Thank you for joining Noble Capital Emerging Growth Virtual Equity Conference. I am Mark Reichman, one of Noble's Senior Research Analysts. Today, we are joined by Mr. Ned Jalil, Chief Executive Officer, and Eduardo Cervantes, Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations of Collective Mining. Collective trades in Canada on the Toronto Stock Exchange and in the United States on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol CNL.
Thank you very much, Mark, and welcome, everyone. Good afternoon, good morning, wherever you are calling from. I would like to spend this time to walk you through our [audio distortion] presentation and corporate presentation and the exciting assets that we have in Colombia. Towards the end, we will have some time to take your questions. Moving on, we are in Colombia. The team who has formed Collective is actually a mature team in Colombia. They are the team that formed Continental Gold, which is the largest gold-producing mine in Colombia today. It is now under the operation of Zijin. It was transacted on to Zijin for over $2 billion in 2020. So a very well-known team, very trusted, experienced in Colombia, obviously experienced in greenfield exploration, and in also building projects and operating mines.
You can see as of June 30, we had over $90 million. We have a solid share structure and we have management in line in terms of ownership with investors and all of our shareholders. As you can see from the pie chart, over 45% in ownership. We are covered by a number of well-renowned analysts, as you can see on the right-hand side. Colombia. Why Colombia and what is so exciting for us about Colombia? If you have been following the news, recently Colombia have elected a new president and a vice president with a new government coming in just in August, so fresh new government. They hit the thing. If you are following Colombia's news and social media, you can see how much transformation has already taken place. This is a get-to-work government.
They are serious about [audio distortion] similar to what happened in other South American countries where there is this attraction into a more stable, more safe zone and open for business. With that, I am going to highlight a number of things that just recently happened. September 8, if you heard or you have seen Marco Rubio, our Secretary of State was in Colombia and he signed a US-Colombia Critical Mineral and Rare Earth Memorandum of Understanding, MOU as we call it. Another set of things that are very interesting for us, there were 10 resolutions that were [audio distortion] held. The permitting process in Colombia is 12 months, and this is, when compared to other jurisdictions it takes years after you apply to get your permit. In Colombia, under the law, you apply for the permit within 12 months to get your license or your permit granted.
Mining code has been in effect in law in Colombia. No title has been expropriated, so very exciting place to be [audio distortion]. Another thing that is happening, which is very recent and will happen in November, the government will be in New York in what they call the Miracle Week, where they will be presenting over 100 capital projects, attracting foreign investments into the country, showing how serious they are into bringing foreign investments into the country and how open Colombia is for doing business. Zooming in on where we are, we the state. As it is called in Colombia, the states are called departments.
We are in the Caldas Department, and Caldas is in the heart of Colombia, as you can see, and it is known for coffee and mining, which is a great place to start this. What we have in Colombia, we have two projects, San Antonio and Guayabales. Guayabales is the cornerstone for us and it is what I am going to dive deep on today. It is next to Marmato and just so you know, Marmato has been mined for over 500 years now. It is part of Aris Mining and Aris is completing the construction of a 5,000 ton per day. Their plan is to have it done before Christmas and it is a mature asset and I will be doing some comparisons as we go through our asset. They are targeting 200,000 oz production from that asset.
What is so attractive for us, in addition to being in a mining camp, is look at the [audio distortion] Pan-American Highway, the largest highway in country that connects the north to the south. We are right along the highway, and you can see the little symbols of power. We have power running along the highway. We have water in the Cauca River. Nearby of two main towns, the town of Marmato, the town of Supía, and within that vicinity, we have enough adequate labor supply so that when we move into construction, we can pull from these towns and these areas. Let us take you deeper into Guayabales. I am zooming in on that map on the left-hand side, which is Guayabales. You can see the highway again, you can see the power lines, and I want to take you through some of what these circles mean for us.
That bottom circle, the blue one, is Marmato mine. Then you have next to it, we are 1.75 km as the bird flies between us and Marmato, lies the Apollo cornerstone asset in this project. Then you will see these dashed circles, and there is this other solid circle called Trap. Trap is another discovery that is matured, but it is a discovery, and I will be taking you through that. The other dashed lines are other potential greenfield targets that we have identified. Some had some hits in it. You can see some holes there in the red boxes, such as X Target, such as Box, such as Emmy. Those are still potential. We plan to drill them in the coming years. In the brownish oval, that circle is where we will have our infrastructure. That is where we are going to have our plant, the processing plant.
That is also where we are starting within the next several weeks our exploration. You can see that tunnel going all into Apollo and with a crosscut going into Trap so that within two years we would be at the edge of Apollo, and we would be able to drill it from even underground. This is a schematic of what I just explained in plan view. We're taking a slice in the cheese as a slice in the mountain. You can see on the right-hand side where the future mine is going to be. That's where the plant is going to be, the processing plant exploration adit or tunnel, how it goes through and passes through Trap and the other systems along the way, and then it targets our main system, which is Apollo. We plan to intersect Apollo at the heart of what we call [audio distortion] below surface.
That is the richest zone of the deposit. It's very exciting for us. Why? Because it is rare that one would actually enter a deposit at the high-grade area. We're lucky where the geometry here, where we actually enter into the rich area of Apollo in that Ramp Zone. You can see in red color some of these very attractive hits in Ramp Zone. Above a Ramp Zone, we have the pillar which is a little bit lesser grade than Ramp Zone, but still very economical and part of what would potentially be our mine. Then on top of that, closer to surface, we have a surface mine as we call it, an open pit mine.
Jumping in on Apollo. We just released in September our maiden resource. It's our initial resource. You can see that we have a pit resource, and you can see the grade of the pit is north of 2 g equivalent gold in the indicated category and the lower section. Those two sections we plan to mine in an underground bulk mining method, called sublevel open stoping which is a very attractive mining method because you can [audio distortion] And at the same time, you do not need to deal with subsidence, which is very attractive for us. Additionally, you can put the tailings, which is the waste product after you remove the minerals from back underground as what we call it paste backfill, and that fills the voids back underground.
You can see, for example, I'm not going to walk you through every line, but just highlight some points to you. You can see how the grade in the middle zone is also around 2 g/ ton. As you go into Ramp Zone, which is the majority of the potential growth for Apollo, you can see how the grade jumps to the 4 and 5 g/ ton equivalent gold. This is a section inside the pit, and the key point I like to bring to your attention with regards to our pit is that you can see that shell 4 is the reason [audio distortion] But as we get to that, we have shell 1 and 2 that covers the first couple of years of the mine life. Look at the strip ratio, which is the ratio of waste to ore.
We're less than 2:1 strip ratio, very attractive pits. What is beautiful [audio distortion], you have sitting right on top of that ore body, right on top of that deposit with tungsten, copper, and silver, and then it grows into more of a gold and silver system. Here we go on the left-hand side, that copper subzone, on the right, that tungsten subzone. I will tell you, the U.S. government is very interested. They have already reached out to us, and we had several meetings on processing that tungsten in the U.S. and getting the U.S. support for this critical mineral. You can see the tables below outlines those resources at this stage.
Exciting thing for us is that, this resource includes the shallow tungsten area, but what we started seeing is these hits at a deeper part of the deposit, you can see it on the right-hand side, which is giving rise to the potential of that tungsten continuing into the deposit and potentially for us as we drill, identifying these areas of high tungsten grades where we can process it as a tungsten source. This is looking at the pit from bird's-eye view. The dashed line is the outline of the pit. What I want to give for you today, what is exciting for us here, after we develop that resource, the one I shared with you just recently, we have started to drill within the pit in the areas that we have not drilled on surface. You can see some of these holes that are being drilled.
What is exciting for us, after we completed that block, the resource, we started getting these assays back, and we are looking now at potentially filling a lot of this void with mineralization above the cutoff grade of 0.3 g equivalent gold. You can see a lot of these assays are even way higher than that. Just to give you an example, 135 m at 2 g / ton equivalent gold, as you can see in the northern side. What is that going to do for that resource? It will effectively, in our next update of the resource, that will reduce strip ratio because these now are areas that have not been drilled before. In the resource, they are being marked as waste rock, but after we finish the drilling update the block model into ore blocks, that brings the strip ratio down.
We are very excited and we see the potential of adding significant material in this open pit shallow zone. Now moving deeper. On the right-hand side, you see a section in the breccia, which is our deposit where the fluids came up, and you can see the middle section. We will start with the middle section, and then in the next slide, I will talk to you about the Ramp Zone. Again, you will see that on the left-hand side. You see it in section on the right-hand side, and you see a level plan, as we call it, on the left-hand side. You can see the distribution of metal. But what is also important for us is that inside the breccia outline, these white areas are areas that have not been drilled. All of this is potential for growth for us, right?
As we drill more within this breccia and potentially get them, this will increase the amount of material that we have in this middle zone. Moving into Ramp Zone, this is very exciting for us. We have only drilled 20% of Ramp Zone. Whether you like to call this a donut or a bagel, you can see where the block model high burgundy colors and red colors and yellow and orange colors, that is what is in the block model as a resource today. You can see around that, we do not have much of that drilled. Only like what I said, only 300 m out of this [audio distortion] have been drilled.
We have some of these holes that we have started drilling to complete the full picture, and you can see these are not in the block model, but you can see where we are seeing. Look at the stars where we have look at some of the intercepts on the western side, and that is where the growth in Ramp is going to be. I will even show you more on this slide vertically. On the left-hand side, you can see Apollo, and you can see in that salmon dark red color in Ramp Zone at [audio distortion] this section of Ramp Zone that entered into this resource update.
You can see how much of the rest of that breccia body is open for drilling, and you can see some of those holes that we have seen visible gold there, and we have seen some intercepts that have not made it to the block model. It will be into the future block model update. We are very bullish on that. Today, if you add the indicated and inferred category, we are not allowed to add it for you in a table because of 43-101 regulations, but I can add the numbers to you, and you can do it yourself. It will be north of 5 million oz. What we see here with the growth in Ramp Zone and the growth in the upper shallow zone that I shared with you, and the middle zone that has not been drilled, we [audio distortion] million-ounce deposit. That is our target.
We are targeting in the next update to potentially be between 7 million and 8 million oz, and into our feasibility study, we would like to be between 9 million and [audio distortion] feasibility study. When you compare us to Marmato, which is, again, it is only less than a 2 km distance from us. It is on the right-hand side. You can see Marmato has already been drilled, and that deposit goes down from 1,000 go down to almost 200 m above sea level, all of that area which is untapped in our case. You can see the resources for Marmato, and what they have been developing now so that they can start mining this year end and have their mill commission.
Very similar deposits at depth. The beauty of our case, because we are a greenfield discovery, the top of Apollo is still intact, has not been mined. The top of Marmato has been [audio distortion]. Finally, I like to give you a little bit of a taste of Trap. Trap is a discovery that we're very excited about. We've drilled it a little bit. You can see some of the holes, but what is even more exciting for us, it's complementary to Apollo. Let's say Apollo is going to give us targeting with the 15,000 ton per day plant with a 3 g/ ton head grade. Let's say that gives us a 500,000 oz production. 50,000 oz of that has the potential to come from Trap exciting about this. You see that our tunnel, this exploration adit.
We're going to have access to this within less than 800 m, so in the middle of drill this Trap from underground, and that is so close to where the plant is going to be, so it's going to be complementary feed into that plant in addition to the main system in Apollo. I want to leave some time for questions, but I want to give you our timeline. You have a project like our project, our size that can be in production by 2031. You can see here our timeline. We would like to continue to drill. We'd like to have another update of the resource sometime towards later in next year or maybe early in 2028, followed by a preliminary economic assessment or a scoping study.
We would also like to apply for the license and by the middle of 2028, have the license and permit in hand. That taking us into a feasibility study, green light on the feasibility into construction, and then production in 2031. Thank you very much, and I will open the floor now back to you for questioning.
Thank you, Ned. I think we'll get straight to the questions. How are you balancing additional Apollo resource growth against the opportunity to make major discoveries at targets such as Trap East, and Orion?
Great question. Thank you so much. Look, the growth of Apollo is the cornerstone asset now for the company, so we have to take care of it. We want to drill that Ramp Zone. It is a hot potato for us. We cannot drop our focus off of Apollo. That takes priority. That being said, we have two rigs at Trap and Trap East assigned to that. Then we have another floating rig that we can mobilize to, for example, Orion, and then after we drill Orion, we go to [audio distortion] Emmy.
Priority number one is Apollo. We want to grow that resource. We want to hit our mark of 7 million-8 million oz and then 10 million oz. That takes priority, but nevertheless, we have three rigs that two now are on Trap and Trap East, and then one in Orion, and that could move also to other targets.
Next question is, speaking of Apollo, how are you beginning to think about the potential sequencing and interaction of, assuming it is the open pit, the underground, and then the Ramp Zone?
Again, also a great question. Sounds like a mining guy or a gal who asked that question. I will go to this schematic because it is easier to [audio distortion]. It looks like we are going to start with the pit. It is a very easy pit, low strip ratio. That would provide the bulk feed in the early mine life. That being said, as the pit ramps up, first two, three years of the pit life, that would give us the opportunity to develop all of the underground. As soon as that is going, which let us say, for example, year two or middle of year three, we start now blending the high [audio distortion] that pit material into feeding the plant.
That would go on for several years, and then as the pit is being depleted, then the mine converts to being fully developed and fully 15,000 ton per day underground.
What technical work remains before you're comfortable that Apollo's gold, silver, copper, and tungsten can be recovered efficiently at commercial scale?
Good. Excellent. We have done significant work on the met side. You can access that. We will press releases, but we also have the technical report coming out towards the end of October. We're very comfortable with-- Actually, we're comfortable with all the metals. What we envision now is float circuit and a CIL circuit. In front of that, we're going to have a gravity circuit because a good portion of our gold is gravity gold. Material that has copper rich in it would go into flotation. That would generate a copper concentrate with gold and silver credits, and that would be sold as a copper con.
The tailings from that, and in combination with the material, let's say from Ramp Zone, that has little or no significant copper, that goes into CIL, and that generates gold and silver doré. We've done not long ago this year. We've done six composites throughout the deposit, each representing different areas of the deposit and that was the basis for the recovery equations that we used for the resource model.
Then you talked about the construction of the exploration adit, and so maybe what that allows you to accomplish technically and then what needs to happen between now and when you target that environmental license filing.
Great. This exploration adit, if you look at other operations, they do similar thing. You design the exploration adit to be part of your potential mine in the future. Today, it's an exploration adit. We have the permits for it, with the primary purpose of exploring. We're not going to [audio distortion] size of a production tunnel because as you know, you're better off to go 6 by 6 m, for example, in our case, and have the full size ready from day one where you can utilize that as part of your assets during production. We're going to go through this tunnel because you can see it's 3 km approximately, so it'll take us two years to get to Apollo, but along the way to Apollo, we have these other potential targets. We start drilling them from underground and defining them better.
Trap East, the Trap Main System. We also cross through Plutus. Very much opportunity along the way in terms of exploration. As we hit Apollo, we would have potentially the license granted, and then we would also be able to drill from the underground. As we develop further, we will potentially twin this tunnel into production. There will be a twin tunnel for production where material will be mined, potentially an underground crusher underground, and everything is fed to that crusher, and then a conveyor belt taking us out into the plant.
Well, I think it's worth mentioning that your team previously discovered, developed, and sold Continental Gold's Buriticá project for a substantial amount. Maybe what lessons from that experience are most relevant as Apollo moves from the phase towards engineering, permitting, and potential development?
Great point, Mark. I think one of the things that Ari, before I joined the team, one of the great lessons he told me, he shared with me, he said that we want to bring the project and operation mentality early into exploration. I guess that was one of the lessons learned in Continental is that bring the study phase early and that was one of the attractions of me joining Collective and them liking me, which has been a great experience and a great potential [audio distortion]. I myself as a mining engineer by background, so we're bringing that experience of projects and operations into this phase. Just to let you know, to complement that, we are building a full [audio distortion] that's a mature team.
But we're building mine engineers, process engineers, electrical engineers, project engineers. That supply chain that is now being built in our regional office in Medellín in Colombia.
Want to just make some closing remarks or maybe highlight the two or three milestones that investors should be focused on over the next 12 months?
Yeah. Perfect. Please watch our growth in terms of. We try to-- The challenges are the labs, right? The labs are being challenged everywhere, but we are very diligent. As soon as we get the results, we put them in our press [audio distortion] ramp grow. I think that is a great item to keep in mind. Also, watch the growth of that shallow halo zone that will bring the strip ratio and the pit down. As soon as we do more of this engineering work that I explained to you about how the mining and the processing is going to be, we will also be press releasing that ahead of the PEA. Why? Because we need to do that as part of the Colombian licensing process.
Look forward to these interim releases as we go over the next six months. As we 1,000 m or 120,000 m over the next 12 months, we look forward to our updated mineral resource towards the end of next year.
Thank you so much for joining us, Ned and Eduardo. As a reminder, a replay will be available on Channelchek [audio distortion]. Thank you to everyone who joined us.
Thanks, Mark, and thank you everyone. Have a great weekend.