Hello, and thank you for all the people here who are attending in person. It's great to see some familiar faces who have been here for quite a while and some people I've worked with for a long part of my career. I know last year I said a thank you to a lot of the people that have been important to me in my now 26 years of doing this, and I'd have to say that this 26 year of every year standing at the podium as the CEO of a company was definitely the most challenging I think I've seen in those 26 years, despite the strong performance of metals, the translation of that into the equity markets I think we've yet to see.
Now, I say that, yet to see, because I do think there will be a significant catch-up, and the companies who have put themselves in a good position to perform will perform very strongly this year. And with the support of several banks and a lot of our shareholders, some long-term shareholders, we were able to be one of the few companies in recent months who have been able to complete large-scale financing. And in 2023, we were consistently slowing down the progress of our projects because of the inability to raise capital. So with this completion of the financing, I'm pretty happy to say that we're looking forward to a very strong 2024, and we are accelerating the advancement of our projects.
Next important piece of business, I wanted to welcome Cassandra Joseph to the board of our company, a new addition and very strong credibility and experience in our industry that I think will be important to our company. So welcome and look forward to working with you. I have our standard disclaimer statement, so I urge everybody to read this. There could be some forward-looking statements made in my presentation. So as most people know, i-80 Gold is a Nevada-only company. We've been fortunate, I think, to assemble one of the largest resource bases that you'll find in any U.S.-based company, with significant gold and silver resources in our portfolio and multiple polymetallic deposits that we've been delineating over the past 24 months. Nevada remains currently the number one mining jurisdiction, and we found it to be a tremendous place to work as we advance our projects.
Very fortunate to have assembled a very high-quality team, some of our team who are here today, who have a vast, strong, long-term history of exploring, developing, and mining in the state. We're one of only two companies in the state of Nevada with an autoclave facility that, for the long-term development of our company, I believe gives us a true competitive advantage to grow. Because for the most part, most projects in Nevada 20 years ago were oxide projects, and as they go to depth, typically transition to sulfide or refractory. The inability to process refractory mineralization in Nevada, to me, is a barrier to entry into the state. This is a key acquisition for our company, and the startup is key to achieving our goal to become one of the largest producers in the United States.
As everybody knows, I'm an explorer at heart, so I enjoy the exploration that we do. And the thing I like about our project portfolio is that these are very high-quality, high-grade assets, but every single one is open for expansion. We have yet to cut off one of our primary deposits, and I look forward to our resources continuing to grow as we go forward. Importantly, these are all brownfield sites, so we have these images here so you can see there's a lot of companies working in the Rocky Mountains or remote sites. And when you look at the future of that company, how many years it's going to take? I use Greenstone, the Greenstone mine that's just being commissioned in Geraldton as an asset that Premier drove forward.
As an example, we acquired the project in 2008, and it's just going into production, so 16 years from first drill hole to permit to build a mine. So it's not an easy business that we're in. It's capital-intensive, and it's time-intensive. And the portfolio that we've assembled, as you see here, we have two existing processing facilities. So trying to process a mill in a tailings pond is not what we're trying to do right now. It's making modifications to existing permits so that we can achieve our goals and getting three projects ready for development over the next several years. In 2024 or leading up to 2024, we have made several significant milestones despite working on a balance sheet that was less than we wanted. Recently, we raised sufficient funds to advance our company's strategy to become the second-largest gold and polymetallic producer in the state of Nevada.
In fact, we are aiming to become the largest pure-play gold producer in the United States. We have more than 45,000 m of drilling plan this year, whereas last year we were backing off all year. This year we're accelerating what we do. This is designed mainly to increase the quality of our mineral resource base. We have, in all categories, 14.5 million ounces of gold, but a lot of that's in Inferred. One of the big challenges for companies is the capital required to convert Inferred resources to indicated or Measured and Iindicated, which requires a lot of drilling. You can drill at 100-meter spacings. They got this nice resource, but in order to move it through to a development scenario, you have to tighten that up and then do your engineering studies in order for that to happen.
So we're in a good position to do that, and we did say we wanted to deliver our first feasibility study in 2023. We weren't able to achieve that because of, as I said, difficulties in financing the programs required. But we have now embarked on a pretty major drill campaign at the Granite Creek property for it to move into Measured and Indicated resource and become our first true feasibility study. And on the back of that, we expect the first operation that we declare commercial production on. And we continue to advance. We announced earlier a non-binding term sheet for a joint venture on one of our properties. A lot of people ask questions about that event. For us as a company, you always want 100%. You never really want a partner.
But when you're trying to do what this company's trying to achieve with multiple operations, we felt that it could be prudent to get some help advancing these projects, so utilizing other companies. We continue to advance this joint venture. Joint ventures are complicated. If you recall what happened to us in our joint venture at Greenstone with Centerra, we're cognizant that structuring a JV properly and ensuring you have the right rights to advance the project is pretty key. We continue to do that. It's not an easy process and does take time. We have a large, very high-grade resource base. Two of our projects that we're advancing currently for development are + 10 g. 10-gram deposits aren't the norm when it comes to underground operations. They're actually very rare. The grade of mines around the world every year declines.
When you look at the average gold grade being produced worldwide, every year it goes down. So we're chasing lower and lower-grade deposits. The price of gold at $2,300, $2,350 helps in those developments, but there aren't a lot of projects that really survive the tough times. And really, the mines that survive best in difficult gold conditions because we are going to see ups and downs. This is not a straight-up business. It's not like the S&P 500. Metal prices go up and they go down, and the companies have to deal with that. And the higher-grade assets typically do much better. When you look at our resource base, we stand as one of the largest holders of resources in the state of Nevada, and we expect that to increase. We haven't released any new resources.
We've been working on new resource work based on drilling for the Ruby Hill project. Granite Creek will be the big one for us here in 2024 as we look to significantly increase our M&I resource for a feasibility study. None of the polymetallic deposits in our portfolio were currently part of our resource. We aren't moving forward with those resources. We're not drilling right now. We completed our drill program, and we're just waiting on once or assuming once we get the JV completed, we will make a decision as a joint venture as to what we release and how we release resources and when we release those resources. We're working through those items as well. As I mentioned, we do have some of the highest-grade development stage projects you'll find across North America.
But one thing I think that gets overlooked is we actually have three open-pit projects in our portfolio, and these are significant resource bases. The largest deposit in our portfolio is at Ruby Hill, and it's a heap leach open-pit project that was drilled off by Barrick prior to our acquisition. It's about a 5 million ounce open-pit project, which if you look at it as a comparison project, in terms of ounces, about the same size as Greenstone. Greenstone is what Premier basically was. The Hilltop discovery we made at the Granite Creek project is what I believe to be one of the highest-grade new polymetallic discoveries in the world. And that discovery was made 18 months ago now, just over 18. And the exploration success we've had at these projects has been phenomenal.
And the work we've been doing to upgrading resources, if you're following the drill bit, has been demonstrating that our 10-gram grade is holding up really well. And in several instances, we're seeing increased grade. Not going to dwell on this slide here, Slide Seven of the presentation, but one of the things that if you look at the history of i-80, we came from Premier. Premier was Canada, U.S., Nevada, and Mexico. And as you can see with the new company, we're just Nevada. And it's nice to see that the Fraser Institute and the peer companies who kind of vote on this, the people in our industry who are responsible for voting to see these types of things done by the Fraser Institute, that Nevada ranks number one in terms of both investment attractiveness and policy perception.
We're fortunate that even that's a good thing to have when it comes to, "I want to build a mine." But these sites that we have are all road accessible. They all have grid power. It's a different situation than you typically find in our industry. And again, as I mentioned at the beginning, Matt Gili, our President and Chief Operating Officer, has done a tremendous job at attracting what we feel is some of the top talent in the state for developing operations. I'd even point out one gentleman, Mark Miller, who's not on this, one of the top permitting people you'll find. So not only the quality, but the experience these people have at working in the state of Nevada is what I believe is going to be key in this company achieving our goals of becoming a significant producer in the state.
We operate entirely in North Central Nevada. I refer to where we work here on the slide. We've got Nevada. It's a postage stamp within North Central Nevada. Within this area of the Great Basin are what are referred to as the Carlin and Battle Mountain trends and the Getchell trends. A lot of arguments about what is the real trend of mineralization in these places. But there's definitely these districts or large structural features through the Great Basin that are significantly endowed in gold. If Nevada Gold Mines, who operate entirely in this picture, were a separate producing company, it would actually be the fourth-largest gold producing company in the world on an annual basis. The only companies larger than it would be the two owners, Newmont and Barrick, and Agnico Eagle.
It took Agnico taking over Yamana to achieve producing more gold than what Barrick and Newmont do in the state of Nevada. We've been fortunate to assemble a very high-quality portfolio of projects. We actually have six active projects in the state. Not developing all six. We're working on three of them, but we actually have six projects in the state. We have the processing infrastructure that's going to be critical to achieving success in the future. Importantly, we didn't start three years ago when i-80 came out. We actually started working at buying projects in Nevada about 15 years ago with a project that's called Saddle, the Saddle project in the Rain District. We acquired an obscure piece of ground in the Carlin Trend. We traded that property, essentially, to get Cove.
What we've done at Cove is delineate what I believe is one of the highest-grade undeveloped gold deposits in North America. We took that project from a concept to a resource. We permitted to go underground, which we successfully put in place in 2023 to begin the underground drill campaign in advance of a feasibility study. Lone Tree is what we believe gives us a long-term competitive advantage in the state. I'd point out that Lone Tree also has a resource. Lone Tree is a significant mine in its day. It was an open-pit operation right beside the Interstate 80, hence our name, i-80. It's the only refractory processing facility that actually sits on the highway. The other ones, you have to drive up dirt roads to access them.
In this image in the center, right under where it says advantage, those little white things, those are transport trucks on the highway. So it's a very well-located facility. Just across the highway is the Nevada Central Railway. So in the future, if it comes to looking for third-party concentrates, etc., it's the primary spot to be used in this state. There's significant upside, though. One thing that we don't talk about, the resource we have at Lone Tree, but there is a pit expansion of about 3 million ounces in all categories. Most of that's in the Inferred category. But the Power Line Fault structure where this deposit exists has sections of it that have significant high-grade refractory mineralization. These deposits could be, if it wasn't for the water situation, could be company makers in their own rights. They're tremendous widths, really good grades.
The Sequoia Fault structure is something that I've wanted to do more work on. We haven't because we've got other higher priorities. And then we have the Buffalo Mountain project just to the southwest of Lone Tree. And Buffalo Mountain, we don't talk about much in our portfolio. It's kind of between us and Marigold, a bit off to the side. But just so you get the picture, the Marigold mine of SSR is immediately south of us. And our last step-out hole, or our southmost hole we drilled in the deposit, was 134-meter intercept of 1 g, which is an exploration guy. It's, "wow, we got to go drilling there," because oxide mineralization at 1 g is actually really good. A lot of the open-pit oxide projects working in Nevada today are 0.5 g or less as an average grade.
So when you see those types of grades, it's something you do want to follow up on. So there's a lot of other opportunities in our portfolio that we haven't fully been taking advantage of. Our most advanced project in our portfolio. I'm doing that on the screen, too, folks. Something on the conversion. It must be a different PowerPoint. So apologize for how the work some of the words are overtopped. It's just a conversion, I guess, different computers. But Granite Creek is our most advanced project. It was the one where we targeted providing our first feasibility study in late 2023. And we didn't achieve that goal, again, primarily because of difficult financial conditions in the market that limited our ability to complete the drilling that was necessary to get there. As you can see, a lot of our resource is Inferred, and we need to upgrade that.
We did do an underground drilling campaign. You can see some of the results here, up to 21.9 m of 31 g, extremely high-grade mineralization. It sits immediately on strike from the Turquoise Ridge operation. Turquoise Ridge, as you can see just to the north, is one of the largest gold deposits ever discovered in the United States. It is, I believe, the third-largest producing complex for Nevada Gold Mines in the state. And we discovered a zone called the South Pacific Zone or have delineated a zone called the South Pacific Zone just north of where the historic work was done that is really, we believe, the future of this operation.
That's where the drill campaign we're just ramping up with four drill rigs here that will be going basically for the balance of this year to not only infill and increase our M&I resource, Measured and Indicated, but also look at stepping out. The deposit is completely open at depth and along strike. Our northernmost hole we drilled in 2022, which is still our northernmost hole, was 15.7 g intercept over 6.6 m. Our deepest intercepts, which were drilled early in 2023, were up to 15.5 g over 19.7 m. This is world-class grades in a world-class mining camp. This year, we look to expand on that given our improved financial position.
But to put it in perspective, this project is the first that we're looking to move or transition from exploration to development to what we hope to be a full production decision on the back of a full feasibility. If you look at our preliminary models that we're doing on that mine plan as we advance the feasibility work, the one you see on the left on this slide here, Slide 13, is what the mine plan would have looked like in the feasibility study in 2023. If you jump forward and we only did a limited program in 2024, you can see the difference in scale, especially when it comes to adding the South Pacific Zone. This year, we hope to make that footprint even larger and complete all of the engineering required to release a 43-101-compliant resource.
We're targeting about a 3x increase or expansion of the M&I resources here with the current drill program. Cove is, I guess, near and dear to my heart. We've had it for 12, 13 years. We've been working this project, put our first holes in, had some great exploration success. Steve was involved in that in the back. We turned it into what is now almost 1.7 million ounces of gold in all categories at nearly 11 g. Truly, one of the higher-grade, advanced-stage gold projects in all of North America. We did put in the underground phase one underground infrastructure that you can see in the image in the middle. A few of us, including my wife, were standing there in the initial blast when we were opening up that portal.
It was nice to see a project after, I think, 13 years go from the first drill holes to where it is today. We have two drill rigs now defining that deposit to move forward with the full feasibility. Our goal is to release that feasibility study in 2025. We are now moving forward with the plan to elevate our projects on an expedited basis based on our improved balance sheet. The advanced-stage project drilling we've done. This is an image you see, the primary image on this site. The green is what's being completed. The white are the holes that we're going to be drilling over the balance of this year and probably into 2025 as we complete the full definition of this deposit. In addition to the known deposits, there's significant exploration upside. We've made new discoveries.
We have a polymetallic discovery that we did when Barrick was working with us here that graded 5.1 g gold, 410 g silver, and nearly 11% lead zinc that has yet to be followed up. So there's a lot of upside in this project. It's not just it's a 1.7 million ounce deposit, and that's it. And that deposit is open. So you can see our last step-out holes in the image where it says open are significant high-grade mineralization. So the upside here is substantial. And we do intend to do some step-out drilling from underground once we get to the tail end of the mission of this project. Our flagship asset is Ruby Hill, though, mainly because it is our largest resource and it has such optionality for the company. The project is host to oxide gold mineralization.
As I said earlier, one of the largest deposits is in red here. It's the Mineral Point project. It's a silver-gold oxide deposit that was drilled off by Barrick but wasn't constructed. In terms of scale, it would be fairly similar to the scale of what Greenstone is. We also have the Ruby Deeps deposit. Ruby Deeps is a refractory gold deposit that sits underneath the Archimedes Pit. Also underneath the Archimedes Pit is Blackjack. That's a skarn zinc deposit. Just south of that is Hilltop and further south, FAD, which are CRD polymetallic deposits. So it's a really remarkable project in the fact that there's all of these styles of mineralization essentially sitting right on top of each other. And we believe that somewhere in this area is a large porphyry center that is the heat engine or feeds the mineralization here.
And if we're lucky, we'll do some extra exploration this year, and maybe we'll be successful at delineating where that porphyry source is because right now, we have lead, zinc, silver, gold, and we started to get a little bit of copper at the end of our mineralization. So adding copper to this project would just add another opportunity here. And we will be doing a step-out drilling and expansion of the area that we believe some of this mineralization exists. The longer-term plan, though, is to develop Ruby Hill as our third actually, we expect it to be our second operation in Nevada. The infrastructure, almost identical to what we have at Cove in the lower image you see here on Slide 17, is to put the portals in the pit.
It reduces how much spiraling down you have to do or ramping down you have to do to depth. So it reduces your cost of building an operation. You're closer to the deposit. But when you look at the larger image here, it has Blackjack and Ruby Deeps. This is a refractory gold deposit sitting right beside a skarn zinc deposit. So this development will allow access to base metals and gold. And that was the reason we had a significant amount of interest in this project and have chosen that perhaps one of the best paths forward here is to work with a partner to develop the project who is mostly interested in the base metals, where we continue to be well, I guess we're interested in both, but gold is an important part of our business. The deposits are completely open for expansion.
The southmost hole we drilled in the East Hilltop discovery, that discovery was made less than 12 months ago, was a 114-meter intercept of 9.5% zinc. Contained within that was 13.6 m of 17.7% zinc, 0.4% copper, and 10 g gold. This is the area where we're tending to see a potential transition of zinc skarn to copper skarn. That is something that definitely warrants additional work on in the ensuing year. We're also advancing this project for our long-term development plan of starting up the three operations. The slide you see here on Slide 18 is the work we're doing. A lot of this is internal, but we do have a consulting group we work with on a lot of our planning at what does the gold operation look like.
These are some of the preliminary mine designs for Ruby Deeps coming out of the pit and accessing multiple high-grade zones. Also on the base metal, we've done significant work on the metallurgy. We just recently received the final metallurgical results for all of the polymetallic deposits. We're working at when are we going to publish a resource for the multiple deposits we have there. At Mineral Point, we are planning to do a little bit of work this year. That's the large open-pit project, getting a better understanding of silver recoveries as part of a future I think in our 10-year plan, we envision that Mineral Point will be an important part of that and working through hydrology and long-term permitting of that project. The polymetallic zones are one of the reasons we acquired this project.
As we were really looking for a refractory gold deposit, which was Ruby Deeps, when we did our due diligence on this project, Barrick had identified a very high-grade skarn zinc deposit right below the pit, and they didn't develop it. We felt that because this region is more of a base metal region, if you look at its 150-year history, that that's something that Homestake and Barrick did not pursue. They did very little work if it wasn't just for gold. We've had significant success. In our first grassroots exploration program, we discovered in our first hole, we discovered a CRD zone. Our second hole was a step-out. We discovered another lens that's now what we call the Upper Hilltop Zone. We started stepping out.
We found East Hilltop, and we discovered what's likely the extension of Lower Hilltop further to the west in this image. This horizon or this fault structure, we brand-newly identified it in mid-2022, so just, I guess, about 20 months ago now. It is completely open for expansion. Between us and FAD, which is about 2 km to the south, this CRD system under alluvial cover is essentially untested. So it's a huge exploration target here. At the right time, we will look to embark on more exploration here. The FAD project was acquired by the company in 2023. We did complete drilling. This is, in my belief, one of the highest-grade polymetallic deposits you'll find anywhere in the world right now.
If you look at one of the more recent mines put into production in the world was Adriatic, a polymetallic mine in, is that in Bosnia?
Pluto.
Where?
Pluto.
And if you look at the grades of FAD and what we're doing at Hilltop, I'd argue that you'll see that when we publish resources, our grades are likely to be higher. This deposit remains wide open for expansion. It's the down dip extension of one of the largest historic mines in this district. And though we don't intend to focus on FAD in 2024, it is truly a significant upside opportunity in our company. So going forward, we're in a much better position than we were sitting when I was at the podium last year. Last year, I was like, "oh, shit. Sorry." But language, how do we keep this ship going? Tough markets. We're slowing projects down rather than speeding things up. And I look at this graph, and I'm going to end here, is how does this company achieve success? One is converting our resources to reserves.
That's going to be a very important part of our 2024 work, delivering technical studies to enhance our financing options. When you don't have feasibility studies, getting a debt financing to build a mine is not there. So as we elevate the engineering work on these projects, it will just enhance our financing options going forward. And that will allow us to deliver on our long-term production growth plan. I think we need to better message and execute a concise plan and how we're going to achieve the company's goals. I like saying, "oh, look at that drill hole. It's wide open." But we need to convert that into mine success. So my final point of this year's presentation is how do we turn exploration success into operational excellence? And I thank everybody for attending this year. And I don't know if we are taking questions, or are we?
Take a couple from the room if there are any. And if not, as I say, every year, let's go that way and have some refreshment.
Ewan, I just wanted you to confirm or maybe clarify what I heard on a recent podcast that you did where you were asked when the company will have a positive cash flow. And the response was, "Well, it'll be after the Ruby Hill Base Metals is up and running in maybe 2026 or 2027." Is that correct, or?
As a business, it's going to be several years. So right now, we believe that the first project of ours that will generate positive cash flow as a project is expected to be Granite Creek. But the cash flow that will realize from that portion of our business will not build Cove and Ruby Hill and an autoclave. So as a company to be truly cash flow positive, when we're publishing right now, we give no guidance, but we expect to in the future once we start delivering feasibility studies is at that point when we've got all of the technical studies upgraded, then we'll be able to give better clarity on when we expect to become a cash flow positive company. But we are still termed as a developer, not a miner. And that development will continue over the next several years.
I was just wondering. I don't want to preach to the choir because you all know exactly what you had to do. But since you were mentioning there are four projects, and each of them are big, and each of them are swallowing a lot of money. So to me, i-80 was a darling of the market those days. And all of a sudden, because when the investment bankers see that you are swallowing so much money, it has become a prey to the investment bankers.
I was just wondering, since you were mentioning Ruby Hill is almost like a lean, hard rock project, five million ounces, is it possible to just develop that project and leave everything on care and maintenance, and then you will get lots of money, and then you can start doing it so that you don't spend so much money and then become prey to the investment bankers?
Well, we've got toll milling arrangements with Nevada Gold Mines that are contingent on us continuing to build our business. So stopping is not really an option for us. We plan to capitalize on having a working relationship with existing facilities to be able to help fund our business. I always say that as soon as you take your foot off the gas, you're going down. Normally, people say, "why don't you save for better days?" But better days don't always come. So continuing on with your business plans is important. And as you said, prey to the investment bankers, we've had our short position increase significantly. I think when we raised capital in February, it was really deemed that these guys just put a Band-Aid on it, and they're coming back. And our short position started to go up.
I expect to see that decrease significantly now that we've completed the financing.
I said the board deals are broad deals. The board deals are sometimes broad deals by then.
Yeah. Sometimes it can be. In respect for the bankers, I'm not going to comment on that. We got great relationships with the bankers, though, by the way. Well, with no other questions, thank you, everybody, again for attending. It's always a pleasure to stand up here and talk to you and look forward to the future. Thank you.