Good afternoon. Thank you, everyone, for your participation and attention. We're pleased to host Discovery Silver. We have Mark Utting, the Senior Vice President of Investor Relations, and Eric Kallio, the Senior Vice President of Exploration and Growth. I want to just disclose that I have a conflict of interest. I own 885,000 shares of Discovery. It's about a quarter of my portfolio. And I'm not interested in the three producing mines as much as the Dome 11 million ounce inferred resource 1.49 g/t pit. And not on the books, the three downtown abandoned pits, Schumacher, McIntyre, and Hollinger, that might be similar size, but might involve moving a couple of things like part of the town, the way the Malartic mine. And the town authorized July 15, CAD 26.7 million to move the water tower 15-20 km east.
It's on the west edge of one of these old downtown pits. So I thought it was very nice of the town to begin doing that. Excuse me for talking too much, Mark and Eric. The floor is yours.
Thanks very much. I'll start out and run through some initial things, and then Eric will talk much more about the exploration potential and the exploration plan. We're both very happy to be here today. This is actually the second virtual conference that John's run, John and his team have run this year. We like to think that we're doing it a second time because we have so much to talk about. First of all, just give some credit where credit is due. John got onto our story very quickly after we announced the acquisition of Porcupine last January. It closed in April, and he's been very good and very diligent in terms of looking not just at what we acquired today, but what the potential is and giving his readers a good sense of the upside, and we think it's substantial.
When the year began, our stock was around $ 0.72. Today, it's just under $ 8. And I get a lot of people say to me that they had a nice run, but we missed it. And I tell them that you weren't in at the beginning, but you by no means have missed it. We have tremendous upside remaining. In terms of our investor proposition, I can summarize it pretty quickly. We've got one of the most compelling growth stories in the gold industry today. We definitely have one of the most compelling development stories in the silver industry today. And we have a valuation that even after the significant run-up only captures a relatively small part of our business. And I'll give you more details on that as we go forward. The next two slides are just our forward-looking statement and other cautionary language.
These slides are also on our website. I invite you to look at them at your leisure. But it is important to recognize we will be making forward-looking statements today. Just as an overview, so we acquired Porcupine Complex from Newmont on April 15th. We paid $ 200 million in cash on closing and $ 75 million in equity, which they have since sold. There is deferred consideration of $ 150 million in four equal annual payments that starts two years from now. What we obtained were three operating mines, Hoyle Pond, Borden, and Pamour projects that could lead to at least three new operating gold mines and potentially more and tremendous exploration upside.
I think it's important to recognize that we had Cordero, and this time last year, we were saying if we could acquire something with production that was generating free cash flow, it would only help us with Cordero, and it would help us with our business. Well, we didn't diversify into something that is new and different for us. We actually, you could argue, are coming home to what we know. Our CEO, Tony Makuch, was born and raised in Timmins. He's worked at these assets. He was mine manager at Hoyle Pond in the late 1990s. That statement about knowing the assets and knowing Timmins, that's a statement that can be shared by most of our executive team. I know Eric was raised in Timmins and is formerly the chief geologist at Dome Mine, and has experience at other assets here as well.
So we knew what we were getting into when we looked at these assets, and we did a lot of due diligence, and we knew the upside that was there. So in January, we did a technical report in conjunction with financing that we announced. It largely came from Newmont's mine plan, shows this year production of about 220,000 ounces that will rise to about 340,000 ounces over the next few years. We very much regard this as a base case scenario. It doesn't include improvements that we see at the existing operations as well as the upside of the projects. Having said that, the economic returns in that technical report were compelling. Using $3,800 gold, the NPV on that report was 4.5 billion, which is basically our valuation today.
And I'll stress that the numbers I'm going to share with you today are in US dollars unless I state otherwise. Going to slide five. As an introduction, Cordero is a tremendous silver project that we think is poised to become one of the world's truly great silver mines. The project is located in Chihuahua State, about 35 km northwest, excuse me, northeast of the town of Parral, where they've been mining silver for 400 years. Like Porcupine and Timmins, Cordero is in a well-established mining region with a lot of the advantages that go along with that. Based on our feasibility study, Cordero is expected to produce about 37 million ounces of silver equivalent on average over the first 12 years and have a 20-year mine life. That is using the pricing at the time of the feasibility study early last year. The economics are highly attractive.
At $40 silver, the NPV is just shy of 2.5 billion. At $60 silver, today's price would be more like 4.5, so the economic returns here are very attractive. The big catalyst for us, and the reason, quite frankly, why we don't continue to not get much value in our share price for Cordero, is around permitting. I'll talk about that a little bit later, but what I will just quickly say is, based on recent events, we're increasingly confident that we could see our environmental impact assessment approved in the very near future, and then we'll move quickly to advance the project towards development once we get that. I mentioned our valuation and look at, there's different ways to slice and dice it, but just the fact is this is our market cap as of the end of last week.
You can see in our technical report for Porcupine, at $3,800 gold, that basically accounts for our valuation. So that means there's the upside on that is all of Cordero. It's improving the assets that are in the existing technical report, the two underground mines, Hoyle Pond and Borden, as well as our Pamour open pit. There's Dome, and John's been very, very quick to realize this and talk about it. We have 11 million ounce resource at one of Canada's greatest gold mines in terms of past history. Dome, they produced 17 million ounces since 1910. It closed in 2017. Large resource, right near infrastructure, and we're looking at bringing it back into production. TVZ's a large zone directly adjacent to Hoyle Pond that we think can be a standalone mining operation. And then there's all the exploration upside.
And there really hasn't been a dedicated extensive exploration program in Timmins, despite being one of the world's great gold camps for a long time. The last one may have been when we all worked at Lakeshore Gold about 15, 20 years ago. So there's tremendous upside there in terms of.
Eric, if I can, excuse me, Mark, if I could elaborate. Your technical study with the 4.5 billion NPV at $3,800 gold only has 4.9 million ounces of output from the three current mines.
Right.
So, my initial model, I estimated 25, and I gave you 10 from Dome, maybe it was 20, 10 from Dome, 21, 10 from Dome, five from tailings, and six from these three mines that you put report 4.9. And then I added five for TVZ and 10 for the downtown pit and one for Owl Creek. So I'm at 36 million ounces of future output. I call you half of Agnico Eagle.
I appreciate it. Look at.
And then a $4.5 billion value is only the current Hoyle Pond, Borden, and Pamour, 4.9 million ounces that were in the January 28th study using Newmont data before you guys could evaluate the property and own it.
Yeah. Well.
Without drilling a hole.
Yeah, you're right, John.
You're very modest, and you're constrained by NI 43-101 rules in Canada. I'm not. So I can talk stupid.
You know what? And you're absolutely right. And I think it's part of the value of the way we work together. I mean, you can point to the upside that we have because you're bang on. And we talked about that technical report was a base case. It was what we needed to do, and it had to be done fairly quickly. So we used a lot of the existing numbers. But the upside, one thing that's common to say, there's upside at virtually every asset at Porcupine that we're going to talk about, whether it's in production or not. The existing mines, they really haven't had much capital investment in them for some time, even going back before Newmont with Goldcorp. And there's just opportunities to add ounces and add production, not to mention drive down costs and extend mine life. So there's all kinds of upside.
And really, that's what the purpose of this slide is, just to start to give you a sense that the upside that's here and the fact that it's really not reflected in our valuation. And that speaks to what I got into at the very beginning, that no, if you haven't bought yet, you didn't get in at the beginning, but there's just lots of value left here to create. And you're going to hear a lot about that as we go forward in this. Just before we go too much further, I'll just talk that the investment and the growth that we're going to be doing, we start from a very strong financial position. We had cash of $342 million at the end of September. We just completed a revolving credit facility that gives us an additional $250 million of liquidity, plus a $100 million accordion on that.
We don't have any debt outstanding at this point in time. I did mention the deferred consideration that we begin paying in two years, but we fully expect that'll be financed out of our existing operation, so overall, very strong balance sheet. I won't go into too much detail on the individual assets. We'll get into some of the, certainly, particularly the exploration upside at them, but at a very high level, the assets we acquired, Hoyle Pond is one of, it says here, Canada's probably one of North America's highest-grade gold mines. Started in 1987 with something like 60,000 ounces. To date, it's produced 4 million. Its track record of replacing reserves is outstanding, and we fully expect that track record to continue. We have a number of targets around Hoyle Pond, not just in the mine and TVZ and Owl Creek around the slide. We'll talk about those.
Borden's a relatively new mine, started in 2019. What's really interesting about Borden is at one point it was the largest land position in Newmont's portfolio globally. It's 1,000 sq km. Most of the exploration, almost all of it, has been really on the one existing mining trend, and we think that Tony likes to say this is the mine that has the potential to become a camp, i.e., multiple mines, and Eric can give you a better sense of what we're looking at there in terms of exploration. Similarly, Pamour is a new open pit. It's on a historic mine that they produced seven million ounces on, but it's a new open pit, but there's, again, tremendous potential below the existing pit on either side to the east and to the west, as well as to the north, and we'll talk about that as well.
It's ramping up currently to about 150,000 ounces of production a year. And then Dome, we've already talked about, and we'll get to that. It's got all kinds of potential. We think that it's going to be a tremendous value creator for us. And then something that I know John has brought into his reports and his model and talked about, we also own Hollinger and McIntyre, two mines that collectively account for 30 million ounces of historic production. This is a longer-term project, but it's very exciting. We think that there could be and are millions of ounces there left. It would be along the lines of a super pit kind of concept that we'll look at a little bit more. A lot of work to do there yet. And yeah, it would require some relocation and some movement.
but on top of everything else, which we think will allow us to transform our company from what it is today, this could be a transformation unto itself.
So let me interject a couple of things if I could, Mark.
Yeah.
The slide has the pick and shovel for Hollinger and the pick and shovel where the McIntyre shaft is. It would appear to be, Eric, that the geology is continuous and the super pit would extend between those two, right?
Yeah, there's a number of the historic mining actually extended right from Hollinger through the McIntyre. It was basically the McIntyre is on the same kind of geological trend and fault and actually represented on most maps as the downplunge extension of the Hollinger. So you actually have continuous mining right through the property boundary.
I also want to point out that the Dome pit, the Pamour pit, Hoyle Pond, TVZ are way east of town and not near the city limits. They're toward the suburbs, Porcupine and the Porcupine River and all that stuff. There was a misconception under Goldcorp and under Newmont that everything was right downtown, and it's just your super pit concept or I call it the downtown pit that's next to downtown. Now, in the map, the Highway 101, the main road from Timmins to Val-d'Or, goes over the north edge of the Hollinger pit, and the hockey stadium is on that road on the north side, and the Dome pit swallowed the Shania Twain Centre that the town speculatively built thinking it would draw tourism. It didn't, but nobody wanted to do anything near the McIntyre Arena built in 1938.
And if you're from Denver or Vancouver, that might seem sacred. Tony's from Timmins, and he wants to build the town a new arena because the old one's almost 100 years old.
Yeah, well, in a couple of slides, we'll get to the Google Earth, and I'll point out all those.
It's only the super pit, the downtown pit that's next to the town.
No, 100%.
Tony's the local boy, and he has a better chance of moving the hockey arena that seats 1,300 than Newmont or Goldcorp would have as outsiders.
Yeah.
Excuse me.
Yeah, and we'll look at those locations, and you're right. It's a very old arena. So I think that, when we get to that point, I don't think there'll be a problem getting a new arena because I think that would be welcome to have a brand new arena there, but anyway, we'll show you just in a couple of slides here where all these various things are located, but that just gives you a very simplistic view of it, and again, on top of this, we've got just tremendous exploration upside. This is just the technical report production profile, and you can see the ramp up of Pamour in the blue. As you go forward, the one thing that I can tell you is that if we went out more years, you'd see Borden in the gray and Hoyle Pond sort of come off.
We don't think that's going to happen at all. In fact, we expect them to continue and really, if you want to know our vision for it, we think we have the opportunity to improve these assets because, again, as I said, they really have been capital constrained for some time, so you could get some growth from these assets, just the three of them. And then when you look at adding a Dome and a TVZ, just we'll leave Hollinger, McIntyre out for now, you could easily see doubling or even more. And that's kind of our near-term priority in terms of looking at it. I'd say if I'm going to add in actually the ones at the top there, like Dome, it's more out in this area here.
But we can improve on what you see here, and that's fully what we're working toward. This is the exploration program that we started following completion of the acquisition. Took us some time to get the drills and the drilling ramped up. What I can tell you, it says here 140,000 meters by early next year. That's the case. Next year in total, when this plan is completed, I mean, we're just keeping going. I mean, you can see all the targets we have. Our meters next year will far exceed this, probably over 200,000 meters. And Eric can talk about the drilling we're going to do. And I'll let him get into the details on it. But what I'll tell you is that we've got basically attractive targets everywhere.
We put out a press release in early November that showed very good results at virtually every location, every operation we have, Hoyle Pond, Borden, and Pamour. It also included the fact that we had started drilling at Dome and TVZ, and we had some success at regional targets like Owl Creek, which is 3 km from Hoyle Pond, so there's all kinds of upside that Eric will get into, and then I mentioned, John, the Google Earth. This is it here. Hopefully, you can see it okay. In red are our assets, and you can see down in the lower left, that's where Hollinger and McIntyre are. You can see the city of Timmins, as John pointed out. They're just on the eastern boundary, and actually, the town that's there is called Schumacher. Dome is a few km to the southwest, basically.
And that's where our Dome Mill as well as the Dome pit is. Further to the west and to the north, you get Hoyle Pond and Pamour. Currently, the ore from these locations is trucked. Hopefully, you can see my cursor down the road, 16 km and 18 km respectively to Dome. And it gives you a sense of the various locations that we have. Again, Borden's about 190 km to the southwest in a town called Chapleau. Everything is trucked to the Dome Mill today. And milling capacity is a big part of our story. It's something because we have so much opportunity. We're going to need to increase milling capacity. And I'll talk a little bit later about the study we're doing to expand Dome Mill. Also, there are other mills in the area. You'll see in blue is Glencore's Kidd Met site directly beside Hoyle Pond.
And then to the west, about what? About five kilometers, Eric, would be five or six from Hoyle Pond, the Bell Creek mine and mill. Those are the old Lakeshore assets that we used to run. So there's options here to potentially do something there where we could add milling capacity. We're going to look, and we are talking to people, and we're looking at it. But the base case is we'll expand Dome mill, bring in Dome, and add production from TVZ. And that will allow us to substantially grow production. What I'll do now, and this is a projection that shows the geology of the camp. And I think I'll turn it over to Eric because this is really his area. And I'll just say that Eric spent much of his career not just being raised in Timmins, but working here.
I'd say that no one knows the geology of the Timmins camp better than he does. Eric, why don't you take over?
Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Mark, and good afternoon, everyone. Yeah, so I'll be starting with this regional slide to try and give you a bit of an overview of the regional geology, but also the setting for the different projects that we have in the Timmins area, and then following up with a number of other slides that get into the more details of all those places, so the first thing I'd just like to mention at a high level is the area we're looking at is in the southwest portion of the Abitibi Greenstone Belt. It's a major geological province in the Canadian Shield, and it covers most of the northeastern Ontario, northern Quebec, and host of a lot of very large mines and exploration projects that are actively being worked on now.
It's also on the west extension of the Destor-Porcupine Fault and on the south side of a major sedimentary basin. Whereas what you can see here on the map, there's been a lot of different thrusting of rock units from the south part up into the basin itself. The basin itself is actually just north of the map where the colors transition into the gray, and the Destor-Porcupine is actually on the south side of the map where we see the northeast trending blue line that's been dashed in. Bedrock in the area is dominated mostly by sedimentary and volcanic rocks from four main formations. Not to get into too much details there, but most of the sediments belong to the Porcupine and Timiskaming groups that are shown here in gray, and most of the volcanics belong to two other groups. They're called the Tisdale and the Deloro.
And those are shown in various other colors, shades of green and yellow and some even purple. And like many other big gold camps, there's been intruded by a lot of different intrusives of various types. And some of the most significant ones are actually the more felsic porphyries, which you can see shaded in orange and surrounding the Dome and the Hollinger areas there, referred to as the Dome. The biggest one is really called the Preston. And at Hollinger, we call it the Pearl Lake Porphyry underneath the lake that John mentioned just a minute ago. Structurally, it's also had a very strong deformation history, mostly along east-west trending lines. So there's lots of major folds and faults in close proximity to the mines.
And just to point out some of the features here, main faults include the Destor-Porcupine, but as well as what we call the Burrows-Benedict Fault, which crosses the Destor in the central part of the camp and actually offsets it by a little bit. So it sort of separates the camp into two different parts from east and west. So in looking at some of the major folds that you see here, they're nearby to the mines. We see, of course, the Porcupine Syncline, which is a main feature of the central part of the Timmins camp. It's located just west of, or just north of the Destor. You've also got a number of other anticlines. You've got the Hollinger Anticline, got the Pamour Anticline, and the Hoyle Anticline, which is associated with those mines. So just looking at it.
A syncline is a U, and an anticline is arch-shaped.
Yes.
They might be crumpled up a little bit like a ball of paper or deformed.
Yes. Yes. Yeah. So when you're doing rock.
I'll try to simplify the jargon, Eric.
They've been all flattened, and so when you see, yeah, so a lot of these mines you'll see, they're associated with these anticlines. I guess that's kind of part of the point there, but if you look in at the mines a little closer, I guess I'll just point out that the Dome and Hollinger are located in the west part of the camp and just sort of west of the Burrows-Benedict, and on the north and south sides of the Porcupine syncline. So they're kind of a lot of the same rock types here, just opposite sides of the syncline. Hoyle Pond and Pamour on the east side of the camp and overlying sort of a different stratigraphy along two narrow volcanic belts that extend eastward from the camp. And.
Eric, in this slide, is the blue broken line, the purple color, the yellow color, the gold color necessarily gold mineralized, magic, or economic?
No. Not necessarily. It's just basically.
These are just host rocks, and not whether the host rocks are mineralized.
They're not. No. But based on people who anybody who's worked in the camp, most of the time, most of the productive big mines and most of the gold showings are from north of the Destor-Porcupine. So those rocks, which are really from what's called the Tisdale Group, are considered to be more favorable. And that's where all our projects are.
North of the Destor-Porcupine would be north of the blue broken line that's like a 45-degree line from the bottom right to the upper left.
Exactly. And rocks to the south. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And if you actually look at just the note on the mineralization itself here in the camp, I mean, not to get too technical again, but we see gold deposited through multiple different events and basically associated with the porphyries and quartz veining. But the quartz veining, I guess I should mention that it can take a variety of forms. You often see discrete quartz veins, which can be high-grade, like what you see at Hoyle Pond. But you also see what we call vein arrays, which can be, and stockworks, which can form large masses. And that's kind of more akin to what you see at McIntyre and Dome. So kind of just trying to give you an idea of what type of things that we're looking for.
So we're kind of looking at things that can be bulk mined and possibly even or narrow vein. They're all good.
Are you ready to?
So good. So I'll go on from there. And the idea is to go and take a little bit closer at the Hoyle Pond and Owl Creek area, which includes three of our main projects, including the S Zone, TVZ, and Owl Creek. And as mentioned, this area is located up in the northeast part of the camp and overlying a relatively narrow band of volcanics. It's interpreted as an anticline. Here we see Hoyle Pond is in the far east side of the bend, and it's centered on a flexure. You can see the flexure in the belt. It's fairly steeply plunging to the northeast. And we know that almost all the mineralization here is contained in discrete and relatively narrow but high-grade veins, which plunge to the northeast along with the main flexure.
So I guess the other thing I could point out here is the S Zone, which is the largest resource at this point in the mine. And the largest production center is actually in the lower east part of the mine, just east of the 1060 Fault. And the TVZ, which is the other project we're planning to do a lot of work on, is in sedimentary rocks just on the south side of the belt. In terms of Owl Creek, the project's about three kilometers west of Hoyle Pond and is centered on a plunging wedge of volcanics just east of what we call the Owl Creek Fault. Yeah. So those are our two projects. But before moving on from this slide, I just wanted to point out that there are a lot of other exploration targets in the area that have less testing.
I'll be showing more details on slides coming up. Some of the more prominent ones where we've already got gold values but not drilled yet, 750 Zone, 350 Zone, and the 950 Zone. A lot of other possibilities, I guess, beyond the ones we've worked on so far. Turning to the next slide, what we see here is just an overhead view. Okay, well, we kind of flipped ahead, but there was an overhead view of the Hoyle Pond, Owl Creek, and Pamour area. Just to try and I guess the main point of this was just really try and give you an idea how close all these projects are to each other. The next slide from there, we're going to give more detail at Hoyle Pond and going underground here.
As mentioned, Hoyle Pond is really an ore body that's made up of multiple individual veins that extend from surface all the way down to the 2,000 level. The key exploration target at this point has been the S Zone, which is in the lower part of the ore body. You can see where we've been doing the drilling, all of the drillings being done from platform on the 1,860 level and aiming towards the lower portion of the resource, which is around 2,200 meters level, and then also a little bit on strike from there. But we didn't make as much progress as we would have liked this year due to actually changing contractors, but also difficulties with manpower for the contractors. But the holes we did receive had very good results with a lot of high-grade results, both at depth and especially on the west side of the resource.
And we included those results in the quarterly update that we provided. Yeah. So our plan going ahead is we're still working on that. Mark said the 2026 budget has not been finalized yet, but it's straightforward. We're going to be continuing work on this S Zone. We think we can still add a lot more resources here, both along strike and to depth. But a big part of what we're going to be doing as well is starting to initiate a lot more work in the mid part of the mine where some of the zones where we know still had good grades at the edges of the ore bodies. And they moved on a lot of times when they found better zones, but also areas that were directly along strike and not fully tested.
So at this point, I would say we'll probably be doing. We're looking at probably double what we did this year and probably in the range of 70,000-80,000 meters. And I would say a good portion of it, maybe 40%-50% of it, will be in the mid mine trying to add resources there that can complement the S Zone. Yeah. So I guess we can move on from there. And the next area to talk about is the TVZ zone. As mentioned, the TVZ is on the south part of the mine. And from what you can see here, it's a very steep-dipping zone about 800 meters away from the lower S where we're mining at there. It was discovered in 2008 by Goldcorp.
They worked on it for about five years, but then they stopped mostly because of lower gold prices, and they had other targets to work on at that time. But they did enough work there basically to define a broad envelope really that we think has a lot of potential. The drilling is pretty widely spaced right now, but our plan right now is really just to fill in for the most part and get this spacing down so we can report it as resource. But we're also going to be testing the lower limits to try and extend it to depth at the same time. We don't have an exact timing for completing the drilling, but it would most likely be sometime in the later part of 2026 and then working towards that initial resource update.
So turning to the next slide, what we can see here is sort of a view to the north looking at the area between Hoyle Pond and Owl Creek. You can see Owl Creek's about three kilometers to the west. And it's the area where there was some historic mining. The work we're doing right now is centered on where there was a historic pit and some underground workings developed by Falconbridge in the 1980s. They did a little bit of drilling down below, and they did actually have some fairly significant results. But again, they did not follow up, pursue the project down to depth. So a lot of the work we've been doing lately has just been following up on that.
We drilled some holes near the lower limit of the past drilling, which is around the 600-meter level, and very, very positive results, I would say, for initial pass, and types of results we're getting, really a mixture of both broad lower-grade zones, which between four and five grams per ton or 15-20 meters, but also narrower higher-grade zones with grades up to 15-20 grams per ton over one to two meters, so still hard to say how this will shake out in the long term, but we see a lot of upside here because there's no drilling beyond this to depth, and we have the possibility for both bulk and high-grade zones not far away from the Hoyle Pond area, but aside from that, I mean, all of the area between Hoyle Pond and Owl Creek has very limited drilling.
And what there is is really only very shallow depths, mostly within 2-300 meters of surface. So still a lot of good things to come from Owl Creek and then a lot of other upside in areas between. And so if we move on from that, I guess we'll go to the Pamour next. Yeah. So as I mentioned before, Pamour is on a geologically, it's on the east side of Timmins and sort of centered on a narrow volcanic belt, which is just sort of north of the Destor-Porcupine and south of the Hoyle Pond area. The main ore body that you see, ore bodies that have been mined in the past and which we're exploring now, located mostly on the south side of the belt and the contact between the volcanics and the sediments.
The types of mineralization that you're seeing there really include a mixture. We do see some very high-grade individual veins, and those were often targeted for the underground mine. By far, the biggest part of the ore body made up of swarms of quartz veins, which were bulk mined underground, but now forming very good targets for the open pit as well. I'm not sure if we show the historic pit here clear enough, but we'll be looking at it in the next slide, I guess. Yeah. This provides a bit more detailed view of the property and some of the main roads and infrastructure. I guess one of the main things to point out to start with is the historic open pit, which is right in the center of the slide here.
And for those who don't know, Pamour was one of the largest gold producers in the Timmins camp. It produced about five million ounces between 1930 and 1999 when it closed down, both from underground and an open pit. So the resource that we've developed now is in open pits which surround that historic pit, but then going to depth over top of those underground workings. And as you can see here, we've got the resource divided into about three main pits, three phases. We've got phase one, two, and three, phase one and three, which is on the east side, and phase two, which sits on the north. And so next, I think we're going to look at some drill results. No, I guess we're going to stop first and just give you a bit more idea of the resource and drill results.
Pamour has been a big drilling project for us this year. We've had three drills working since April on the project and trying to cover areas in different parts of the ore body, mostly looking at the lower portion of the pit, and I would say the results have been, in general, pretty good in all areas. We've had results, and some of these results here are shown. I guess we're going to take a little bit closer look at the portion on the east part of the pit, and you'll see that it's quite similar from most of the east and central part of the pit because essentially you're drilling a lot of the same ore body, large swarms of quartz veins which are following that contact.
So you're seeing close to a gram per ton over 86 meters here, a lot of values that are sort of 1.74 over 37, 1.3 over 40. So a lot of values that are fairly consistent in this 1-2 grams over 30-40 meters, sometimes getting values up to even 75-100 meters. So that's the type of ore body that we're seeing shaping up here so far. And these results are quite near the bottom. So they go to the central part of the pit. Again, you're seeing very similar results here. And I think the interesting thing to point out here is the depth of the center goes down to about 300 meters, but mostly because that's overlying the historic mine where there's a lot more data.
If you go to the east, which we were just looking at, much shallower there, only about 100 meters, so in most cases there, we don't have the density of drilling because it was beyond the limits of most of the mining, and if you go a little bit, I think the next slide might go a little bit further to the west. Again, you see holes here targeting the lower half of the pit, and part of the main reason for that is trying to get a feel for the zones, but then also testing the expansion potential, so I think we have a good mix of holes here, and I guess all showing good results, but especially encouraged by holes that we see on the west edges of the pit, which are still showing continuation of the structures and getting similar types of grades.
So just giving you a bigger perspective of the mineralizing system here, the open pit. You can see the open pit still very shallow in comparison to what the mining was at the mine. It was not a deep mine by any means. I think the deepest level was really less than a kilometer. So quite a bit shallower than Hoyle Pond. So the largest part of the pit resource we have now is centered really over top of the green, which are those historic workings. All the yellow represents values that are greater than 2.5 grams per ton, but sort of sticking out of the workings. So huge areas, both along strike and to depth, which remain untested.
One of the main areas of interest to us, I think, is going to be to the west, where we already have a lot of data, and there was a small amount of mining already done there called the Pamour West. So that's going to be part of the big part of the 26 budget. Yeah. So if we move on to the Dome, next slide. This is a close-up of the Dome. As I mentioned, we're looking at an area on the south portion of the Porcupine Syncline, just north of the Destor-Porcupine Fault. And the main pit is sort of centered in a very interesting area where you've got two main structures coming together, which on the mine terms is referred to as the Greenstone Nose and the Dome Fault.
The Greenstone Nose is basically the contact between volcanic rocks and sedimentary, which is really marked by that brown line that you see on the west side of the pit, and then the Dome Fault is the black line which sort of runs through the south part of the pit. Both of those structures contain just a very large amount of quartz veining, which continues along the length of those structures and has been traced down to about a mile in depth, both swarms of veins and single high-grade structures. Important thing to note here is that the overall trend of the structures is plunging shallow to the east, so that as the pit goes to depth, then you'll see that really what happens is the pit just has to expand to the east.
And I guess going to the next slide, again, gives a bit more of an overview of the project area here, including some of the infrastructure on the site, some of the conceptual pit shells that we've been working on. But at the same time, it gives you probably maybe a better idea of the work we're going to be doing going ahead. And Mark's going to talk a little bit more about those studies. But before he does, I thought maybe I'd just point out a couple of things here. I mentioned the main pit. We've got those main structures coming together. So if you look at the ore body and how it's going to go to depth, it's basically plunging to the northeast. And so as it does, basically the east wall of the pit is really just expanding back.
So that's really the main change that you see happening is you're just stripping a little bit more, mining the same ore body to depth. And yeah, so we're going to have a lot of work ongoing here this year. And part of it is drilling, which we have got underway already. We've got one drill already working out there to try and convert and upgrade resources for the upper part of the resource. But there's also going to be a number of other studies as well, and Mark can talk a little bit more about that.
Yeah. Yeah. There's really two key studies that we're doing at Dome. One is examining the mine and doing a study into resuming operation. And obviously, that's a significant pushback of the existing former pit.
But just at a high level, I mean, when you took a potential at Dome, you've got 11 million ounces. This is all open-pittable resource. We'll show you the underground potential, which is on top of that in a second in another view. But you had 11 million-ounce resource on a site of a former producer where there's significant infrastructure, and it's directly beside the mill. And that's what we're looking at. The purple outline here is the inferred resource pit shell. You'll notice it would require us to take out the mill. Our current plan is to establish a pit shell, which we think will give us access to anywhere from 5 to 7 million ounces of that, which would keep us mining for well over a decade, probably more like 15 years plus. And that's in the red.
You'll see that it does not require us to take out the mill. What it would require us to do is to remove this infrastructure here, which a lot of that is maintenance shops and admin buildings. This is the primary crusher of the mill. This is an ore bin directly beside it. And then there's two kilometers of conveyors that go to the secondary and tertiary crushers, and then another half kilometer of conveyors into the mill. It's kind of clunky infrastructure that was done based on the history of the mine. The old underground mine, the headframes right over here. This infrastructure probably costs us upwards of $10/ton in processing costs. When Gordon Leavoy, our head of processing, ran Dome Mill as the mill general foreman about 20 years ago, their processing costs were about $8/ton U.S.
When we acquired it, they were about 28. Last quarter, they were about $22 a ton. So we can take anywhere from $5-$10 a ton out of the cost for every ton going through this mill just by removing that and putting a primary crusher and a SAG mill in this area over here. We need to do that to bring the mine back into production, but we're going to do that anyways because the payback on it's going to be extremely quick. So we're doing a study on that, which will also, that's the primary objective. We'll also are going to look at doing an expansion from the mill, from the current capacity of 12,000 tons a day to 30,000 tons a day. That won't all be in the study that's coming late next year.
But changing the front end, the crushing grinding circuit, and putting in the SAG mill, those are all key parts of that. So we'll also be advancing plans on what that would look like. We won't do that expansion immediately because we need to finish the study on the mine and to bring the mine back into production to require that extra throughput. So the current plan is that we're going to ultimately first do what I just described in terms of moving that infrastructure out of the way. Second, get us to the point where we've significantly dropped the cost of processing. We're going to increase throughput from 12,000 tons a day now up to the permitted probably 15,000 tons a day.
And then when we're in a position to bring Dome back into production, we would take it up to 30,000 tons a day, which would allow us to process Dome at 15,000-plus tons a day. If I showed you some of the other mills in the area, this is why we are interested in adding additional mill capacity because if we could add additional mill capacity, we could have more throughput for Dome. And if we were ever able to take material elsewhere and dedicate Dome Mill entirely for Dome Mine, then with an average grade of about a gram and a half or a mine grade would be somewhat less than that. But you could be looking at something like 400,000-plus a year if you could do that. If it's 15,000 tons a day, it's still 200,000-250,000 tons a day.
So when you look at this and we get very little value for it, you see the kind of value that Dome is going to probably, well, in all likelihood, and we're pushing towards it generate for the company.
If I could interject, Mark, IAMGOLD is almost a $10 billion enterprise value. Côté Gold is 0.8 grams. So this is a beautiful hole. It's two times Côté Gold's grade and probably more than two times the value of IAMGOLD. So just reasoning from IAMGOLD, this is a $20 billion hole. Yeah. Detour Lake Mine is 0.9 grams. Canadian Malartic was 1-1.2 grams through its history. When Tony gave his first talk in Toronto on March 3rd, PDAC week, I just assumed $500 million build the Cordero 30,000-ton-a-day mill twice. And I have this in my models 2030 output full year.
Tony's very conservative financially. He has friends that want to sell him used SAG mills. He's probably going to double the 12,500-ton-a-day mill with used equipment and spare parts for far smaller than building a new mill. Yeah. I mean, obviously, sorry, go ahead. The downtown pit is not drilled, Hollinger, etc., because the other companies did not imagine moving the hockey arena. But it's on the same order of magnitude or bigger. So I call these two pits half of Agnico Eagle or four times IAMGOLD $10 billion value. But this is documented. Downtown is not documented yet, and downtown has to be permitted. But the town is paying to move the water tower that's on the edge of the Hollinger pit for you. So much tougher.
Yeah. I mean, you're right, John. I mean, this Dome is a very special project.
I mean, you look at it, and it's got good grade, and sure, the mining grade won't be a gram and a half like the inferred resource grade is or maybe 1.1, 1.2 but still, it's a good grade. Obviously, we'll have no haulage costs. You can tell by what Eric's already said. The geology is extremely well understood, and we just have to do the work now with these two studies, so we're going to look at, and again, our thinking on this is the base case is to put Dome back into production in a way that allows us to be mining for between 10 and 20 years at least on the red outline, not having to move the mill or build a brand new mill, but to increase throughput there to upwards of 30,000 tons a day.
That gives you adding about 200-250 thousand ounces a year from Dome. If we can get additional milling capacity in the area, our plan would be, say, we could do something for Kidd, for example, and we talk to them. Then you could send everything else there, and you could produce Dome at 30,000 tons a day. Obviously, deals have to come together, and people have to agree, so that's not something you count on. This is kind of the base case, and you're right. The leg up after all of this, after you add all of this, is then you can go to Hollinger, and you can look, and just before, and I know time-wise, we're starting to run a little bit tight, so we'll be very quick.
But I think it's worth taking a second to for Eric just to comment on the underground potential at Dome because we don't say a whole lot about that, but the reality is that there's a whole lot of potential to also have an underground operation there someday.
Yeah. As you can, this is a slide showing the long-section view across the zone and mentioned those same structures we looked at on the geology map. They just persist down to the bottom of the mine, which is close to the 5,000-foot level. The mine dug shapes are actually in green, but you can see the values that are sticking out at different grade levels from outside of those shapes, and a key part of this to keep in mind is that this is, like I say, what I was talking about, the bulk zones and the narrow zones.
A large part of the Dome really is in stockworks and stacked swarms of veins, stacked vein arrays. And so these are just very regular shapes. And the lower you make the cutoff, they mean basically they keep getting bigger and bigger. So there's a lot of material that could never mine perfectly underground. And it's basically we see values right down the bottom. So they were mining very selectively in the past, but we've been looking at different concepts that really you could do block cave method, or maybe you could do some selective mining in areas. But we're definitely going to be looking at that as we go ahead in addition to the pit.
Okay. So maybe we'll go to Hollinger now and just give a sort of quick discussion of the longer-term potential there.
Yeah. Yeah.
So just very quickly again, Hollinger's on the north side of the Porcupine Syncline, centered on the Hollinger Anticline, which is a major structure in that area where there's been. You can see two large intrusions cutting through there. So very favorable kind of a geological environment. It's been like 30 million ounces already mined from here in a system which plunges right from Hollinger through into McIntyre at depth. But again, mining with a grade of 0.3, we expect there's probably with these types of regular vein systems, there's most likely a lot of mineralization at open pit grades that could be available for future mining.
Sorry.
Yeah. So if we go ahead here, just another slide to give you, I guess, an overview of the project as it sits to date.
You can see in the central part of the slide, there is the pit that has actually been mined up to this point. It's very close to the town already, and it goes down to a depth of only maybe a couple hundred meters in the deepest portion of the pit. There is a stop mining about a year and a half ago, but there's still some broken ore in the pit, and there's some ability to mine a little bit from there, but the big thing that we're focused on here is a much larger concept where we would go over top. We would extend the pit mostly to the east and to the north towards the McIntyre, Pearl Lake area. Those two small ponds are both part of Pearl Lake, and the arena is sort of in the middle that John has mentioned.
So really expanding out into that direction and then going to depth. And we haven't done the studies yet to really show what the ultimate size of this could be, especially at this gold price. The work that was done for the pit we have now was designed for a much lower gold price and really just to mine without disturbing very much of the property. But you can see here the overall shape of the ore body as it goes to depth. If you start lowering the cutoff grade and following that trend, I mean, as Mark mentioned, the potential could be huge.
Okay. We'll go to Borden now, Eric?
Yeah. We'll go to Borden, I guess.
So this just, by the way, is. This is the mine that we have that's 190 km to the southwest of the town of Chapleau on a 1,000 sq km land position.
So do you want me to go right to the geology here?
Sure. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So as Mark mentioned, we own about a 1,000-square-kilometer land position here, which covers pretty much an entire greenstone belt. But this map really only shows the very west portion of that surrounding the mine. And the idea of it is really just to give you an idea of the setting for the mine, but also point out some of the main exploration targets that we have at this time. So at a high level, the mine is located sort of on the south portion of the greenstone belt and along a major deformation zone, which is highlighted here in red. We call it the Genesis Deformation Zone. And
deformation means crumpled up. Right.
Yeah. More or less, yeah, a lot of these deposits kind of occur along these deformation zones.
So it's marked here in red, and the red line basically, it's been mapped out mostly by mining that's happened mostly from the west to the east already. And so it's pretty well mapped out there. But in terms of exploration, what we're doing now is really continuing to try and extend that even further to the east with both work underground and to the surface. So the underground is really what we call the 585 Drift. It's the most easterly drift in the mine. And we've got three drills down there right now. We announced some results, looking very good. In fact, we're getting grades down there that are actually quite a bit higher than some of the existing resources that we're doing.
But on a very positive note to that too, we've got holes, two or three wide-spaced holes that are over a kilometer to the northeast where I've got the GDZ East target and seem to be right on trend and suggest that the zone has a lot of potential to grow in that direction. And so that's another target. We just started drilling on that. We haven't been working on it, but we're expecting to try and drill not only at that location, but even look at places that are even further to the east if we have success there.
The other area we've been looking at is the northwest trend, which is really a combination of looking at new targets which are north of the mine, but also extending the holes a little bit further, just testing to give us initial test of what could be down dip of the main structure. So that's still in the early stages, but that's another very exciting area that we look forward to advancing. So I think the next few slides just gives you a bit more detail on some of these targets.
It shows you some of the results that we announced in November, yeah.
Yeah. So this first one is really, I think it's looking kind of at the 585 Drift, which is the very east limit of the ore body in the northeast part of the mine. And in light blue, you can see these are the target area.
Purple and blue is showing basically projection of the mineralized zones from the mine. In general, it's partly in inferred, partly in areas that are in the extension, but we've got three drills already working there. Like I say, these may not even be the best holes. We've had 19 grams over 5.2, 15.6 over 6. There's a lot of good holes in this recent drilling, like I say, double the grade of the actual mine, so I think a lot of upside to mine higher grades, but also there is the option to mine wider grades at the same grade, and so that's really, really encouraging, I think, at this point, and additionally to this, we've got a crew down there extending the drift right now, and so getting us already set up for next year so that we can have three more drill days.
And in this case, we'll be drilling past the end of the inferred resource. So actually adding beyond the PEA numbers.
Good. Okay. Well, then we have the Cordero slide. John, is there anything else you want to ask first about Porcupine before I just make a few comments about Cordero?
Let me ask a few questions on Porcupine, and a couple of them came from clients in advance. When you had your earnings call, Eric, you had 16 rigs running. Is it still 16, or do you have more?
We're up to 17 now. We added a couple more at Hoyle Pond. And with going to the TVZ, we've got two drills going at TVZ now, so we're up to 17. But we're still not up to the full amount. We're still aiming for 20.
So if you're getting 90% of 140 km done by year-end, roughly, but you don't have 20 rigs running, the productivity per rig must be higher than your original budget that you're not falling short by a bigger amount. Is that fair?
Yeah. Productivity, yeah. You're exactly right. Yeah. The productivity has been extremely good.
Are you moving the rigs around less from point to point because the results you're getting are so good and you keep drilling in the same place?
Yeah. Well, two things. There's kind of more pit. You're drilling right into bedrock. So sometimes you get trouble when you drill into overburden, deep overburden, and you're further away from the infrastructure. But the mine, you got a lot of support. You're drilling right into bedrock. They get shifts that we're drilling double, triple what the normal you can get on an exploration project there.
So that's one of the areas we had really. We're also getting good productivity, though, at Owl Creek. But like you say, offset by things that are happening at Hoyle Pond. But yeah, some areas are really outperforming.
Your November 6th press release said 15 holes out of 85 were abandoned due to deflection. The other 70 holes almost all hit gold. I don't want to diminish your wisdom, but in the cases where you're drilling into known structures like the Dome pit or extensions of existing mines, are high probability exploration because you're drilling to restart things that were abandoned at lower prices like Owl Creek and the Dome pit or extensions of your producing mines. That's sort of fair?
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The abandoned holes, I'd say there's two areas where we had that.
I mean, drilling in the deep part of the Hoyle Pond mine, we're trying to do infill drilling. And sometimes we're drilling through a fault through the part. So we've had a few difficulties with that. But as the holes get longer, Owl Creek, again, holes are a little bit longer. So this is kind of unique situations that you have happening in terms of those areas there.
So I don't want to raise the expectation that every hole that is not deflected hits, but you're doing better than Ted Williams or Babe Ruth these days.
Yeah. Yeah. I think that that's the idea of the regional project we do is we create it's really a pipeline for the advanced project.
And we're picking up on places where people have abandoned projects and drilling those, but we always make sure we're also working on new targets which don't have drilling so that it always looks like you have drilling less risky targets, right?
So one of the clients asked whether there's fish if Pearl Lake is a natural lake. And the little pond to the west of Pearl Lake that's smaller is an old tailings dump without fish. But your comment, Eric, on Pearl Lake?
Well, I lived in Timmins from the 1980s till the year 2000. The lake has always been there. I've never seen anybody fishing in.
I've seen people fish in Nighthawk Lake. There's other lakes people like better.
I see people fishing in storm overflow ponds near my house north of Toronto, but I've never seen anybody fishing in Pearl Lake.
This is the tough one.
One of the big investors asked how many jobs Discovery is going to create in Timmins. Or if we just look at one or two of these projects in the near term, I'm almost asking how much gold Eric's going to discover and how many ounces you're going to increase your plan. But can you give a guide? What is the magnitude of the job creation here?
Well, I mean, I'll give you a sense of that. I mean, we probably have with contractors, I'm going to guess about 1,200 people now. When you look at the key projects that we have being Dome, I mean, you don't add a lot for the mill necessarily when you expand it. But the mine, you're going to need a fleet. You're going to need drivers. You're going to need mechanics. You will need people.
And then to look at something like Hollinger McIntyre would be, again, this is a future game changer. I mean, if we did everything we talked about here today, I would speculate, John, you could be looking at something close to doubling it.
Okay. There's no questions in the question box. In one minute, the next speaker is supposed to start. Why don't you give your best blurb on the Cordero slide?
Okay. Well, maybe what I'll do is just quickly go to this slide and just cover these things up. And the Cordero slide, I talked about a lot that's on it. It's an outstanding project. I didn't get into the details of the discussions. I mean, obviously, you've seen Silver Tiger got their permit. They are issuing permits for new projects now. That was a new open pit on a brownfield site, but a new open pit.
We've had discussions. It's south of Tucson and Sonora, and you're more south of East Texas, and in the U.S., if you move 1,000 miles, the politics can change.
Yeah. That's true, but so based on that, and probably more significantly, based on discussions we've had at very senior levels within SEMARNAT, the Environment Ministry, and the Ministry of the Economy, yeah, we're very optimistic we're going to get the permit, and then we'll update the feasibility. We'll finish. There are some other permits that aren't really related to whether you get to do your project or not. They're more procedural. We finalize that. We finalize the financing, and you give us till late next year, and we could be pretty much ready to go. Just to give you a sense of Cordero, this is a slide that just shows the reserves of North American listed silver producers.
American and several of the others, they have multiple assets. Cordero, we would place second in this. This just gives you an example of the magnitude of this project. It will be large-scale, very successful silver project. And again, we think we will get permitted, and it will move forward, and we move forward very quickly. So this gets back to the initial slide that just shows you. I mean, I think we've gone into a lot of detail on why Porcupine is so prolific and why there's so much value creation potential there. Cordero, we think, will be one of the world's best silver mines. And again, so much of what we talked about really isn't in our valuation yet.
Okay. Well, maybe next time we got to give you a half hour extra because there's so much going on.
Yeah.
There's a lot to talk about, like I said.
Thank you for the service to the company and have a great evening in regards to the team.
Yeah. Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
See you later. Thank you.