanal mining. Very, very simple to do here, and I am going to bet you that in time, we will drill this to north of 10 million ounces ourselves as we continue to drill. The last thing to mention is our Trap system. That is, you are looking at when you look at the arrow pointing in white, that is the exploration adit that we are going to be starting in November.
It's very close to Trap. Trap is an earlier stage system, so I don't have a crystal ball to tell you what I think will happen here. But we have drilled it very loosely over 1.4 km in a northwest-southeast direction. We have found a sheeted vein system that overprints the pyrite halo of a porphyry system. The pyrite halo is carrying continuous gold grades, kind of in the 0.3 - 0.5 range, and then the sheeted vein lets juice it, and we get some amazing intersections. As we move more southeast, the porphyry portion of the system dissipates, so we get more discrete veins. Up in the north, we get big bulk intersections, many of them including 630 m at over one gram starting right from surface. Multiple intercepts like that.
This makes a lot of sense for us to put money into right now given it locates almost directly beside where the plant will be built. The hope here is that in time, we'll be able to build a resource here and an eventual mining front. If this can only contribute 50,000 incremental ounces per annum to the mill, it will be a home run, and there's a chance here it might contribute a lot more as we drill and force this discovery to see what it evolves to. I'm pretty bullish on this. Two rigs drilling here by the end of October from surface. We will be drilling it from underground from this exploration adit in 2027, and I think the future looks bright. Key milestones outside of drilling a lot of holes outstanding, as I mentioned.
We have accelerated this project, and before someone asks me, "Well, how do you do this with only a maiden resource out? You don't have a National Instrument 43-101 PEA or FS out yet." We're doing two parallel paths. There's the Colombian route. We'll be filing for the environmental license for this project the middle of 2027. That follows Colombian law. As I mentioned, we'll be filing for a 15,000-ton per day mill. While we're doing that, between now and the end of 2027, we're going to drill something like another 130,000 m of diamond core. And that will feed an updated mineral resource estimate towards the end of 2027. I am fairly confident that our resource will grow to a total number of ounces of somewhere between 7 and 8 million ounces on a gold equivalent basis by that timeline. That will feed a PEA.
We expect to get a decision from the environmental authorities in Colombia sometime in the middle of 2028. Confident it will be positive, so we'll be licensed. By the end of 2028, we'll have one more resource update. Maybe we'll get to 10 million ounces by then. That would be a good goal, and that's what we hope to do. That will then feed a feasibility study that will come out sometime in the middle of 2029, and that will be the construction decision point to build this project. That would mean that you will produce from this project, if all goes well, sometime in 2031. That's a pretty fast timeline for projects today. I mentioned 15,000 tons per day. Obviously, I don't have an economic study, so I can't guide you on what that can mean.
But if you look at our open pit in indicated grade and think about that blended with Ramp, pick a number. You have the fun, 3 g maybe. You can do the math at 15,000 tons and see what the potential of this project is. Hint, hint, it would be one of the top 20 largest gold-producing mines in the world if we can do at that rate. Okay? Our last project in Colombia was Continental Gold's Buriticá. That produces around 300,000 ounces per annum. This one's going to be bigger in terms of annual production. With that said, any questions? We have time.
Yeah, we have time for questions. Does anyone got a question for Ari? Maybe I might kick it off. So Ari, when we think about the higher grades shoots within the Ramp breccia, how do you actually target those? And then when we think to 2027, is there any plans to test that depth extension of Ramp? As you said, it could go quite deep, so that would be interesting to hear.
Yeah. Okay. So two-part question. The first part is, so Ramp consists of very high-grade shoots with modest grade in between. The simplest and best way to test them is to just drill in different directions. Okay? So we're drilling north-south or south-north and east-west or west-east, and that seems to be the magic bullet. You pick up these shoots that way, and then once you have a shoot with two holes, two pierce points, you can then target in three dimension. They are vertical, so that's what you target, and that's where we find the very high grades. The second part of your question is targeting the deeper parts of Ramp. Track-mounted rigs are required. The first one arrived at site on Saturday, couple days back, and there are three more on the way. We think we can drill down to sea level. Okay?
So we would extend the block model about another 700 m deeper from surface. It is relatively expensive deep drilling. Believe it or not, our all-in drilling costs, even with directional drilling, is only $300 a m. It's Colombia, and there's drillers around. But ideally, let's get that tunnel in to Apollo in two years, and then we'll be able to really pound Ramp with drilling at that point.
Okay, brilliant. Well, please join me in thanking Ari Sussman's presentation. Thank you.
Thank you, everyone. Appreciate it.