My next fireside chat will be with Ryan King, Executive Vice President, Capital Markets of Equinox Gold.
Thanks, Ryan.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Ralph.
Yeah. Ryan, before we get into some of the more formal Q&A, maybe just at a high level for those unfamiliar in the audience with your company, just at a high level, just some key points on Equinox, where they are right now and what the sort of overall strategy is.
Absolutely. Yeah. No. Thanks, Ralph, and thanks everybody for attending. I'm sure some of you might have heard of Equinox Gold over the years, but as a high-level overview, founded by, I guess, well-known mining entrepreneur Ross Beaty back in 2017. Ross had a vision of putting together a company, acquiring assets, building up a company to have a solid, diversified gold producer. That is what we are today, and actually, we're very North American- focused. The company today has guided the market 700,000-800,000 ounces of gold production this year. We've got a great pipeline of assets in front of us and very focused on, as we'll talk about, tiering up the portfolio over the last few years to have predominant production coming out of North America.
An exciting time, a big transformational year for the business last year with the merger between Equinox and Calibre Mining and a new senior management team in place led by a gentleman by the name of Darren Hall, who's a very seasoned mining entrepreneur, mining engineer. He was over 30 years with Newmont, optimizing assets around the world with Newmont. A very solid operating team and operating focus within the company now.
Ryan, you talked about that sort of transformational growth. How do you think about risk versus margin and sort of the trade-up story? I'd like you to talk about that a little bit more and sort of the upscaling of the asset base on where you were in the last five years versus where you're going to be in the next five years.
Yeah, no, to your point, I guess you have to start somewhere, and you typically take an Equinox Gold or even a company that it acquired, Calibre, starting with lower-quality assets and reinvesting into those assets to try to deliver strong cash flows and build up the asset base. From there, through hopefully accretive M&A transactions, you can tier up the quality of the portfolio, and that's what's happened here last year between the merger with Calibre and Equinox. With that merger, the company now has two high-quality Canadian long-life assets. These are assets that have great margins in today's markets. They have multi-decade mine lives, probably a lot of exploration upside from here. Typically, Canadian assets do demand or do get a premium valuation, especially those that are now in production, generating good cash flows.
It's been that pretty significant transformation through these acquisitions and mergers that have tiered up the portfolio from where it was a couple of years ago. A couple of years ago, more, I would say, mature assets in the portfolio, grade was going down, costs were increasing, but we took this opportunity to go through this merger, and at the time, there was a lot of questions around the merger. There was a lot of question about why now, why this team, why this company, and we've seen some good operating expertise come out of this and some good delivery. A couple of years ago, even last year, we went through a significant balance sheet transformation as well as a result of this merger. We were able to divest of some assets, Brazil, with five mines, four mills.
Not easy, not a simple one big mine approach, which what we have now in a number of the different regions that we're in. We've been able to simplify the portfolio, tier up the portfolio, and transform the balance sheet. Because of the divestiture, we were able to pay down well over $1 billion of debt last year.
Starting with the foundation being this 700,000 to 800,000 ounces of gold production, we've got two assets that are sort of in the hopper, right? Development assets in Los Filos and Castle Mountain. Should we be thinking about those concurrent growth strategies, sequential, and how do you think about bringing those into the portfolio production-wise?
Sure. Yeah, I mean, we're a very fortunate company at this point in time because of the buildup of assets over the years. We have, and to your point now, we're ramping up two large Canadian assets, one in Ontario called Greenstone and one in the central region of Newfoundland called Valentine. Combined, once we get to nameplate, those assets will be producing between 500,000 and 540,000 ounces combined of annual gold production in Canada. That's exciting in itself and its ramp-up phase here is what we're in the middle of right now in 2026. We look at the growth opportunities. First and foremost, Valentine. We're working through a phase II at Valentine right now. That's a near-term opportunity. I believe we'll have Board approval here shortly. We just came out with a new technical update on Valentine.
Capital cost about $400 million to take it from 2.5 million tons of annual processing capacity to five. We see good exploration potential there. There's one organic growth opportunity in the portfolio. What you just spoke about, Castle Mountain, I'll start there. Castle Mountain is an asset in California, going through the FAST-41 Critical Minerals Infrastructure permitting process. We just finished a public consultation at the end of 2025. We're now going through the environmental impact statement process. We've been told we'll get a record of decision by December of 2026. If all goes well and we end up getting a positive record of decision, we would anticipate getting state and county permits, probably the first half of 2027, putting the company in a position to make an investment decision, a construction decision at that time.
While we go through the permitting process, we will also refresh the asset. The asset has over 4 million ounces of gold in reserves. The previous technical report envisioned the asset producing approximately 200,000 ounces of gold a year. If all goes well, we would potentially start construction the middle of 2027. This would be about a two-year build, and then put us in a position by middle of 2029 where we're now ramping up another asset, 200,000 ounces a year. The nice thing about that scenario is, of course, one, it's in a Tier 1 mining location in the United States. We have a lot of experience in California. Our current operating asset, called Mesquite, we've guided the market 70,000-80,000 ounces of production this year. This asset has been in production since the 1980s. It's actually produced over 5 million ounces of gold now.
We do see good opportunities to grow and extend mine life there as well, but I guess what I'm trying to raise is the fact that we've got good relationships with county and state and communities already established, putting us in a fairly comfortable or confident position, being able to move that forward. That's one great opportunity. The second one that you mentioned, Los Filos. Now, many people in the room that is a mining investor has probably heard of Los Filos over the years. This is located in Guerrero State, Mexico. Los Filos is currently on suspended operations. We've had it now suspended for, I guess, about 15 months. Now, what we're doing is we're working through land access agreements. We have land access agreements with two ejido communities. We're working on the third community.
We think there's an opportunity to reach a multi-decade land access agreement, really reestablish our stakeholder relationships, and that then we could look at restarting a heap leach scenario. Now, a heap leach scenario at Los Filos is probably suboptimal. What we'd like to do, and we're doing all the technical studies now to see what that could look like, we're looking at various mill size scenarios at Los Filos, 10,000 up to 40,000 tons a day. So we believe there's great opportunity there, but we've got to work through some things there first. As we do with Castle Mountain, we've got to work through the permitting process there. I think sequentially or overlapping is very likely the scenario. You don't want to tax the company too much from a financial and a human capital perspective.
We'll see how the sequence looks based on the timing of permits, the potential resolution of a social license there at Los Filos. Again, at Los Filos, I think it's the fourth- largest gold deposit in the Americas, at a little over 16 million ounces of gold in all categories. I think the last design was in June of 2022, and the economics or the design of the asset was done at $1,300 gold. Very likely, our updated technical report will look at an $1,800-$2,000 gold price environment, which I think will present a very compelling reserve asset size, and that'll inform our decision about how we might be moving forward with that, assuming we can potentially unlock the asset from a social license perspective.
Great.
Good opportunities with both, but likely sequentially.
Okay, Ryan, I'm going to pivot a little bit with some questions on the operational and execution side, and maybe just with a few on Greenstone and Valentine. Greenstone, we have this upper end of the guidance at about 300,000 ounces for the year. Can you talk a little bit about how the ramp-up is going, how the mill throughput, how the recovery rates, how the reconciliation is going with that mine plan, and what can we look through sequentially throughout 2026?
Yeah. I guess one aspect of that is we just actually published an updated technical report. That updated technical report showed 5.3 million ounces at 0.92 g per tonne gold for the total reserve. However, when we're mining the open pit, we would envision that the average grade to the mill, the mill feed grade, will be roughly 1 g-1.15 g per tonne gold. In that scenario, running at nameplate, which is 27,000 tons a day at about 85%-86% recoveries, we should be getting an average annual gold production of about 320,000 ounces of gold a year.
Mm-hmm.
Where are we at in the cycle right now in terms of its ramp-up phase? I would say if we're looking at a nine-inning ballgame, nine is getting us to 27,000 tons a day. We're probably right now around inning six.
Mm-hmm.
We're getting closer and closer to reaching full nameplate capacity at 27,000. I would say this quarter here, I think we're around 25,000 tons a day. We have seen many days north of 27,000 tons a day through a period of time in the quarter. One of the things that we're working through right now is, you might be familiar a little bit with Greenstone, it's a past-producing underground mine. As we're mining the open pit and we get into some of the past-producing areas, whether it be a void or a backfill, there's tramp underground infrastructure that will be ripped out and potentially get caught in the mill. One of the things that we're doing now this year is investing a bit of capital into some equipment. One of them is a trommel.
So this trommel will help us filter out or screen out some of this tramp equipment. That'll help with the utilization time into the plant and give us more up days, essentially. So it'll allow us some more consistency on a day-by-day, quarter-by-quarter basis, and I think that's highly important here, and that comes in in Q3 of this year. So we would expect an H2 weighting in our gold production this year at Greenstone. And I believe that that trommel will be very impactful to help us get that utilization and throughput rate. But our vision would be that assuming we get to 27,000 tons a day, there's a path to get us to 30,000 tons a day. I mean, the plant on good days is running at 30 to 31,000 tons a day, getting between 80% and 86% recovery, so we are seeing that demonstrated ramp-up happening.
Post the trommel, I would be encouraged, and I believe we all view the opportunity to get to 30, which is another 3,000 tons a day beyond the 27 to get us that 320,000 ounces a year. There's good optionality and upside potential beyond that. Yeah, I think we're still in a ramp-up phase here. 2026 will still be that year at Greenstone where we're continuing to ramp it up. I think that, as I've mentioned here, one key aspect will be getting that piece of equipment in to help us increase the utilization of the plant.
Similar to the second half weighting at Greenstone, we have a second half weighting at Valentine. Both operations are ramping up. Valentine is a little bit more seasonality aspect to it, as we work through some of the sort of temporal issues there. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that plays as an extra variable into the ramp-up over 2026?
Well, actually, I would probably say both have some seasonality to them, I mean, given the harsh winters that we see in Northern Ontario.
Yeah
This year was particularly harsh for central region of Newfoundland. I think this year we might have had one of the largest, most severe winters in 10 years. I don't like using that as an excuse, but nonetheless, we had to deal with a huge amount of snow removal. Remember, Valentine first gold was in September of last year. End of September last year was first gold. By the end of November, we were declaring commercial production. From a ramping- up perspective, that's a pretty quick timeline. Q1 here is our first full winter quarter. Yeah, to your point, we had some seasonality. We had a pretty harsh January where we had to deal with some belts breaking.
Mm-hmm
Some muck piles freezing, some just real, typical winter-related challenges in your first season. There'll be learnings out of that, and it'll help us understand in how to prepare for next year. Going into Q2, we're already seeing the seasonality changing. I think we even published recently in our Q1 numbers that February and March, we're starting to see throughput rates through the plant getting closer and closer, if not above nameplate, being 6,800 tons a day. Interestingly enough, this plant has been running quite well on a number of days. We've had it actually running well north of 9,000 tons a day. The plant is running well. We're working through all aspects of the mining and the tonnage, the material movement on a daily basis. We'll continue to ramp that up throughout the year.
Yeah, pretty typical in a first full year where you're likely to have your weighting of gold, and it'll depend on the face position that we're at in terms of where we're at in the pit with regards to grade. Little lower grade where we're at right now. We'll ramp that up, likely getting closer to 2 g per ton for the second half of the year. Right now, things are going well. There's always little challenges that are coming up in a typical ramp-up. I mean, this is the first mine in the central region of Newfoundland, I think in, what? Well over 10-15 years. Exciting for the region, great workforce. Pretty exciting about the future of this asset.
Great. Ryan, I'm going to poll the audience for questions. Do we have any Q&A from the audience? Ryan, if I can conclude with just one question on Nicaragua. Some questions that we get from investors are around the cost structures and the volatility of the cost structure. Just wondering, in 2026, what's behind that? Is that more of tactical mine sequencing, or is there more underlying pressures?
Well, maybe I'll just, for those that aren't familiar with Nicaragua, this asset was picked up and acquired from B2Gold in late 2018-2019. At the time, the asset had two mills, so El Limón and La Libertad combined can process about 2.7 million-2.8 million tons of processing capacity. At the time, they were completely separate. They are separate entities. What Darren and team did was we really integrated them together such that material from El Limón, because the mineralogy is the same, can be transported over to La Libertad and processed there. We've implemented this very effective hub- and- spoke strategy. You've got some transport costs that are related to that, but we've been building that out over the years. At the time we acquired this, we had about 100,000-150,000 ounces of reserves.
Each year, we've been reinvesting back into this asset from an exploration perspective, from a mine development perspective. We've gone from 50,000 ounces of annual gold production there to this year being 200,000-250,000 ounces, to last year, we produced a little over the top end, around 265,000 ounces. Now, since that time, we've produced 1.4 million ounces of gold. Since 2019 to now, we've produced 1.4 million on a reserve base of 100,000 ounces.
Mm-hmm.
Each year, we've had very good success with the drill bit. Today, at the end of 2025, we've got 1.15 million ounces in the reserve category. We've incredibly increased that reserve base and grown the production profile. What we're doing now is we're looking ahead. To the latter part of your question is, we're investing this year. We've got higher strip ratios such that in 2027, 2028, and for the next five years, we've got a good 200,000-250,000 ounces a year in front of us. I would anticipate that the overall cost profile goes down a little in the future years, but I want to be cautious about that at the same time, because we all are seeing inflation impacts within the business.
Even if you called it a flat structure here going forward, the margins are still fantastic at $2,100-$2,200 per ounce. Here we are selling at $2,500. Again, I'm very excited about the future there too, because we continue to invest and find new epithermal gold veins, good mineralogy that feeds into either one of these plants. It's been a little engine that could.
Great. Thank you for answering my questions, Ryan, and I'd ask the audience to please join me in thanking Ryan for his fireside chat.