Yes. Thank you for the opportunity to present GoGold here today. I'll just tell you a little bit of our group and what we've done in Mexico. For myself, it's been 29 years. We've been down there. We built four mines, the first company being Gammon Gold, which literally started in the garage 32 years ago. That one we took from, we built two mines there, and they were an underground 1,500-ton-a-day mine, open pit with 11,000 tons a day going to a heap leach and moving about 100,000 tons a day. Sometimes you look back and you say you didn't know what you didn't know. Anyway, it worked out fairly well. We produced 250,000 ounces a year. Ultimately, Carlos Slim bought the Ocampo asset, and the company was merged with Alamos Gold.
What we typically have done in Mexico are private families who have mining assets. The El Kubo asset we bought from the Via Gomez family back in 2004. That one we had a shell. We, Bank of Montreal, put $45 million into it out of the gate and financed it. We doubled the production. We sold that for $375 million. Our Nayarit project was just a small discovery, and we sold that in 2010 for $80 million to Capital Gold. It's been GoGold here now for the last 14 years. I've had some involvement in some other projects as kind of founder, as Silver Tiger, as Kai has mentioned. We kind of are a group down there who are technical, and we pool together our relationships in Mexico and our network. In GoGold today, we have a very strong balance sheet.
We have $141 million US cash in the bank, no debt. We have one operating asset in the company, which is tailings reprocessing, and it's been operating continually now for 11 years. That project, we've developed some new technology there. At current prices, we're making about $3 million US a month in free cash flow, so around $40 million a year, which is very good. It pays all of our G&A. It pays for a lot of drilling, and it pays for engineering. In the last quarter, it's added about $2 million additional to our bank accounts. Today, last quarter, we were about $139 million. I think we're around $141 million at the end of the quarter there in September. We're heavily institutionally held. You can see some of the names there, both in Europe and in North America.
Also, we're about 20% of insiders, and that would be directors. Myself, I'm one of the largest shareholders of the company. I had about 6% and kind of friends and family where we started with, and about 30% of retail shareholders as well. GoGold for the last 14 years, what we've been doing is what we always do. For example, we bought this one, which was Santa Gertrudis, for $9 million. We invested $11 million. We sold it to Agnico Eagle for $95 million. At the same time, we had just built this project, our Parral project, where that technology and retreating tailings. Really, the driver of the company and the project that we're shovel-ready on is the Las Ricos project. I'll go a little more into Las Ricos. It's in the state of Jalisco, two-hour drive outside of Guadalajara. Easy access, the project.
We entered this in March of 2019. Private individuals paid $7.5 million. We had zero ounces in official resources there at the time. We did 250,000 meters of drilling. We have 285 million ounces of silver-equivalent resources now in the north and the south. Just for scale, this would be about—oops, try that again. This would be about 35 km. Part of this was all that drilling and everything, and part of it was consolidating more ground. In the Las Ricos South, we completed first a PEA, but we've now taken that to a final feasibility study. In fact, we've really started as much of the execution phase as we can do. By execution phase, I mean we've awarded the EPCM, the engineers who are going to assist us in building this, and that's with M3.
They're a US engineering firm, but a big, big presence in Mexico. Outotec CEO, they do a lot of the work for Grupo Peñoles and for Torex. A good group to build this with. The other thing we've done is we have a hydro dam. We put money down on our contract for our hydro contract, $2 million. We have 15 of power secured. We're in the execution phase. We're just getting ready now to appoint. We had an RFP process, a bidding process for underground contractor. We're ready to award that bid now, and we're waiting for that permit. I'll also mention that Los Ricos North, although it's earlier stage, it's a PEA. We do have an overall plan here of how we're going to really advance the project. It has developed into more of what we'd like to see as a continual build.
And what I mean by that is with the permit, we're going to start in Los Ricos South. It's a 24-month build, another six months to ramp up to commercial production. But in 24 months, we'll have that first pour. And we'll be pouring a doré bar. We don't produce a concentrate. We produce a doré bar, which we would get paid 99.5% of spot on that bar. And while we're building Los Ricos South over those 24 months, the plan is that, and this is what I mean a continual construction, that we're going to Los Ricos North in the new year. And we plan to fire up the drills, do infill drilling to bring a resource to a feasibility study to get our proven and probable reserves, and to hopefully next summer apply for a permit in the north as well and get that on track to get a permit.
Because we produced today 2 million ounces. Las Ricos South will add another 7.2 million ounces to the production to bring us to about 9 million ounces, which would make us a significant mid-tier producer. Our all-in sustaining costs there would be around $12. In fact, in the first 18 months of production here at these commodity prices, we will, after tax, generate $450 million. It is a very high-margin project. We have $141 million. It is $227 million to build it. We have had a great run-up in the commodity price. What typically happens, you are going to have some inflation as well in the cost to build. It would not surprise me and it does not worry me if the CapEx goes up to $235 million-$240 million. All of us are going to have a little bit of inflation. It is a very, very well-done study.
Everything was 70% costed, and the study was done in February. But now where do we get the rest of the money to get it up to have lots of available liquidity? Well, I'll tell you, we are having people falling over us with term sheets and saying, "Hey, we want to do business with you. You got $141 million in the bank. You got a high-margin project. This will be mine number five for me and my career building the south, and this will be mine number six." But we have to look at covenants, and we have to say the lowest cost of capital may be some of the lowest covenant, but we want flexibility because we want to remain very much a growth company.
By that, I mean that we want to be building this, moving the drill team, moving the engineering team to the south, and in 24 months just roll right into the north and build the north. Because that'll add another 8.8 million ounces a year of production. That would bring us to a 15-17 million ounce a year silver-equivalent producer at an all-in cost of around $12. I mean, it would literally make this one of the top silver-producing districts in the business. There are larger companies, but 15-17 million ounces out of one project. Very much we're moving towards that concept of a continual build over the next four years. I'll go to permit because permit has had a big impact.
Last Friday, Silver Tiger Metals received all the necessary approvals to build their stockwork zone that they had previously announced in their pre-feasibility earlier last year. So it's being built now. It's going to be built. There's a process, and I will tell you that the process with this current administration in Mexico is one that puts community first, and it's very much focused around the community and acceptance in the community of having that mine. There's a process involving the Secretary of Economy's office where they literally are sending people out to the community and knocking on doors and asking the people what they think about the project and the build. We have had that at Los Ricos South in the last four weeks, and it went extremely well.
We've always had very strong community relations, and they literally knocked on the doors, and the response from the whole community was overwhelmingly in favor of the build, and the same thing would have happened at Silver Tiger Metals, so that process, that would be probably one of the number one things. The other thing right on par with that would be environment, and again, we score very high on the environment. We have our operating asset where we retreat old mine waste and clean up the environment. Obviously, that's a very good calling card with the government of Mexico on environmental cleanup, so we're going through the process. We see what has happened with Silver Tiger Metals. They went through the same process. We can estimate our timing off that. I do believe we think that we have the potential of getting to a permit by the end of the year.
I'd only throw in there the caveat that Christmas in Mexico starts about December 10th, and it ends around January 9th. So that may push it into the new year. But that's all fine. We know we're going to get a permit. We feel so positive about that. We are on the short list. We know where we are in the process. And of course, it was very positive last Friday when Silver Tiger received its approvals to move ahead in building the mine. And I think we're pretty much almost there as well. I'll leave it just if there's some questions for the audience and more specifics.
We have about two and a half minutes for questions if we have any from the audience.
No.
No? You must have a question.
We always have questions. Lots of questions, Brad.
Okay.
No, in terms of budgets moving forward, have you ordered any long lead items already and things like that? Not trying to get ahead of ourselves here, but.
No, no, and that's a very good question. And what we're doing right now is the detailed engineering with M3. So that will put us in a position where we could order the long lead time item. The longest lead time item right now would be the mill itself, the SAG mill. And that's about 54 weeks lead time. The other thing, the longest lead time in the whole construction would be that underground development. This is an underground 2,000-ton-a-day operation and with an average grade of 340 grams of silver-equivalent. I mentioned that in the first part of the mine, the first 18 months, it's at these prices about $450 million of after-tax free cash flow. And that's because we have one area that we get to early in the mine life that's extremely high grade.
And we'll be processing that. So the underground contractor is very, very important. That's the longest lead time to get that ramp going underground and get developing these sub-level long hole stopes, average stope width 11 meters wide, and get those developed so that we can be feeding that 2,000-ton-a-day mill. So on that contract, we're just ready to award. Fantastic.
We do have one question here. A microphone is coming. Just one second. There we go. Thank you.
Hello, Majid from Synergy Engineering. I was just wondering what you do with the tailings and the rock dumps and stuff like that. I mean, do you have lots of that or what do you understand?
Yeah. What we'll do here, everything has been done here by best practices. For example, we'll go with the best standard of tailings today, which is dry stacked tails, and those dry stacked tails, they're detoxified. All the water is pressed out of them. We recycle the water, so less water usage for the mine, but we also take those tailings and we mix them with cement. We pump them underground again into the voids that we'll create here when we do our long hole stoping, and it becomes a paste backfill. It means that you leave less pillars in the mine for support, and you have the safest and good ground stability as well doing that. In our operation that we've been mining for 11 years, what we've done is we've moved those old tailings out of the city.
We don't have any of the old liability for the old tailings. They're 300 years old. But we put them in a new facility, which is this environmental standard you'd have in Canada or the US.
Time is up. If any follow-up questions, please.
Great. Thank you.
Really appreciate it, Brad. Thank you so much.