There we go. Sorry about that. Not off to a great start. Thank you for joining us today for the i-80 Investor Day. Last fall, when we announced our development plan, we talked about delivering feasibility studies for our five gold projects by the end of March. We're on track to do that. Preceding that, we issued five press releases now, with the last one going out this morning for the Granite Creek Open Pit. What you can see when you look at those press releases and studies is that there's been a lot of work done. We believe that these are reasonable and achievable, and we hope that as we move to the feasibility studies, we'll be able to do better. At $2,175 gold, the NAV of those five gold projects is $1.6 billion. At $2,900 gold, it's $4.5 billion.
This is just a portion of our portfolio, and I think Matt will talk a little bit later on about some of the projects we have within the portfolio that aren't included. It is a very valuable asset base in Nevada. I can tell you, having recently worked in Ontario and then going back to Nevada, where I worked in Nevada for Barrick Gold with Goldstrike when they were building that, operating in Nevada is easy. It's a great environment to work in. You can get things done quickly and economically, and the team will walk you through that today.
The host will be Matt Gili, our President and COO, and I hope that by the time we finish, you'll have a good sense for the people behind the numbers and doing the work and the confidence that they can do what they say they can do. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Matt. We're going to keep this at 10 minutes per asset in terms of presentation, and then a five-minute Q&A. Thanks. Over to you, Matt.
All right. Thank you very much, Richard. Yeah, as Richard mentioned, my name is Matt Gili. I'm the President and CEO of i-80 Gold. I've been here with Ryan Snow, the CFO, since the inception in April of 2021. This is what you're seeing today is the culmination of four years of really hard work to bring all of our projects to a point of a publishable technical report where we can start talking about them openly. I'm very excited to be here today. This is a big moment for me and the team. Let's get started. The first thing I'm going to do, I'm not going to read this disclaimer, but I am going to say one thing. The information contained in this presentation reflects our assumptions, opinions, estimates, plans, beliefs, and expectations as of March 6, 2025, and is subject to change without notice. All right.
The next two slides, we're going to talk about the team. I'm not going to read through each of these bios. I'm not going to detail each one. What I'm going to show you today is a team I couldn't be more proud to be part of that has got a tremendous amount of international experience. More importantly, for what we're doing right now, is a Nevada-based team which has specific experience in operating in Northern Nevada, understands the environment, understands the players, knows how to get things done, and is incredibly skillful in their job. You are going to have a chance to hear from each one of these people today. Without me going through them specifically, know that you're going to get to meet each of these people. Today's agenda, as Richard pointed out, I'm going to do a little introduction.
I'm going to show you the—it's called the big picture. Let's call it the—why are we here? Then we're going to go through each of the sites and different parts of the team. We're going to show you each one of the sites, the five projects that we've advanced to PEA right now. Inside of each of those project presentations, there's going to be one slide on permitting, which Mark Miller is going to take you through, and there's going to be one slide on exploration, which Tyler Hill is going to take you through. At the end of each section, each mine, we're going to open it up to questions and answers for that property. That's the agenda for today. All right. Here's the pillars. This is why we're here. This is why all of this matters. We are a proven Nevada mining experience company.
We understand what we're doing. We understand the environment. And we're based in Nevada. This team, the people you're going to hear from today, we all work and live together in the Northern Nevada area. Some of us in Reno. In fact, all of the people you're going to talk to today are in Reno. We also have another operations hub that is at Lone Tree, which is outside of Battle Mountain, where the safety teams and a lot of the engineering groups sit. We are a Nevada-based team based in Nevada where the mines are. We have a very high-grade growth pipeline. You can see that from each of the PAs. What we also have is resource expansion potential at each of our sites. What we're going to show you today is the start of i-80.
It's a 22-year start, but it's the start of i-80, but it's by no means the end of i-80. We will just continue to grow upon that. We use the strategic hub-and-spoke mine model. You see this in the Pilbara in Western Australia. You see this at NGM and the former Newmont and Barrick operations. It's the concept that if you look at the three underground mines for i-80, they're all brilliant deposits. None of them is large enough of scale to support its own processing facility. When you take the three and you combine them, that's when you demonstrate the scale necessary to be running a refractory processing plant in Northern Nevada. That is really the model. The model is we have the autoclave capacity. That's our core. That's our hub. These spokes feed into that hub. It's a very efficient way to use capital.
You see that from the capital estimates. The capital costs for each of our projects are very modest because they're not each one trying to build their own processing plant. You'll see a processing plant at the Granite Creek Open Pit, but we're sticking with the hub-and-spoke model right now. The first three underground projects all feed into the hub-and-spoke. We are going to show you two very substantial open-pit deposits today as well, one at Granite Creek and one at Ruby Hill. These are large in scale. They're oxide. They're traditional Nevada oxide gold deposits. They're just the next step of growth for i-80 Gold. Lastly, we're going to talk about we have a great pipeline of growth. We have projects that are currently in operations. Some are in construction. Some we're going to construct. There's a lot of moving parts here.
The CFO, Mr. Ryan Snow, is going to take us through and say, "Okay. So how are we going to recapitalize this? What is our strategic plan for structuring the balance sheet?" All right. Here is my first slide. Look, I have prepared some notes just because I am very excited about what we are doing here. First, Nevada. We are talking about brownfield sites, the hub-and-spoke model, and the efficiency that comes from having all these properties together. I really cannot overstate, relatively speaking, how easy it is to operate a hub-and-spoke model out of Northern Nevada. Anyone from any of our sites or from the Reno office can be at any one of our other sites within a four-hour drive. We can share resources. We share laboratory facilities. We share core processing facilities. We share technical staff. We interact meaningfully every single day.
The communications are there. The interaction is there. We function as a team. We have three underground mines feeding into the centralized autoclave facility. Again, as I mentioned before, each of these properties by themselves does not have the scale to build an autoclave. Together with the Lone Tree Autoclave, they all come together into one very tidy package. That allows us to get the value out of three modest-sized deposits, big for us, modest-sized deposits, refractory in nature. That is our strategic advantage. We are the entity that can process those 1-2 million-ounce high-grade refractory deposits in Northern Nevada. Added to this are the two open-pit deposits. I touched on them briefly. We will touch on them in more detail. Historically, if you are looking back at our last four years, we did not talk a lot about the open-pit deposits. We had them. We knew they were there.
Exciting to us. Look, it's changing the gold price environment. It's really brought out the value that's contained in these two open-pit deposits. They're both very large in scale. They are high-grade in nature. This is really what you're going to see today as we go through the presentation. What this brings in altogether, when you look at all the different parts, is you look at a company that has over 13 million ounces of gold resource in Northern Nevada and almost 200 million ounces of silver resource here in Northern Nevada. Again, we'll talk about exploration upside. Tyler's going to touch on the exploration upside for each of our properties as we go through the presentations. All right. This is the slide that's exciting to me. This is what we've been working for for four years.
This is the first time that we've been able to show in a public forum a production growth profile supported by technical reports. This is what all of these deposits together represent. This is a big deal for all of us. It shows us in 2031, we are now a steady, reliable 400-ounce-a-year producer. As we bring on Mineral Point, we peak very high, and then we come back down. Tyler is going to go through how we're going to maintain that level as we go forward over the next two decades. This is a fundamental pivotal moment for i-80 Gold. You will not have seen this before. We would have alluded to parts of it, and you kind of had to piece together the math and figure out how all the parts fit together. This demonstrates how that all fits together.
Great production profile, lots of moving parts. The common question we get is, "How are you possibly going to build all of these projects?" This is how you do it. It's sequential. We're going through and systematically executing on each of these projects. As we advance each project, we learn from the previous project. As we advance each of the permits, we learn from the previous permitting process. While it looks like a lot of moving parts, when you look at it in this context, you can see this is a very executable construction schedule. This is a very executable ramp-up for a mining company. This is the heart of what we're doing. As you see, you now see a PEA on all of our projects. That is a fundamental moment for i-80. That's certainly not the end.
Through the course of the rest of this year, we're going to advance feasibility study on the Granite Creek underground, pardon me, the Granite Creek underground. We're going to advance the feasibility study on the Cove Underground. We're going to finalize the Class III engineering estimate for recommissioning of the autoclave. We're going to advance the technical reports for the Granite Creek Open Pit. One thing you're going to touch on as we go there is we were looking now at a CIL plant as the processing facility for the open pit. That's a fundamental change. It's very valid. It's great work. We're going to spend some time this year confirming that and really fine-tuning those estimates. I just really can't overstate how exciting a time this is. I hope my excitement is my excitement palpable, Ryan? We have worked really hard on this.
I say my team more than I to get to this stage. We are very proud to be able to show you what we've been working on and the value represented by these assets. It is time for me to pass on to the team. The first project that we're going to go through in detail today is the Granite Creek underground. I'm going to pass over to Mr. Timothy George, and he's going to take us through Granite Creek underground.
Thank you, Matt. Good morning and welcome, everyone. It's really a pleasure to be here. It's just amazing to be able to get up here and talk about our deposits in this open forum and have it all out for everyone to see. My name is Timothy George. I'm the Vice President of Operations for i-80 Gold. I'll be walking you through Granite Creek underground.
This is i-80's currently producing mine. This is a very typical Nevada underground operation. What do I mean by that? This is portal access. We have two portals accessing this mine from a historic open pit, from the CX pit. This is underhand cut and fill, 100% underhand cut and fill. We produce backfill on-site. We have a quarry produce backfill mixed out with cement. Very typical for underhand cut and fill here in Nevada. It does make for a very busy open pit. There is a lot going on in that picture, as you can see. We've got a lot of infrastructure there right at the portals and a very congested, busy place to be. We are talking about the PEA today. What does this show us? It shows us that we've got approximately 60,000 ounces per year underground mine with approximately an eight-year mine life.
The reality of this is that we are 10 kilometers away from Nevada Gold Mines Turquoise Ridge Mine, which is a very large deposit. Along trend, there's multiple historic operations there, Getchell Mine and others. This is essentially the same geologic setting. Now, I don't want to get too carried away. Tyler's going to walk us through more on the exploration side. Suffice it to say that we believe in the potential of Granite Creek. This is a really good mine, and it has a lot going for it. There's a lot more down there. With that, we have a PEA out. We are going to be completing a feasibility study in the fourth quarter of this year. We have a little over 20,000 meters of drilling that did not make the cutoff for the PEA.
We are planning on another 15,000 meters of drilling throughout the rest of this year to go into that feasibility study. Great amount of information that is going to go into that feasibility study. Very much looking forward to it. Where are we at today? We are developed down to a little bit past the 4,100-foot elevation. That gives us about 700 vertical feet of mineralized exposure on that body. Ultimately, we are going to get down another roughly 900 feet to the 3,200-foot elevation of what we know now. As many of you may know, we have encountered a fair amount of groundwater in the mine. This was not unexpected, but it has had a larger impact on our development than we had initially planned for. Accordingly, we have really ramped up dewatering and hydrology studies on all aspects.
First has really been about our knowledge of the aquifer. We do not just get a slow seepage through the mine. This is very much structurally controlled. We can go hundreds of feet without hitting water and then hit a structure where we encounter really big inflow. That is different. We are learning about it. We have done quite a bit of geologic mapping and actually mapping when we hit those water flows, mapping that out into structures that carry that water, and learning how we are going to deal with that water. We have also found quite a bit of historic data on airlifting from holes. This is helping us plan new dewatering wells and better target our dewatering resources. We have also started a very successful grouting program underground.
The good thing with this is that when we do find the water, we can grout a specific area, and it's not a prevalent issue throughout the entire mine. Since taking over this project, we started with two operating dewatering wells. We quickly got a third one into production that was already existing. We drilled another dewatering well. Most recently, we've deepened one of those wells, Well 5. We've deepened that with some of the geologic knowledge we've gained and really been able to increase the production on that well. We've increased overall dewatering pumping there at site. With those wells, water quality has been an issue in some of those. We've also permitted and constructed a water treatment plant that is currently operating.
Most recently, we've been able to take permit, clean up the water that's underground, and obtain the permits for putting that through the treatment plant and discharging that out to our infiltration basins as well. Quite a bit of work has gone on this past year and before that even. We've greatly increased that system. Going forward, we have another well planned for this year, as well as increasing that treatment capacity and continuing to dewater this mine. A large part of that as well has been installing piezometers. Every time we turn on a new well, it's a new pump test for us. We're learning more about this aquifer. As of February, we have a predictive groundwater model. All that work, all that knowledge gained is going to be rolling into that feasibility study later this year as well.
We've got mine there at Granite Creek. What are we doing with the ore right now? We have processing contracts with third parties. We have an in-place contract for oxide material. We are in the final stages. We've essentially agreed to commercial terms on a new refractory processing agreement. We are in the final stages of finalizing that agreement. With those third-party contracts, essentially, when it all boils down to it, what we see is a 58-62% payable on the material that we send to those third parties, which is a hard pill to swallow. We don't have a processing cost on top of that. You can see that once we get that autoclave up and running, we're looking at 92%. That recovery is coming from acid autoclaving, which Todd's going to carry us through a little bit more later.
That is going to be a huge impact to us, which you'll see in the coming slides with the economic impact. As we ramp up, let me find my notes here. All right. We are looking at the, where are we? As we continue to ramp up, the Cash flow shows that for the next three years, 2025 at current prices, at $2,175, we lose about $20 million. At current prices, that is actually a cash positive. Why is it so much spend in 2025? The main reason there is that we are looking at this exploration drift and quite a bit of drilling this year to complete that feasibility study. It is basically modest Cash flow for the next three years. Once the autoclave commissions in 2028, we see very cash positive for Granite Creek. You can see this quite well in the chart there.
As we bring that production up, our overall cash costs come down. It is very positive for Granite Creek. It is very key that we get that autoclave going in 2028. With that, I will invite Tyler to walk us through the exploration at Granite Creek.
Turn this on here. All right. I'd like to direct your attention to the image on the screen. This is a section looking west through the Granite Creek underground. The image shows a snapshot of what things looked like in 2021 when the property was acquired. Note the underground workings in black at the top and the red shape showing what would later become the South Pacific Zone that contained only a few historic holes at the time. Now you'll see the image displays a current snapshot of the underground workings and additional drilling since 2021. I apologize if you're viewing online. I've been told you won't be able to see the transition to the new image. For those of you in the room, you can see how far we've come with development and mining, as well as drilling of the South Pacific Zones and OG Zone.
We still see significant exploration potential at depth and to the north, as well as elsewhere across the property. Also note the planned drilling from underground this year shown in the black traces from the exploration drift. The recently published PEA includes only drilling through 2022, leaving 21,000 meters of drilling not in the current resource. Additionally, we will conduct 15,000 meters of drilling this year for infill and step-out of the South Pacific Zone. This new drilling will be included in a feasibility study planned for the end of the year.
Thank you, Tyler. With that, Matt's going to trade places with me again and open it up for some questions and answers.
All right. What are we talking about with Granite Creek? We have a producing mine with very positive reconciliation. One thing we have not touched on yet today with regards to Granite Creek is we have had over two years of operating experience within Granite Creek. We have had approximately 12 different levels that we have mined out and been able to do a reconciliation on each of those levels compared to the resource model. They are all reconciling quite positively. What that does for us, we are not using that and trying to say that we are putting some sort of factor into our mine plans. We are just saying, "Look, our resource model is very comfortable. It is conservative. It functions well." That is the base of our mine. Very pleased with what we have there.
As Tyler laid out, Granite Creek is the property with the most implied resource expansion ability, the resource expansion ability that we can see out there as we go downtrend on the South Pacific. It's not obvious to us that we are neighbors to a mine that's much larger. And we have very anomalous style structures with what they have there to the north of us and groundwater. So that's the story that you've been hearing for the last years on the groundwater. How are we managing with the groundwater? As Timothy pointed out, we've gone through an extensive program to first understand the hydrology model and now have a predictive hydrology model that tells us what's going to happen in the future, allows us to plan better for our dewatering wells. We have upgraded. We've installed one additional well. We've upgraded another well.
We will upgrade another well during the course of this year. Accompanying that, we put in a water treatment plant so that we can treat for arsenic in the water and discharge that out into the aquifer, the basin on the other side of the highway. With that in mind, I'd like to open up to questions regarding the Granite Creek underground. Justin.
Maybe could you talk through where the ramp is, what the mine plan is in the next year and a half, where the ramp is, what levels have you developed, and then?
Also just on the exploration drift for Granite Creek to drill out the South Pacific Zone, what's your expectation there on timing and where is it currently?
100%. All right. So Justin's question was, where are we now with the decline? What levels are we looking at and how are we progressing with the exploration decline? Timothy?
Yeah. I'll tackle the exploration decline. We got a very good start to it last year. Got slowed down once again. Got slowed down by water. We're incorporating that grouting program in with the exploration decline and beginning to move that along now. We do expect to be on time with that exploration decline.
I guess when do you think you'll start drilling and how quick?
I recall, Tyler, we're looking at two months out?
Yeah. The drift is approximately halfway complete where we're at now. Probably a few more months, just. Timothy, touching on the concept of how many levels do we have? That concept of levels, how many levels do we have in production right now? How is the decline advancing? What's the plan for this year? How many levels do we ramp up to?
Yeah. Levels are changing on a day-to-day basis. I apologize that I don't have an exact number for you. Essentially, the ramp is progressing a little ahead of schedule. We're right about where we expected to be on that ramp for 2025. It is supposed to accelerate towards the end of this year as we get ahead of the water more and more, essentially on what we planned for this year. We're sitting, I don't recall the exact elevation offhand. If you want to talk later, we can look at exact levels there.
What we're doing, Justin, there is that the plan for this year has got a phased-up approach to the way that we're syncing the decline. Each quarter, we have a different target rate for the advancement of the decline, culminating in just over 11 feet a day for the second half of the year. As Timothy pointed out, if you're following Granite Creek, it's all a function of how many levels you have active. Right now, we have between five and six levels that are active at any one moment. The advancement of that decline is really what allows you to continue to ramp that up. For the first quarter of 2025, the target advancement rate on that decline is very modest. It steps up to ultimately 11, as I mentioned before.
The plan for this year would then be to kind of finish the year between seven and eight active levels. The South Pacific Zone has come into the mine plan. It has been a major contributor to the ounces for production in 2025. It is absolutely a major contributor to the ounces that we're getting right now. South Pacific is really turning into a very notable ore zone. And we're very pleased to have it in the picture. The South Pacific contributed about 25% of our ounces in 2024. Justin, did I give you justice there?
Yeah. I hope that helps a lot. Are you getting to the levels where you have more horizontal extent than the others?
Again, in the OG Zone, the main zone, we've kind of reached the steady state there. As we go deeper, the levels aren't necessarily getting larger. They shrink and swell as we go down. The South Pacific, the upper levels we've touched have been modest. As we can see, and certainly our resource model shows that as we go down, those will get longer in extent. We haven't got there yet, Justin. That is the whole development plan for 2025.
Thanks very much.
Yeah.
I'm curious on the dewatering, or sorry, let's just say.
Thank you. Curious on the groundwater and the PEA, what the current assumptions are with respect to groundwater that went into the PEA. Also, more broadly, does the groundwater, is it more of a schedule risk or a cost risk? Okay. Great questions. First off, I'll address the first question with regards to the PEA. The PEA was based on work we had done in early 2024. You're right. It doesn't include the today impacts of the groundwater. All the work that we did in 2024 to mitigate the groundwater risk has been built into our internal plan. I will say that in the second half of this year, at that sinking rate of over 11 feet per day, that is more than the sinking rate that's implied in the PEA.
We have a six-month, there is about six months where we are a little bit out of sync. That is fair. I hope we disclose that transparently in the press release. That is the time frame we are looking at, is that six-month window for us to get over the hump of the water. We have significantly increased our ability to dewater the mine, both through the well system as well as the contact water system. The predictive hydrology model shows us that as we continue with this program, we are going to be able to see that water level really drop. I will say we are advancing the decline again. At the end of last year, the message was we have not advanced the decline for several months because that heading has been underwater. We have all the pumping systems in. The main decline is sinking again.
The exploration drift has started up again. We're using grouting as a way to advance in areas where we do hit pockets of water. That's the model for this year. That's the plan for this year. That's where you get to that guidance of 20,000-30,000 ounces produced that's in the press release. Okay. On the groundwater more broadly, if you encounter more surprises, is this going to cost you more money, or is it going to slow you down? I'm sorry. It is because we've built into the PEA and the internal model the budget on capital for we've allocated a capital cost per year of extending our dewatering program, primarily wells. I mean, the idea is always to have wells as you're dewatering versus better systems of capturing water underground.
Each year, we have allocated approximately $3 million for another well as we advance. The water treatment plant is functioning brilliantly. We are going to do an expansion to that water treatment plant to allow it to handle even more water. Other than the capital costs of dewatering, which we are just building in, we are just going to assume from now on, and it is prudent, that we are going to be spending $3 million a year on dewatering infrastructure. It is really schedule risk. Right? What happens? It is not a lot of water. In the context of Nevada, we are discharging right now 1,200 gallons a minute from the underground. That is not a lot of water. Right? It is a lot of water if it is in your decline. It is all H-1 at the bottom of the mine. That is the issue.
It has been completely a function of schedule risk versus the extra cost of dewatering other than the capital infrastructure. Am I giving you justice there?
No, that's great. Thanks.
We had one question online that just wanted a bit more clarity on the drilling schedule going forward at Granite Creek Underground.
100%. Look, I'll let Tyler and Timothy, you alluded to that, where we're sitting with the exploration drift. Most importantly, how are we going to finish those meters of drilling for this year? How are we going to get that feasibility study out at the end of the year?
Yeah. There has been a bit of delay due to the water. We are back progressing on the exploration drift now. We hope within the next few months, we'll be able to begin drilling.
Yeah. Certainly, the plan, the schedule, the budget is to complete that drilling this year and have it incorporated into the feasibility study that comes out at the end of the fourth quarter.
I think it's important to chime in there that on the feasibility study, really what we're waiting for is the drilling to upgrade that resource. The rest, we got a handle on.
Yeah. All right. Any further questions, Kathrine? Okay. Thank you very much. Let's go to the next one. Now we're going to talk about the Granite Creek Open Pit. Todd.
All right. My name is Todd Esplin, VP of Technical Services. Really happy to be h ere today. And I'm a Nevada miner. I've been working my whole career in Nevada. Had a few opportunities to leave, but always stuck it out in Nevada with Barrick and Kinross. And i-80 has been a great fit for me with the different sites all around Nevada where I've worked my whole life. One thing I want to say about Granite Creek Underground Water real quick, and then I'll get into the Open Pit. We just finished a predictive groundwater model.
We can now take a dewatering well and say, "We want to place it here." They can predict what the level that'll pull in years pull the mine down to, and also how much contact water we have. That is very new to Granite Creek. That model goes clear out to Twin Creeks. It goes miles and miles every direction with a lot of inputs. It is calibrated. We have those at some of our other mines. Granite Creek was a little later. I just wanted to say that. I will get into the Open Pit. Granite Creek Open Pit is something we had not been looking at. We decided to look at it again with gold prices going up. It is pretty enlightening. I am going to go over some of the changes.
One thing I will not do today, I am not going to go over every number. You guys have the press releases. I am really trying today to show you something maybe I have some inside knowledge on and can go over and give you a little context on it. You can see up there, really nice mine. It is about 130,000, 127,000 ounces a year, 10-year mine life. Pretty nice grade. Stripping ratio is a little higher. It is not that big a pit. If we go to the next slide, you can see the pit up there. What has changed here? When you look at our 2021 PEA, what has changed? The biggest change is when you pull this pit at $2,175, it goes a little wider. It goes a lot deeper just because of that gold price.
The other big change we made with GRE's help is before this asset was heap leach and CIL. Because of the increased gold price, we were able to make it all CIL. You're wondering, why is that important? That's important because the recovery now is 86.6%, where a lot of the recovery in the heap leach was around 60%. It brings a lot more ounces in that can be recovered. It's just a really neat story that we've just finished up in the last few days. If you look at the timeline down there, you can see that we do have permitting. There is not a lot of water in the mag pit. It's not a lot of water, but that has to be dewatered. We can do that really easily in about a year.
We're looking at putting that into the tailings dam that we build. You can see we have permitting. Michael talked about that. We have about a year and a half of construction. We're into production. All right. Some of the interesting things here. One thing about this open pit, I've run open pits before. I used to run the Round Mountain Open Pit. That pit is deep, and your truck hauls are very long. This pit, if we go back one, you can see it's not that. It's an existing brownfields pit, two pits. We're just going to do laybacks on it and go deeper. The hauls aren't that long, and they're not that far. We're also going to incorporate backfill into that. We'll get into it more, but I'll talk about it a little here.
The CIL plant, we looked at it at different how fast should we mine? We looked at 3,000, 7,000, 10,000 tons per day in the mill in the CIL circuit. Ended up with going with 10,000 just made more sense to get it mined quicker and get that through the plant. When you get a plant like that, economy of scale makes things a little cheaper. That's what we went with. The capital, we can talk about a little bit. You look at the capital costs, they might seem a little low. This is a very simple I've been in processing a long time in my life. A very simple crusher. It'll be a SAG mill, and then a ball mill. Then we'll go right into a CIL circuit.
This ore is really amenable to a CIL circuit, especially in the mag pit side. The mag pit side has a little organics. Not a lot. If you know anything about organics, when you get them in competition with coconut carbon in a CIL circuit, you can have better recovery. We did that a lot at Gold Strike on the autoclave side. You get a lot better recovery when you get, if you have organics, you get something in competition, the coconut carbon will always win. Not always, but most of the time. Some of the other capital items included in that capital is the initial tail stem is included in there. In sustaining capital, it's building that tail stem up. You always want to build the tail stem up when you're in production because it's just way cheaper.
You have waste coming out of the pit. This tail stem, if you go to Granite Creek, it's very flat, very simple. We have a lot of land. We bought some more land from an MGM a few years ago. We have lots of places for the tail stem. It's easy to pipe tails out to wherever it makes the most sense to get an economic tail stem. Very simple tail stem. Here's the unit cost for operating costs. I'm not going to go into every one of them. You can see all in sustaining there at $1,225. Pretty nice typical open pit. One thing you don't see in Nevada too much anymore because everything's been mined out. Everything's somewhat gone refractory. It's nice when you we have oxide in the underground too.
It is nice when you get an oxide deposit like this that is fairly simple and really tried and true processing. All right. We will turn it over to Tyler to go over some of the
All right. Thanks, Todd. First, I'll direct your attention to the image in the bottom left, which displays the conceptual open pit at Granite Creek, which consists of lay backs on four historic pits, the A, B, CX, and mag pits. The section at the top of the image is a long section through the B, A, and CX pits. Note the current topography shown in black and the conceptual ultimate pit outline in white underneath. You'll see the drill hole traces and gold shown on the trace. Almost all of this drilling is historic drilling from the 1970s and 1980s when the pit was first mined. The lower image is a section through the mag pit. Again, same features there with the black being the current topography and the white being the conceptual ultimate pit.
You'll see most of the pushback there is on the southern end where there's a significant amount of mineralization that remains. Overall, approximately 85% of the material from the Granite Creek open pit will come from the CX and mag pits. We do see potential to expand mineralization at depth and along strike of the known deposits. Again, these really haven't seen any drilling since the 1970s and 1980s. It's important to note that there's also two additional historic pits on the property that are not included in the current resource that offer further upside. We'll look to include these in a future feasibility study.
Thanks, Tyler. Now Mark Miller, our VP of Environmental, will go over permitting.
Good morning. Just to follow up on Timothy's presentation on the underground, at present, we have all needed permits to continue advancing the underground there. However, as we move into the open pit expansion, we do foresee additional federal and state permitting actions needed. At the federal level, it will require a National Environmental Policy Act requirement, which will eventually lead to an environmental impact statement, we believe, through the Bureau of Land Management. Over the next two years, the key focus will be on completing required technical studies and baseline surveys. At the state level, on Nevada Division of Environmental Protection, we have a water pollution control permit and a reclamation permit that will need modification. Also, our Class 2 air quality permit will receive a revision.
Currently, with what we know today from a permitting perspective, we expect this process to take an approximate three-year time frame. For details related to that timeline and associated costs, you can refer to the PEA. Thank you.
Thanks, Mark. I was looking down at my notes. One thing I failed to mention is this also is a we're looking at contracting this open pit. It's a very small fleet of 10 trucks, 110 tons, 10-12 trucks, and four loaders. It will not be rope shovels or hydraulic shovels. The benches are pretty small. It's how they did it before. It's a pretty small fleet needed for mining this. I would not call it a small open pit, kind of a medium open pit. Anyway, we will turn it over to Matt.
All right. Thank you, Todd. All right. Let's talk about questions regarding the, pardon me, I went too far. Let's talk about questions regarding the open pit. Huge change in the way that we look at the open pit at Granite Creek and just the appreciation of what is there. You've heard us talk about it before. We mention it. Now you're seeing a real effort and an appreciation for the value that's there. We have begun the permitting process. We have a three-year timeline towards that permitting. That is, Todd alluded to, making sure you understand that trade-off between heap leach and CIL. That is, it's how much does recovery pay? When gold price is $2,175, recovery pays. It pays enough that it does make economic sense and value creation to put in that CIL and process that material.
It's 1.4 gram feed that goes into that plant. To go from 60-ish % recovery into the '80s, that makes a lot of value for i-80 and for our shareholders. That's really what you're seeing there. You're seeing a rethink of the open pit and a reappreciation for it. Pretty excited about this. It's all very fresh. You would have just barely seen it. I'm looking for questions regarding the Granite Creek open pit. Yeah.
Thanks, Todd. Maybe if we just go a bit under the hood. I guess I'll remind you of its contracted mining machine. I guess on the plant, what's the assumptions on your source?
The power, power costs, grind size on this, on the yeah, stuff like that. Okay. So Justin, okay. So you're asking some very specific questions. I'll tackle the easy one first. Yes. When you look at the plan we have here for Granite Creek open pit, which is different than the Mineral Point plan, but we'll touch on that later. The Granite Creek open pit concept is very much contractor-driven. This is a very normal-sized contractor job for Nevada. It's 110-ton trucks. It's loaders. This is what the open pit mining contractor group in Nevada is set up to do. So that's the basis for what we've done here.
You will see we've put in approximately $10 million in the capital estimate for us to build the facilities like the truck wash and the truck shops and those infrastructure that's required in order to be able to bring a contractor on the site. The rolling stock and the operators and the supervisors of those operators and the maintenance for that equipment is going to come from the contractor. I answered that one. Regarding the power costs, the power costs for NV Energy right now are 9? Yeah. We're in the 9-10 cent kilowatt-hour range with Nevada Energy. Granite Creek is hooked up to the Nevada Energy line. The power's there. I mean, we're online with Turquoise Ridge and Twin Creeks Complex. We're running right now at approximately 9 cents a kilowatt-hour for electricity. We answered that.
What else did you have, Justin?
Grind size is standard grind size.
Oh. Yeah. Grind size.
my memory serves me right, it's like a P80, 150 mesh, kind of typical CIL. There's no fine grind you have to do for this deposit. I do remember that for sure. It's pretty typical CIL grind.
Relating to permitting, is it just keeping the pit dewatered and just getting the permits?
I'll let Mark answer the permitting. The pit is really easy to dewater. Actually, GRE came up with a good plan where we'll just take it to the tail stem when we build it and evaporate it. It's 150 million gallons, so it's not that big. Permitting, I'll let Mark talk about it because it's a little more complex.
Yeah. On the federal side, as we look ahead, I mentioned that the NEPA will require us to more than likely complete an EIS. With that, I mean, the big focus is really on your big resources such as your biological, your cultural, your hydrological, those types of activities that get the attention of the agency as well as the external folks outside of our company. There is a robust analysis that goes on. Certainly, we will not be issued a permit to proceed with that open pit expansion until those have all been satisfied to all external parties.
Could I, Mark, can I summarize it by saying to answer Justin's question, the dewatering of the mag pit is an inconsequential part of the permitting? I mean, by what we're doing with dewatering the underground, we're already pretty much dewatering the area. Dewatering in itself is not going to be the primary driver for the permit. In fact, if you look at Granite Creek property as a whole, it's a brownfield site. It's been being disturbed for 30 years. There's no sites of cultural significance and certainly no endangered species there. It's really a very bog-standard permit. We are going to have a tailings dam. That's just going to require the amount of diligence that a permitting agency is going to expect from a company that wants to build a tailings dam anywhere in the world. Yeah.
I hope I answered that, Justin. There is no specific smoking gun issue at Granite Creek permitting. Is that fair to say, Mark?
Yeah. That's pretty standard Northern Nevada permitting action. Tailings dams are part of how we operate. Like Matt said, there's been a renewed focus on how those tailings dams are managed moving forward. Part of that permitting will involve a robust engineering design to ensure that we've got adequate capacity as well as stability to move forward.
I have a meeting right now. Once you guys go off.
You'll get it.
Oh, Ken.
Hi. This is a question about permitting. Already, there is a long time to get permitted. Now, with the Department of Office Efficiency, I believe, headed by Elon Musk and Trump, already we do not have enough staff on these agencies to process the permits applications. There are too many projects and too less staff. With the Department of Efficiency's initiatives, are they going to reduce some more staff and then it is going to get delayed? Are you all going to take any proactive actions, contacting the ministers or state governors to increase the staff and not to cut down the BLM staff? That is one question. I have a comment after that.
Okay. I'll answer that. I'll go for the first question, Ken. Look, I am going to be very incredibly cautious in my answer to this question. Over the course of the last three weeks, maybe four now, there have been some significant impacts upon federal employees in the country of the United States. When Mark refers to a NEPA permit, he is referring to interaction with an employee from the Bureau of Land Management, which is part of the Department of the Interior for the United States. On one hand, we have concerns about that. We have concerns about them. One, they're our friends and neighbors. We do not like to see our friends and neighbors being impacted negatively. Two, we rely on them to get our permits expedited. We're monitoring the situation closely.
There have been some administrative people that have been let go from some of the Nevada BLMs. That is not helpful. On the other hand, there is certainly a lot of discussion about how the incoming administration wants to make the permitting process more efficient. I am weaving a narrow political path here. On one hand, we are concerned about the impacts on employees for the federal government. On the other hand, we are optimistic that there is a real drive to make the permitting process more efficient. We do not believe in any model that permitting is just going to get easier and you do not have to be as environmentally conscious. We are going to be environmentally conscious. We just believe that there is going to be a process by which permitting itself is just a more efficient process. We believe today that those two things will balance each other out.
We're still very much committed to this three-year permitting timeline.
Maybe music to Ryan Snow is when you say after-tax Cash flow , this is an academic calculation. In reality, are you in a taxable situation where you actually have to pay tax? The actual Cash flow could be more than the after-tax Cash flow that is indicated, I believe. That may be a positive situation at least until you become taxable.
Is this on?
Hello. In the PEAs, we've taken into account the tax situation that we see for our company with our existing loss pools, etc. That's been reflected in the after-tax Cash flow s that are published in the PEAs.
I see. It's already done there.
Yes.
Okay. Thanks.
Okay. If there are no more questions on open pit, we have a question that takes us back to Granite Creek Underground from online. They ask, "Is approximately seven mining levels enough for the throughput that you need? Also, what is the average width of the currently delineated veins? And how are you looking to manage dilution? Any optimizations on mining methods being implemented?
Okay. That's a great question. Okay. You went through so many questions there, Katerina. Give me the first one.
Approximately seven mining levels, is that enough for the throughput that you need?
Okay. Timothy, do you mind if I field this one real quick? Just because you and I talk about this almost every day.
Right now, if you look at the PEA calculation, the PEA calculation is approximately 700 tons per day of ore production. If you look at what we plan for ore production per level, it's 100 tons per day per level. That's all of our levels. Through the whole cycle, through the mining cycle, the backfill cycle, and through the reaccess cycle. Right now, we're exactly in sync. The PEA is kind of built that way, right? There is an in-sync there. The way to get more production at Granite Creek is to get more levels in production, not to try to get more tons per day per level. That's my belief.
We have kind of demonstrated that as we have gone. That was the first question. We are on path. The number of levels we have currently in production is in sync. It is seven, is in sync with the PEA. We have actually done, look, we have done better than that for the last two months. Let us just say, from the standpoint of the PEA, we are in sync. Your second part of that question?
What is the average width of the currently delineated veins? How are you looking to manage dilution/optimization of mining methods?
Okay. I'm going to start on that. Then I'm going to hand over to Tyler. And what I'm going to say is, when you look at the ore body at Granite Creek, you shouldn't be thinking of it as a vein. Okay? The OG zone is an undulating deposit. Okay? We are not mining down a vein. We are not taking a single pass down a vein. We are coming into a polygon. Then we are cutting across the polygon and then retreating our way out with panels. That is the Granite Creek methodology, particularly for the OG. In the South Pacific zone, it's not a vein, but it does resemble a vein somewhat in its geometry. Tyler, do you want to expand on that?
Yeah. Everything at Granite Creek is very structurally controlled. Rather than veins, the mineralizations are in fault zones. The OG is on a fault zone. The South Pacific is on a separate fault zone or set of fault zones. They do, like Matt said, act as veins in places where you very quickly go from high-grade mineralization to rock that is far below cutoff. The width varies anywhere kind of in that 2-3 meter range. We have seen intercepts, true widths of kind of in the 13-15 meter range in drilling. Maybe Timothy can comment on what size some of the mining is now.
Yeah. That very much matches up with the mining where a typical one cut is like 4.5 meters. There are places where we widen that out to three or four cuts at that width.
Yeah. If we were talking about the whole program by which we minimize dilution at Granite Creek, it all starts with, first, we have the resource model. We do not just come in onto a level and say, "Oh, the resource model says this is where the ore is," and just go in there. What is the first thing that we do when we get to a new production level, Timothy?
We're doing cover drilling on every level that we do. We do that through a combination of a core rig that we have on site, essentially full-time. We have one core rig doing cover drilling as well as a QX rig or an underground RC rig that we use at times as well.
As Timothy points out, when we come onto a level, we do essentially ore control drilling, just like you would do vertically in a pit. We come in. We have an idea of where the ore should be from the resource model. We come in onto a level. We cover drill that level. We use that detail to fine-tune where the stoke layouts are going to be. That is not where it ends. Every round that we mine is logged by the ore control geology crew. It is then brought out of the mine as a separate entity, laid into a windrow in the yard. It is sampled. Based on that sample is how we direct that round, that approximately 170 tons of material, to which pile. Is that ore? Is it refractory ore? Is it oxide ore? Is it waste?
Each round is separately categorized based on its assays to where it is located. Those are the processes we use in order, the ore control processes that we use to minimize dilution. We have an overbreak system that we monitor overbreak in every one of our headings. All of our headings are cavity-surveyed. We are able to calculate in detail the overbreak on every one of our headings. We have a monthly meeting to reconcile that overbreak with the contractor and work out ways to improve our mining methods. Oh, I'm sorry. It's you, Katerina. Was there a third part?
Just comments on optimization of mining methods.
Okay. Optimization of mining methods. That's really a very important topic. You're going to see that when you get to the undergrounds at Cove and at Ruby Hill. Right now, the mining method at Granite Creek is very much underhand cut and fill. However, we are starting to see spots where we can do some more bulk-style mining. What that does, if you go back to my previous conversation, it was that 100 tons a day per level. That is what you can do to change that 100 tons a day number. If you have a more bulk, amenable mining method, you can schedule more than 100 tons a day. We are seeing that a little bit in Granite Creek right now. We have done two experiments on areas. They have been successful on how we can improve our bulk mining method.
We see a lot of potential for South Pacific that is not yet built into the PEA. We see potential where we can see a vertical overlay on the South Pacific that will allow for benching. When we get to Cove, you're going to see that 20% of the mine tons in the Cove PEA are assumed to be bench tons. When you get to the Ruby, you're going to see that 80% of the tons in the mining model are assumed to be benching. We're seeing, if you look at a comparison, it's about $20 less per ton mining when you go into the bench methodology. Timothy, did I do that justice?
Yep.
Okay. Katerina, anything else? Okay. Progressing along, we are now going to go and we're going to talk about the Archimedes Underground. Timothy's going to take you through that. Do not be shy in going into detail about the benching that we're going to be doing. Why is Ruby Hill Underground, Archimedes, pardon me, Underground different than Granite Creek? And the pros and cons.
Thank you, Matt. All right. Thank you. Going through Archimedes Underground, as we're calling the underground there at Ruby Hill. Once again, we're looking at a very typical Nevada mine. We are planning this as a contractor mine. We did not go into detail there. We are contract mining there at Granite Creek right now. Small Mine Development out of Battle Mountain is our contractor. There are many good contractors in Nevada and in the region. Where we are now, it makes sense to have that ready-to-roll fleet come in and do the mining from a contract standpoint. Archimedes Underground, once again, another very typical Nevada mine. This is all portal access. We are planning two portals out of the Archimedes pit. We are putting those on the west side of the pit, if you will. Historically, there have been some ground issues there at the Archimedes pit.
We're staying well away from those so that those don't impact our mining underground. Just going to make that a non-issue. This is primarily going to be a long-hole stoping. Matt calls it benching. It's the same thing. It's a type of long-hole stoping that we use in Nevada. That makes up the majority of the mining here with some cut and fill making up the remainder. You can see here where the Archimedes Underground is going to fit in with the Mineral Point open pit. They are separate deposits. Geographically, we get to them separately. The portals are not going to get taken out by the open pit. They'll remain separate and distinct throughout the mine life there. I'll give you a little construction update. As you can see on the schedule, it says 2025 construction. We actually started construction in late 2024.
We've got a slope stabilization contractor in right now. There's a large section of high wall that we're putting a fence across the top bench, draping that high wall so that we've got protection there at the portals and that that's all ready to roll for the underground. Currently, we're permitted to do all the surface construction for this underground. We are not permitted to go underground yet. Mark's going to cover that here in a few slides. I'll leave that up to him to talk through. We've got the slope stabilization contractor there. We also have a construction contractor. What is the construction contractor doing? We are building a shop there right by the portals. We're going to have an office trailer there down by the portals.
We're bringing in power so that we've got power at the portals on day one, as well as water. We're going to have a fuel island, oiling facilities, everything there at the portals ready to roll for underground contractor. We've also gone out to bid for underground contractors. We have multiple bids that we're analyzing right now that are very good from a very strong selection of underground contractors there. The metrics here on Archimedes Underground, we're looking at roughly 100,000 ounces per year for a 10-year mine life. It's a very good mine. Average recovery there is sitting at 90%. The vast majority of that is planned to go through the autoclave. There's a little bit of oxide that will go on the existing heap leach and a little bit of third-party contractor. The vast majority of that is going to be autoclave there at Lone Tree.
You'll see there one of the things this is of the three underground mines, Archimedes and Granite Creek and Cove, this is the lowest grade. The geometry of this body is it has the most potential for higher tonnage rate, bulk mining, easier mining, and less costly mining. All right. Looking at the Cash flow there, it has a relatively modest spend there for the next three years. You can see there in 2028, we get the autoclave online and really start producing out of that underground. Essentially, all of the capital expenditure here is in mine development. We've got an existing mine. We've got power there. We've got water. We've got dewatering facilities. It's already there. We're just going underground. There's roughly $4 million in dewatering. I'll talk about that a little bit as it's a large issue at some of the other mines.
Archimedes Pit has been dewatered for decades now. There's a whole series of wells around that pit that are pumping and dewatering. It's a very confined fault block, if you will, where the water exists. We can pump out the area around the mine without impacting a much larger area. We do have a little bit of capital there to essentially deepen those wells so that we can push that water table down deeper. Where we're sitting for the next few years, this is a dry mine and has been so for some time. There we go. As you'll see, talked about operating costs there. These are much better costs than what we're sitting at at Granite Creek. Like I mentioned, we are bulk mining here with primarily cutting or primarily long-hole stoping. The overall mining cost per ton milled is $164 per ton.
Very much, you can see the Cash flow there. On the permitting side that we're going to get into here shortly, essentially, we're looking at a phase two of permitting. We split this at the 5,100 elevation level. Mark will explain that. Essentially, we're looking at the phase two of permitting kicking in in June of 2027. You can see where that fits in our overall production schedule there. With that, Mark will chime in here and talk us through the permitting.
Thanks, Timothy. As Timothy mentioned, we received our permits to begin the surface infrastructure work for the underground. That involved approvals from both the BLM and the state of Nevada. Now, our current focus is on getting the permits that we need to tap that underground. We have decided to take a phased approach to that primarily because we needed to be able to get into that underground in a faster way versus permitting the entire underground. If you look at the graphics on the right, you will see how we broke that up. Phase one is what we are currently permitting. Timothy mentioned the 5,100-foot level. What is the significance of that? Previous permitting actions at Ruby Hill that were tied to the East Archimedes Open Pit involved technical studies that were approved.
We used that particular truncated elevation as a springboard to get our permitting going for that phase. That, once again, like I said, allows us to get into that underground quicker while we then can turn focus to the lower Archimedes Underground for phase two. At present, from the federal side, an environmental assessment was required to tap that underground. From the state side, it was a major water pollution control permit. Those actions are close to completion. We expect approval in the early Q2 time frame. Once that happens, that allows us to get into that underground and mine through about mid-2027. As soon as these permits are approved, we will then turn our attention to the phase two permitting. At present, the big focus from both agencies was they needed more characterization primarily from a hydrology standpoint and from a geochemical standpoint.
We have begun looking at those and on how we can get more robust data sets put together through additional drilling that Tyler has done. We are working with his information and, of course, several consultants that we are using that focus on these particular aspects. With that in mind, that is going to take us to about a projected time frame of the end of 2027 at the latest to get those permits. The key thing is we do not want to run out of underground real estate before we receive that second tier of permitting action. It is very sequential. Matt had mentioned that very early on about how we are approaching this. We feel good about it.
We have had many conversations with both the state and federal folks at the BLM to really provide them with the approach that we wanted to take to expedite this permitting action.
Thank you, Mark. Tyler on exploration.
All right. Thanks, Timothy. Archimedes Underground, we have several exploration targets to follow up in the coming years. On the image here on the slide, this is a section looking west. You see the 426 zone shown in orange there at the top and the Ruby Deeps in red at the bottom. You'll note a drill hole on the left there, 50 meters of 6.9 grams. That is south and outside of the current resource. We need some follow-up drilling around that hole and potentially to expand the Ruby Deeps to the south. Additionally, there are multiple high-grade intercepts beneath the Archimedes Pit that provide further exploration potential. You can kind of see those in the bottom left there. One is a historic Homestead hole. We drilled a hole about 30 meters offset of that one a couple of years ago now.
That is the only two holes in that entire area. We do have a 50,000-meter program planned from underground in 2027. That is to upgrade the inferred resources to indicated ahead of a feasibility study.
Thank you, Tyler. All right.
All right.
Matt will walk us through.
Thank you, Timothy. What takeaways from Timothy's presentation on the Archimedes Underground? First, we're in construction right now. As he said, we've draped the high wall getting ready for the portals. We brought the utilities down. We're building the shop structures and the office structures down in the pit so that we can expedite that. That's where we're sitting right now with Ruby. Why are we doing this? We're doing this because Ruby, while it has a lower grade, it's the lowest grade of the three underground deposits. It's the most minable of the three deposits and is able to produce about 102,000 ounces a year, as Timothy laid out, for a 10-year life. That first stage of permitting allows us to continue on the PEA plan through June of 2027. That's the time frame that we have to work towards to get that next permit.
The permits are sitting on the desk. As Ken pointed out, there's been a change in administration in the U.S. and so there's a little hesitation now to be the tall poppy and sign something. The document's on their desk and ready to go. They're comfortable with it. We'll continue with that. We expect to get that imminently as far as a permit to begin the mining through 2027. You got a modest MPV, a 148. Look, the great parts about Ruby are its location. It's right next to a town. It's fully infrastructured. It's a really easy place to operate. Downside, it's farthest away from the processing facilities. It has lowest grade.
If you look at what's the potential, what do we need to do to increase value at Ruby Hill or Archimedes Underground, pardon me, is to be able to do some sort of pre-classification, some pre-sorting so that we're not having to truck the entire ore stream to the processing facility. That's the next step in our value creation path. With that in mind, I'm open to questions about Archimedes Underground.
On the permits, can you push the ramp for phase two or you can't get in there at all?
What we'll do is we will actually drive the development. We'll get the first permit here in the next month or so. We drive the decline. We drive the decline all the way down to 5,100. We have to stop at the 5,100. When you look at the mine plan and the PEA, that shows that if you can get, as long as you have the permit to allow you to continue the decline down June of 2027, June 30th of 2027, then the mine plan functions without a hitch. We have a few months of contingency built in there. Just let's use the June 30th date.
Just so we can help keep track of progress, I guess how much progress do you need on the ramp? Have you kind of assumed for that phase one? How many levels do you need to kind of hit your schedules?
That one's very different. I mean, the Ruby Hill ore body is completely different in structure and shape than Granite Creek. The 100 tons a level does not hold together. The peak production coming out of Ruby Hill is just over 1,500 tons a day. That is very much, you should think of Ruby Hill as a panel benching. You are coming into a level. The tons per vertical foot calculation for Ruby is completely different than it is at Granite Creek. It is really holistically, when you have all the undergrounds in production, what you are going to see is you are mining Granite Creek as hard as you can. You are mining Cove as hard as you can. You are actually doing ore calls to Ruby Hill to be able to say, "Okay, look, this month I got Granite Creek and Cove going really smooth.
I need 800 tons a day this month from Ruby. It will be more of a pull than a push from Ruby Hill. I did not give you a specific answer there. It is not the same; you cannot use that same level calculation that I have been using for Granite Creek at Ruby Hill.
Yeah, I get it. It's bulk mining. Yeah, got it. Is it a longitudinal sequence? And your backfill, is it paste or CRF?
No, backfill is CRF. We have no tails. We do not have any place that we are using paste. The sequence there, each of our mines has a different—it's cemented rock fill at all of our mines. It costs about $42 per metric ton is the cost of producing a ton of backfill. That ratio is different at each of our mines. At Granite Creek, the backfill replacement ratio is one ton of backfill per ton of ore. At Cove, the replacement ratio is approximately—there is a little bit of a specific gravity—approximately 75%. So 0.75 tons of backfill per ton of ore. At Ruby, that ratio is 60%. It is approximately 0.6 of a ton of backfill for every ton of ore.
Is it longitudinal or transverse?
It's transverse. Yeah, I'm using, yeah, you're coming on that. The way that benching method works is you kind of have a long dimension and a short dimension to the level. You're coming down the long dimension on both sides. You're cutting across the top, drilling out, and then mucking, lashing, whatever verb you're using for removing, or across the bottom. Yes.
Thanks. Just one question. I was looking at I think this relates to toll processing.
Yep. Okay.
Because I noticed you got a few comments there on acid versus alkaline. I assume you're going to the Lone Tree autoclave is going to be acid. You're not going to run it as an alkaline. How should we think about that? How does it pertain to the overall picture?
Okay. There's been a lot of Todd is going to go the last presentation is on Lone Tree autoclave that Todd's going to take us through. I am going to lead into it because this is a very exciting topic. Our original projections for all of the different ore types coming in and you'll see this very clearly that we have carbonate-rich ore that comes from all of our deposits. It's just the amount of carbonate. If you're following autoclaving, you know that for every ton of carbonate you have, you have to have a ton of sulfuric acid, William, I think my math is correct, to neutralize that. Okay? We have always been looking at the and with the carbonate that we have, that's a lot of sulfuric acid. We have always been looking at the standpoint of alkaline operations for the Lone Tree.
That's the way the original scope was designed. You get to the fundamental question. It's a trade-off: operating costs versus recovery. More sulfuric acid, you get better recovery. That equation fundamentally changes with gold price. As gold price goes up, the amount of benefit you get from recovery gets bigger. If sulfuric acid prices do not go up proportionally to gold, that completely changes your equation. What we are looking at now is an autoclave. We know this. I mean, I do not want to, I am hoping I am not stealing your thunder here because he has got a presentation coming up. The Goldstrike autoclaves, which Todd and team ran for decades, those switch between alkaline and acidic. We are now building in with our QP partners, which we are very, very fortunate to have.
We are building in the optionality to be able to run that alkaline or acidic. We are very much building in the concept now of batching, so that we are going to be running in an alkaline environment for a period of months. Then we are going to swap over into an acidic environment for a period of months and being able to manage that. It is all a function of recovery now. The gold price has just made recovery so much more value-creating than the cost of sulfuric acid.
I think one other comment, Matt, just so everybody understands. Switching from alkaline to acid, as long as you have acidulation tanks, which we're going to, is very easy. I mean, it's just a fact of turning on the acid to acidulate the carbonate and turning down the boilers a little bit. You can switch back and forth. We'll be able to campaign one or the other. Like Archimedes Underground, especially in the lower levels, acid autoclaving is much better.
Out of curiosity, how long would that take to make a switch?
To make the switch?
Yeah.
Very quick.
Like a day? Like a week?
No, no, no.
A month?
Like 10 minutes.
No, I mean, it's very quick.
10 minutes.
You got to think about an autoclave is running, right? You got a continual stream coming in. The pressure and temperature are not going to change. The only thing that is going to change is now you switch over and start acidulating the carbonate in tanks. That is just taking sulfuric acid and putting it into a tank and getting rid of the carbonate. I say 10 minutes. I am being a little flick. It is very fast, right? You can change it. It is just adding that acid. When you do alkaline, you have to have more boiler steam to increase the heat to help oxidize the ore. You just turn the boiler down. It is very fast. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate the comment. We're not being flip because they've been training me on this.
It's fast.
They've been training me on this. This is a big part of i-80 is this autoclave. They've been training me on it. I'm going to rehearse the speech that I've been trained on.
Yeah.
You have a vessel. You feed ore into it. If you're running in the alkaline with our ore stream, it's going to naturally want to go alkaline. If you're feeding in alkaline and you're running in the alkaline environment, you're all fine. You're feeding in your ore. You're processing it. You're pressurizing it. You're heating it up. You know that when you're in the alkaline environment, you're not going to be getting a lot of heat from the oxidation. You're going to have to have the boiler capacity. You have to turn up the boilers. You know that. Now, okay, I'm running along. Now I'm going to swap over to acidic. What I am going to do now is I'm going to start adding acid into the feed side of the autoclave. That is going to acidify.
It's going to neutralize the carbonate. That's going to start bringing the heat up. I'm going to turn down the boilers. That oxidation is going to continue to happen through the autoclave. Now I come out the back end of the autoclave. All I have to do on the back end of the autoclave is if I'm running acidic, if I'm running alkaline, I'm fine. I just need to make sure my pH is above 8 when I come out the back end of the autoclave. If I'm running acidic, I've got to then add back in some lime product to bring the pH back up above 8. That's all part of the cyanide reaction.
At Goldstrike, we ran three autoclaves, alkaline, and three acid, right? Then we co-mingled the tails out of the autoclave into a CIL. So it's yeah.
That is the fundamental change that you're seeing in our approach to the autoclave and the alkaline versus acidic is the metal price and recoveries right now just make that a compelling argument.
Do you have any questions for us, Katarina? Oh.
Is there a $12 million agreement with the guys?
Yeah.
Is there a limitation on how much you can send them?
There is.
Do they care what you send them?
Okay. They do.
I guess one other one. Is there a limitation on how much you can put on the ropes?
Okay. I'll go through all those questions. That would be another thing I spend a lot of time on is the 12 million agreements. The oxide ore purchase agreement is a very simple structure. That is when we get to oxidized material, we sell it to our third-party partner. They just buy it. We weigh the trucks. We sample the material. We compare our notes. They write us a check for a percentage of the gold contained. That's the agreement. It's a revenue agreement. All they care about on that side from the oxide is that we don't have too much sulfur because then it wouldn't be oxide. The limitation there is making sure we stay under the sulfide levels. We've never approached the sulfide levels for the oxide.
On the $12 million agreement, that is very much about the autoclave. There is a limitation. The limitation is 1,000 tons a day. That is how many tons a day that we can process at their facility. They do care about the material. The way they demonstrate their care is that when we go into any new mine now, and I mean not a new level, not a new zone. When we go into a new mine, we send them a bulk test parcel. It's either 5,000 or 10,000 tons, depending on the mine. They have the chance then to run that material through their plant, analyze the results, make sure it's not interfering with their material, and accept it. They've accepted Granite Creek years ago.
We run Granite Creek material through. We were running Granite Creek material through the autoclave, through the $12 million agreement, all the way through October of last year. That is fine. We have the ability to add other mines into that agreement, but the 1,000-ton-a-day level still remains. Okay? That is where we were sitting through October. You know that the previous $12 million agreement expired in October. We are now in the final stages of another three-year extension agreement with our partner. We built up a nice tidy stockpile of material over the last four months, and we will start doing that process again. Did I answer your questions?
Yeah. Is there a limit on what you put on the roads?
Oh, I'm sorry. There's a limit on the roads. We're not even close to it. For example, Cortez right now is shipping 1.8 million tons a year on the roads to the Goldstrike complex. Our limit is 365,000. So there's a limit, but we're not even kind of close to that limit. It would be cool if we were. That is another when we finish our production ramp-up, maybe we'll be there. Katarina, do you have any online questions?
We've answered all the online questions. Thanks.
Okay. All right. On to Mineral Point Open Pit. All right. Talk about Mineral Point. I'm not sure 10 minutes is going to work for this one, but we'll make it work. We'll get in there. There's a lot on Mineral Point. It's a pretty neat deposit. When I first came to i-80 in 2022, I started working on this a little bit. And it just really interests me because I have a history of running a large open pit. It just interests me. But gold prices weren't quite there. It didn't look too bad, but it was interesting. Recently, over the last year, we've done a lot more work. You can see that it's interesting at $2,175 down there at the bottom where it says 2 billion. It's really interesting at $2,900. Yeah, nice open pit.
If you compare this open pit to other things in Nevada, Kinross Round Mountain, I ran that pit. Really similar to that pit, about 100 million tons a year. You process about 23 million tons on a heap leach, a large heap leach. It's a large fleet. You have two rope shovels, two hydraulic shovels, 24 haul trucks, large haul trucks, 320-ton haul trucks to keep the you want big haul trucks so you can keep the manpower down, keep the cost down on the labor. This will be one of i-80 Gold's largest producing mines from an ounce standpoint. The other very interesting thing, there is silver in Nevada. It's a silver state. Not that many mines produce a lot of silver. Cove used to produce a lot of silver in the day. Coeur Rochester produces the most silver in the state right now.
Mineral Point produces a lot of silver. Out of that 280,000 equivalent ounces a year, 80,000 of that is silver. You are going to produce a lot of metal, 4.5-5 million ounces of silver. Nice silver mine. We will get into the processing a little bit. It will be Meryl Crow, which if anybody knows Meryl Crow is what you want to use on silver, zinc precipitation. You do not want to use a CIL because you just overwhelm the carbon with silver. You use zinc precipitation to pick up the gold and silver. Simple technology, pretty common, used around the world to Meryl Crow. This bullet here, they told me not to move. I am the guy that moves all around the stage because we are getting filmed. It is hard for me not to want to walk around.
Barrick did a lot of work on this. I remember Barrick working on it. It used to be called Bullwacker. Now it is Mineral Point. Barrick, as I dig into the reports, has done a lot of metallurgy work on this. It is in an advanced stage. We started working on the hydrology recently. There is just lots of hydrology work done. It should be about 6,000 GPM is what the reports say right now on dewatering. Mark will talk about some of the challenges there on the dewatering in the area. Yeah, just a very interesting project. It is Ruby Hill, a brownfield site. There is infrastructure there. We even looked at Mineral Point. We are going to use part of the truck shop that is there to save costs and then add on to that truck shop for the larger equipment. All right.
Some of the metrics. Like I said, one of the largest open pits. Cortez would be another pit you'd compare it to that kind of has that tonnage. Goldstrike in the day was quite a bit higher than that. Nowadays, they run a little lower than that and in a similar range. I talked about the trucks and shovel. You have all the support equipment, dozers, graders, RTDs, everything to manage that. Stripping ratio is pretty low, 2.9-1. One thing we've done here that I worked a lot with Forte Dynamics that did this report, the way we sequence this pit makes a lot of difference. The first sequencing we did, you didn't get any ounces till a couple of years or two and a half years. We sequenced the pit to optimize how we get ounces out.
We also optimized the ramps to get more ounces. That was even hurting the ounces, just the ramps and the pits. There is a lot of work been done on Mineral Point. Anything I want to go over on the metrics? I think everybody can see them. I think I talked about it already, 100 million tons, 280,000 equivalent ounces, and about a 16 and a half year mine life. Yeah. I talked about quite a bit of this already. There is one I want to talk about. I have some recovery graphs that are coming up. This ore, if you do run a mine, does not recover great, and especially on the silver. If you crush it, it is a very steep recovery curve. What we have in the PEA right now is a two-stage crush, primary and secondary, with cone crushers.
We're going to be looking at a tertiary crush just to look at the economics on that. If we could get the recovery right now at 78% for the gold, 41% for the silver, if we could get that silver up in the 45-50% range, that makes a lot of difference in the economics. Maybe the gold would go up too. We got to do work on that. Typical to Nevada, silver is more locked up and has to be crushed finer. That's what Coeur Rochester does with HPGR crushers. We'll be looking at that as we go into the technical work and doing that metallurgical test work to balance how fine you crush. You got to be careful when you crush. You get too fine on a heap leach, you'll have porosity issues.
You got to balance that with what you can leach. The initial test work did not have any porosity issues at a half inch. We will be looking at that. This is another interesting one. This runs through, if you look over there at the slide, you will see the Archimedes pit. You will see a heap leach over there if you can see it kind of in the middle of the page. We actually have to take out the heap that is there. We are running that heap right now. In years 7 and 14, there are some tons that will come out of that heap. We will take that heap and put it on the new heap. We did not put any ounces in for doing that, but you will get some ounces flipping that pad over and leaching it again.
That'll be one thing that has to happen as we mine through that heap leach. All right. Here are the recovery curves I'm talking about. You can see on the gold side, and don't look so much at the yellow and red one. Those were 1.5 inch column tests. You can see on the blue and the green up there, those are typical column tests at a half inch size recovery curve. You get a really fast up to 75-80% in a matter of days. Then, like any heap leach, it kind of keeps going up. These were done at 90 days. We need to do some more test work at a longer period of time because it's likely as you stack a heap, you probably can leach it even more as long as you have cyanide.
It would go up even higher. You can see how that works. On the other side, that is silver. You can see how the silver is kind of in that 41% range. Those are 90-day tests also. That is where I think there is some you are never going to get it from the mineralogy and stuff I have done. This is never going to go to 90 or anything. There is a potential to get 5-8% recovery, get that higher. It does make a lot of difference in the economics. All right. On the capital, on the $708 million of the initial capital, $299 million is equipment. That is all the equipment, all the rolling stock, all the shovels, everything. The other part of that capital is for the processing facility. You have crushers. You have stackers, primary, secondary crushers.
You got a truck shop. You got a, like Timothy was talking about, you got a wash bay. All that equipment will be in there. They did a nice job of, I would say, it's not lean at all is what's in this capital buildup. The sustaining capital mostly resides in you don't want to build that heap all the way at start. Most of the sustaining capital is in building the heap out. As you're going along, you want to put new expansions on the heap and then build that out as you go. That's what I've done at most mines. There is some sustaining capital in you got a 16 and a half year mine life. You're going to have to replace some equipment and do major rebuilds that you do on shovels and different things that are capitalized. All right.
Here's the unit costs. You can see the ASIC over there. We do plan on doing this as owner-operator. I think at this point in I-80's time, we do this owner-operator. This mine is so big that economies of scale, you can get your mining costs, processing costs down fairly low doing owner-operator. It is easily done. This mine site will be owner-operator. I want to go back. I do not usually go back. I think somebody told me I am not supposed to, but I am going to do it anyway. I am known for getting in trouble occasionally. All right. I kind of missed the timeline I was noticing down there. I wanted to talk about it. Tyler and I are planning on doing some drilling in Mineral Point this year. Then we would get fresh metallurgical samples to do that on the north side of the pit.
There's a lot of M&I on the south side. On the north side, we need some more drilling to get fresh metallurgical samples for column tests and to do that work on the crushing. You can see the permitting timeline and technical report is pretty long. The reason for that is, as Mark talked about, we got to get the Archimedes underground, lower level, below 5,100 permitted. Then we can move on to Mineral Point. You can't do two NEPA actions at the same time. That's why that timeline's out there. It'll give us time to build capital up for this project. It's pretty capital intensive. You can see the timeline there. Just want to make sure everybody saw that.
Start construction 2030, give us plenty of time to do the permitting and get the technical work done and get a feasibility study done on this project, which isn't going to be that hard with the amount of work that Barrick has done before. All right. Turned over to you, Mark.
All right, Todd. As Todd mentioned, the permitting of the open pit cannot officially commence until we have received approvals on the lower Archimedes Underground. In the interim, though, we do intend to focus over the next few years on some of those key technical studies and baseline surveys that need to be completed that require long lead time analyses. Two examples of that is a regional groundwater model, which we are kicking off. That is definitely part of a NEPA defensible activity, as well as the geochemical characterization, which Todd touched on a bit. We'll definitely be working with Tyler's team to make sure that we have good drill data that can be used for this particular type of work, which really amounts in some cases like humidity cell testing as an example and some of the other tests that Todd talked about.
Based on the disturbance footprint associated with this project, as well as dewatering efforts, we anticipate this will be a NEPA action that will result in the need to produce an environmental impact statement. That, once again, drives us into that roughly three-year-plus window for approval of that permitting action. On the state side, the same types of permits: water pollution control permit, reclamation permit, air quality permit will all need revisions to the current permitting acts. Primarily, I think we're all aware of how important water is across the globe. Here in Eureka and the Ruby Hill mine area, it's an area known as Diamond Valley. Water rights are very important. They're over-appropriated in that valley. There's heavy agricultural users primarily around alfalfa and so on and so forth.
As a result of that, for many years, there's been a decline in the groundwater elevations in the valley. As such, the area has implemented what's called the Diamond Valley Groundwater Management Plan to help mitigate those long-term effects. As such, all users over the next 30 years, there's a recipe in terms of reduction in usage to try and get that groundwater table to replenish itself. A lot of work around that. As a result, we get a fair number of inquiries about how we're going to manage our water on site from a pumping perspective as well as post-mining from a pit lake. Those are big things that we need to continue to work with Eureka County and other key stakeholders on because, like I say, it's a big attention getter. I think that's it, Todd.
Thanks, Mark. All right. Tyler.
All right. Thanks, Todd. We'll talk a bit about exploration on Mineral Point. On this slide, note the image in the bottom right. This is a long section through Mineral Point looking east. You'll see that most of the drilling that has been done is in the southern portion of the deposit. That's where the resource is mostly drilled to indicated. The top image shows a cross-section through the northern portion of the deposit where we see very good potential to add additional ounces. Many of the historic holes ended in mineralization. Many holes are on the margin of the conceptual pit. You can see a few holes there in the center of this section that obviously should go a bit deeper and then a few on the sides there of the conceptual pit where there's some pretty good mineralization.
You definitely need a few step-out holes to make this thing a little bigger. We have 6,000 meters of drilling scheduled this year. That will be core drilling from surface. That is to collect additional material for metallurgical and geotechnical purposes. In the coming years, the deposit will need 50,000 meters of drilling for infill ahead of a feasibility study planned for 2029. We do see good potential to further grow the resource here at Mineral Point by the time we get to feasibility.
Thanks, Tyler. All right. Matt.
All right. Let's recap on Mineral Point.
Let's recap on Mineral Point. We got over $600 million NPV, over 280,000 equivalent ounces per year of production. It's the real deal. It's a big mine. $900 million of capital. That's basically three buckets of equal proportion, one being pre-strip, one being the mining equipment, and three being the processing facilities that you're going to need for a mine that size. We're talking about a mine the size of Round Mountain, the size of Cortez. Big mine. This is extremely exciting for us, right? Many people carry this in the models as dollars per ounce, dollars per resource ounce. This is the first time that we've been able to show you, as the investing public, the real potential for Mineral Point to give you some parameters by which you can start modeling it. You can start seeing what its potential really is.
You can also see where the value drivers come out of Mineral Point. The first thing that you're going to pick up on, at least that I pick up on, is you got a 41% silver recovery. Whatever you can do to increase silver recovery is going to be incredibly beneficial to the deposit. It's still there because it does have that relatively large upfront strip. At our previous gold prices, we were using $1,650 for a long time. This is interesting. At $1,650, at $2,175, it's extremely compelling. That is where we're at right now. As Richard pointed out, you start talking about current price and you're in the $2 billion mark.
It is a very exciting project. It is the real deal. It's going to take a lot of time. It is the last of the five projects that were in our development cycle.
We were planning on being able to make a construction decision on that at the very end of 2029. That is where we are sitting right now. I am looking for questions on Mineral Point.
I guess when you ramp it up, you're planning to go owner-operated from day one, essentially?
We will. I mean, at least in the Nevada context, when you're talking about two hydraulic shovels and two rope shovels and 24 320-ton trucks, this really isn't—the contractor isn't set up for that. This is really compelling owner-operator.
Do you need to acquire the land for your heaps, your waste dumps, et cetera?
No. That is all part of the land package, it is all part. We will have to permit it, of course. Everything that we have laid out is sitting firmly in the i-80 land package.
Can you remind us what the power situation is here?
Because the power at Eureka comes from it comes off the grid, but it's a different supplier. It's Mount Wheeler. Ryan, do you know the electrical price for Nevada Energy is $0.09 per kilowatt-hour? I believe Mount Wheeler is approximately the same, isn't it? Yeah. Mount Wheeler doesn't it's the American system of rural co-ops. They don't make their own power. They buy it from Nevada Energy. It's $0.09 a kilowatt-hour. Yeah, remember, this was a producing mine for Homestead and then Barrick for decades. As far as the grid is concerned, that's all functioning and in place. We're going to have to do some upgrades to the transformers and stuff just to deal with the electric shovels and the crushers. These are all built into the PEA.
Yeah, Matt. I'll chime in there real quick. We've got a 25,000-volt line that comes straight to site right now. Basically, the main line comes right into there, so.
Thanks. Yeah, Ken?
Over the four years of permitting time, how long do you actually wait until you get the high-committed underground?
Okay. June 30th, 2027, Ken. Between now and June 30th, 2027, we are going to absolutely be advancing the permitting, but we won't be submitting the draft plan of operations to the federal government. We'll have it ready. July 1st, 2027, we will deliver that.
It's on July 4th.
Pardon me?
Maybe on July 4th.
Okay. Meet July 4th. Day after, the office will be shut down on July 4th. That is absolutely the sequence. We are not waiting on anything. We have plenty of this project has been there stewing. Now, all of a sudden, now we are launching. Mark's got a year and a half of work to pull together baseline studies, to pull together the necessary reports, particularly with regard to hydrology and waste rock characterization that you are going to be required to do to get the permit. I was hoping for more questions because I am very excited about yeah, okay.
I'm just curious, given your comments around the sensitivity potentially to silver recovery, what's the distribution of silver with respect to gold in the deposit? Is it uniform? Are there higher or lower zones? How does that affect the Cash flow?
Okay. The first thing, Tyler, give us a because there is a little difference there.
Yeah. There is a difference. It's not completely uniform throughout the deposit. You do get areas of higher silver in places. Yes.
The second.
Can you tell me if it's early in the mine life or late in the mine life?
It's later. I know that from the and you can see that when you go through the work that Layley's done to pull together all that long. You're going to see these bumps in the later years of big silver jumps. That's coming from specific areas that are deeper in the mine. Tyler, did I say that right? Okay. Good. The other thing, the next part is where is the silver in the ore itself? This seems to be completely a function of silica encapsulation. What we do, we are using a very conservative and this 41 is not a guess. This is coming from the column tests. We are going to continue to rationalize that, look at opportunities. Does finer crushing get you higher silver recovery without going to the point where you're starting to make sand?
That's going to be a big part of the work that we advance through the feasibility study.
Okay. Now you made me ask a different question. You mentioned silica encapsulation. Is that with respect to silver specifically, or does it occur with the gold?
It's not occurring with the gold. It's coming from column tests. It's not from hopes and dreams. The column tests aren't showing that at all. We're getting really solid, the crushing helps a lot. Because the one thing you see at Ruby Hill, you see that the underground too, it's good rock. It's good, solid, competent rock. The crushing really improves the kinetics for the heap leach. It's certainly the Archimedes pit. That certainly improved it. It was about a 10% increase in recovery that came from the crushing. We're seeing those similar numbers here. The gold is, and maybe Todd and Tyler have more insight into specifically why the gold is functioning different than the silver. The gold doesn't seem to have any realistic issues, real issues, whereas the silver does.
You're saying that the gold recovery is actually not especially crush-sensitive. Is that?
Oh, no. I'm saying I misspoke. The gold recovery is specific, is sensitive to crushing. We're going to crush.
Yeah. I saw it on the graph.
That's right. We're crushing. And every number you saw there and the $300 million part of the $300 million for facilities is built on the concept of crushing. It is just if you crush even more, can you get more silver? We'll keep working on that. I don't want to be too optimistic, but I don't want to let opportunity slide.
Yeah. I think that typically a lot of deposits sometimes run a mine is just time. You need more time to get it there, right? Because the solution breaks it down and stuff. This does seem sensitive to crushing on the gold. So there's a mechanism there where you crush and it's a lot faster. Plus, you got to do it for the silver. As far as silver encapsulation, a little careful with that term. I mean, there's always some gold that's still encapsulated, 3-4%. That's why you don't see 100% recoveries, right, in any deposit. But silver is just usually, Tyler can talk more to it, a lot finer and gets trapped, silica encapsulated usually. And so you just have to grind it finer. If it was a CIL, you could grind it really fine. But this grade isn't there for a CIL.
Yeah. I mean, those are very respectable silver recovery numbers for Nevada.
For Nevada.
You are correct. All right. You know what we didn't, I'm just so excited about Mineral Point. I just want to keep going a little bit. What we didn't touch on, Tyler, one, let's talk where we're starting. We're starting with a resource now that's sitting at 5.5 million ounces of gold and almost 195 million ounces of silver. That's where we're sitting at now. Tyler, you want to touch on the expansion ability? I mean, you talk very optimistically.
Yeah. I touched on it some there in the slide, right? There's a lot of those holes that ended in mineralization. There's a lot of holes on the margin of the pit that are mineralized. I think as we do additional drilling, there's really good potential to add more ounces here. You can add a lot of ounces with not a whole lot of drilling in a lot of these places to the north there. I think that's pretty exciting. Yeah, 1-2 million plus, who knows? I think there's really good potential for another 1-2 million at least.
Excellent.
Gadarin, do you have any questions online? No? All right. I think that concludes our presentation on Mineral Point. I hope we've done it justice because it is a very exciting property. Anytime you're looking at $2 billion of nav at spot price, that's exciting to me, at least. With that in mind, I'm getting the lunch signal from Katerina. We are now to the break where we take some time for lunch. Katerina, how long is our lunch break? Our lunch break is 15 minutes. Thank you for your participation. I hope you stay for the second half of today's presentation. We are going to talk about Cove. I'm very excited about Cove. I'm going to talk about Cove. I'm going to give my team a little break, and I'm going to take you through Cove. Cove is the oldest property within i-80.
It was the one that when I came and joined the organization, it was the one that we developed. And I'm very excited about it. I'm going to lead you through that after lunch. Thank you very much. What kind of dodgy Airbnb are you staying at? No idea. I'm sorry. I have no idea. I've seen the queue and must be in this new. Right, I think we're ready to start again. We're going to start on Cove. Before we start on Cove, I just need to finish out one piece of business. If you recall, we were talking about the Ruby Hill Archimedes Underground. We were talking about permitting. While we were talking, we received the record of decision from the BLM regarding the permit for mining underground at Archimedes, and there was a finding of no significant impact.
That is the federal permit for mining underground at Archimedes is received. Still need to finish out the state permit. State permits are generally much easier. It's easier to manage the state than it is the federal government. That's a good point to start us off on the second half of our discussions. In the second half, what we're going to do is we're going to finish, we're going to finish on Cove as far as the mines go. Todd's going to take us through a quick discussion on the autoclave at Lone Tree, and then we're going to pass over to the CFO, who's going to take us through the restructuring strategy. All right, I want to start on Cove. Cove is very exciting to me. It's the first mine that we started developing as the new i-80. Granite Creek was already in production.
We took this over. It had been sitting idle for about five years, waiting for, you know, something to change, something that would make it compelling to develop. The compellingness came from the Lone Tree Autoclave and having a processing solution. It's near and dear to my heart, and it's the first one we started building at i-80. It is, it's 1.4 million ounces of mineralization and resource with an eight-year mine life. 100,000 ounces a year is the steady state production, $271 million NPV at $2,175 gold and 5% interest rate. Regarding the project itself, and pardon me for my glasses, but I can't quite see everything there. We got a high-grade brownfield development, gold deposit always open for expansion and down depth. It's immediately south of NGM's Phoenix mine. Just giving you a proximity to where we sit in the world.
It has, we have a very well-advanced on exploration and permitting. We're going to talk a lot about that, but you can see that in the diagram there, those drill hole traces that are coming off of our exploration platform into the Helen and the Gap zones. We have now finished that drilling about a week and a half ago and demobilized the rig. That process by which we now take those drill results and move those into the feasibility study is progressing now, with the feasibility study for Cove being scheduled again for the end of this year, similar to the underground for Granite Creek. What you do see there is you see the timeline, okay? You see a long permitting timeline, then you see a year and a half of construction, and then we go into production.
The very valid questions are going to be, what are you doing for three years of permitting at Cove? And why is it, why do you, you're already underground? What's the year and a half? This is all about water. That is going to be the theme of Cove. One, great ore body, very good grades, very mineable ore body with expansion potential, but you got water. You can see the water in the pit there, in the pit in the lower right-hand corner. The permitting is related to dewatering. The year and a half of construction and over 60% of the capital costs for construction are related to the development of the dewatering field and how we remove the water from that system.
That exploration decline you see there, the elevation of that is about 20 feet above where the current water table is. I'm going to go into some, some kind of specifics there. We got two deposits. We got the Helen and we have the Gap. And the Helen in this, in the lower right is represented by the green and the Gap is represented by the blue. They're, you know, they're adjacent to each other. They are separated, and distinct. Typically, the Helen, the green side is more amenable to a roaster, and the blue side, the Gap side is more amenable to an autoclave. We have a 10-year roaster agreement with a third party to allow us to process, to allow us to, I think we have a, is that a fire alarm? Okay. I'm just going to pause. There's 100%.
There's probably a safety share attached to this. There's a fire alarm and Matt's just standing there.
Attention please. Attention please. Attention please. We have a fire alarm activation on floor 28, penthouse. Please prepare to evacuate following signal change or instructions from your warden team. Attention please. Attention please. Attention please. We have a fire alarm activation on floor 28, penthouse. Please prepare to evacuate following signal change or instructions from your warden team. Attention please. Attention please. Attention please.
Okay. What matters most is everyone's personal safety. I am going to look for direction from my hosts on what we do now. We have been instructed to leave. Yeah. Would you recommend that we continue? It's going to be hard with the alarm going off. Can't really. It would be a little distracting.
I'm going to ask everybody to remain in place and calm while we figure out what's going to happen. Maybe another cup of coffee. Yes. There's food outside in case you did n't know.
We were told the alarm will be off in about five to ten minutes. If we want to just take a quick break for the noise to die down. For a few more minutes. If so, good opportunity to just grab a quick coffee or bio break.
Thanks, everybody. We'll be back as soon as this alarm is complete. Thank you very much. That's the end of the Cove presentation. No. Yes, sir. We do. We have a $10,000 donation which is very helpful, but it doesn't help very much in the long term. We do have the donation to start us right now.
We do not, and we do not even, we do not even have the community just being charged to do the donation. We have to make sure that we get the information we need to do the construction to do that. That is all part of that donation. It is $80,000 to complete the donation. As we said right now, it is going to be less than $300,000 to complete the donation. We will. Look, I will show you. Trevor? Yeah, Trevor, look, while we are waiting anyway, I will show you. Here, this is a donation here. You see it there. Okay. What we will do is we. All right, we will let everybody reassemble.
For those of you that aren't familiar with mining underground, when you have a fire alarm underground, to communicate it, what you do is you dump stench into the ventilation system. It is the smell they add to liquid gas and propane. You do not just, it is not a subtle, you dump it into the system. It is nauseating. It encourages you to quickly evacuate the underground operations. Yeah, just get out of here. The message is just get out of here. Do not get your stuff, do not get your lunchbox, get out of the mine. All right. I am going to start back again. Thanks, everybody, for that, and apologies for that slight interruption, but we are back on track. We are talking about Cove. We are talking about a property that is very exciting to me.
I'm just getting myself all situated here and back on track. Okay. The current mine plan includes Helen and Gap. We were touching on that. Helen's green, Gap's blue. Helen is more amenable to a rooster. Gap is more amenable to the autoclave. This is all based on PEA level metallurgical testing. The big focus for us in 2025 is a renewed amount of metallurgical testing from those brand new drill holes we just finished two weeks ago to allow us to really fine-tune that, that mix, verify that's rooster versus autoclave feed. We do have a rooster agreement with a third party for a 10-year term that allows us to process 750 tons per day of material in their rooster for a toe milling agreement. Just now I need to recombobulate myself. We talk about the capital structure at Cove.
You're going to see a relatively high, relatively high for us, $157 million of capital. Over 60% of that capital is associated with the dewatering. From the standpoint of the rest of the capital, what you need to start a mine, we've already portaled down, we've already established the exploration drift down to the water table, and that's about 5,400 feet of development we've completed so far. The surface facilities are largely in place and largely functioning. What we really need to do is the next step as complete that dewatering. That's what the three years of permitting is for, and that's what the year and a half of construction is for, is for installing those 15 wells and the associated well fields for recharge. Just to put us in context, so we understand what does dewatering mean in the Nevada context.
When you pump out the water, it's not your water. Somebody else owns that. What you do is you pump the water out of your immediate vicinity and then you pipe it away from yourself and you re-infiltrate it into the aquifer over there. This is the same system we use at Cortez. It's the same system that we use at Goldstrike. I say we in a previous life. This is the same, in a previous life, it's the same system that we used at Cortez and at Goldstrike and in all the other mines in Nevada that require dewatering. We're not consuming that water. We are just moving it temporarily so we can proceed with our mining operations. You see, again, you see the ramp-up curve, you pre-development, construction, and production.
When, again, is when this mine comes into full production in approximately 2032, 2033, you're looking at 102,000 ounces of gold production per year over a 10-year life. Cove is, partially amenable to bulk mining. 20% of the tons that are in the mine plan, in the PEA mine plan, are mined through a bulk method. I'm using bulk method to describe long hole and/or benching, however you want to describe that. The rest are conventional drift and fill. The ground quality here is very good. People are asking, what, what is, what is the ground quality in Nevada? And for virtually all of the underground mines across Northern Nevada, the RQD is between 30 and 45, which puts you right center in the middle of poor. You're not in very poor, but you're in poor.
What this just means, since we have that consistent ground quality across Northern Nevada, we feed back to that Nevada experience. We mine in Nevada fashion. That is what we're experienced with. Nevada fashion is that we use welded wire, use Swellex, bolting with Swellex, which is a style of ground support with welded wire mesh. On our primary development drives, we then top that with a shoulder coat of shotcrete. The shotcrete is mixed on at the portal. That is the Nevada style. That is what we're used to. That is what's built into all of our PEAs. From an operating cost standpoint, that shows up as the mining cost at $152 a ton, which is a very reasonable mining cost for Nevada. You do see these numbers are all very consistent.
You got a really nice ASIC, you know, $1,300 is a really good ASIC for us and for Northern Nevada. The number that stands out there is going to be the electrical cost, and that is a function of the dewatering. The dewatering does consume a lot of electricity. That electricity, just as we talked about the other sites, that's line grid, Nevada Energy, Berkshire Hathaway, nine cents a kilowatt hour. We're going to touch now, you know, I'm going to hand over to Mark here in a second to discuss permitting. This shows you the layout of the wells across the north and west side of the pit. This is coming from a very detailed hydrological study led by Todd and his team, consisting of drilling wells, doing 40-day pump tests to really fine-tune that model. The Cove dewatering model is very high quality.
It's the basis for the feasibility study and the path going forward for Cove. Without further ado, I'll pass over to Mark.
Thanks, Matt. As Matt indicated, obviously this project is very much about the management of dewatering from both Pit Lake and underground mine perspectives. Initial projections have that initial pumping rate at being approximately 50,000 gallons a minute, which is pretty significant. This would, you know, currently put it at the largest dewatering project in Nevada. With that, Matt mentioned the studies are going on. A big part of that has been preparation of a NEPA defensible groundwater model, where we've taken many of these inputs and looked at how are we going to optimize those pumping rates and looking at different sequencing to make sure that we achieve our desired outcome.
On the federal permitting side, we fully expect this to be an EIS when the official decision comes from the BLM. That once again, significant new disturbance and a major dewatering effort. We have over the last two years been working on the required baseline studies as well as the technical reports. Those are all in the hands of the BLM as we speak, and we are waiting on their review of such. At the state law, and just one additional thing at the BLM, we've also submitted the initial plan of operations amendment to the BLM. They have provided us some comments, and once we get their feedback on these baseline studies and other reports, we will then do another iteration of that plan and submit it to the agency.
On the state side, we've got three water pollution control permits out there. Every one of them is going to be affected by this permitting action. The first half of this year, the focus is going to be on getting those modification applications into the state of Nevada. Other than that, with all of those moving parts, we are still targeting a permitted project by the end of 2027.
All right, thank you, Mark. We will turn over to exploration.
All right, thanks, Matt.
Cove is a project that's very near and dear to my heart. I started working here in 2016 and was part of the small team that advanced it to the first PEA. I really enjoy Cove. At Cove over the last couple of years, we've been busy with the infill drill program of both the Helen and Gap deposits.
We've drilled over 45,000 meters, and you can see the black traces on the image here. That's all the drilling we've done over the last couple of years. We see further expansion of these zones likely concurrent with underground mining. It's important to note that both the CSD and the 2201 zones are not included in the PEA. Those are the other two deposits you see shown in red on the image. Off on the right, just under the pit, that's the CSD zone. A little deeper down, that would be the 2201 zone. The 2201 zone has an average grade of 26.7 grams gold, and it hasn't been drilled since 2015. Definitely a lot of upside there. This year, we'll incorporate the new drilling into an updated resource model with a planned feasibility study by the end of the year.
All right, thanks, Tyler.
Okay, so let's recap what we talked about with Cove. We're talking about a deposit of 100,000 ounces per year. It's got eight-year mine life. It's got an MPV of $271 million at a 5% interest rate and $2,175 gold. It requires dewatering, and that is known and understood and advancing well as far as our studies and planning for when that comes. Just, you know, from our context, it's a big dewatering, but it was dewatered before. You know, Echo Bay dewatered that pit when they were mining it. Water treatment is not required for us to discharge that back into the aquifer. Those are all positives. That's where we start talking about questions. I guess how long is it dewatering after you get the permit to do it? Okay.
The way it's built right now, Justin, as soon as we start, as the wells are drilled and come online, they start dropping the water table and we're at the water table. We're basically following the water down. It is approximately a 12-month from the first well until we get down to the top of the Helen, Helen being that deposit that's the farthest away and the highest elevation. Then we start touching ore. The dewatering plan and the cone of depression and the modeling of that drop in the aquifer is synchronized with the mine plan. Those are built together and those are demonstrated very detailed in Lailey's models. You can deduce that from the model, Justin, because those are synchronized together. Does that answer your question?
Yeah. So it's essentially just the gap between processing and your mining schedule. Yeah. I mean, you permitting in your process. Yes. Permitting in your mining schedule. Yeah. Is there a reason you haven't, I guess for Helen and Gap, do you think they continue at depth and could you drill deeper now or? No, I don't think Helen and Gap continue at depth. So they're hosted in the FabRed limestone and then below there you get into a dolomite and a conglomerate. And that's just not, it's not a good host for the Carlin type mineralization. That is what hosts the 2201 zone, but I don't think that style of mineralization probably continues under the Gap and Helen. We do have some deeper drill holes that were previously drilled into that unit that don't show the same style of mineralization.
Do you have like lateral extension potential? Yeah, there's definitely lateral extension potential. I think you really see that once you get underground and you're able to follow some of those high angle structures that we know exist and follow those out laterally. Do you have any online questions, Katarina? Okay. That either I have very eloquently described the full potential for Cove or not. I am very excited about Cove. That concludes the five of the mining projects that we're going to discuss today. We're now going to move over to Todd. He's going to take us through a recap of the Lone Tree autoclave itself and then move on to the CFO.
All right. Let's talk about Lone Tree and the autoclave that's at Lone Tree. You know, there's a single autoclave at Lone Tree.
In comparison to other facilities around Nevada, there's only three facilities that have autoclaves. Barrick Goldstrike has a facility, one autoclave facility, six autoclaves that are there. They use five of them. One of them is quite old and they don't use it. Then at Twin Creeks, now they call it Turquoise Ridge with the NGM combining, there's two large autoclaves there. In all of Nevada, there's only three autoclave complexes. Now those complexes run quite a bit more tonnage than we run at Lone Tree. We'll get into that a little bit. It's become very apparent to us that, you know, we don't want to keep doing toll processing. We want to have our own processing facility. When you have single refractory ore, you have to have an autoclave.
I want to go over a little bit of the history of Lone Tree. It's, you know, started out as Santa Fe. They put in a heap leach with some crushed material. They did an autoclave POX as autoclave expansion in 1994. Newmont took over the property in 1998. They did put in a flotation plant. What that flotation plant did, and it's still there, we don't have any plans for it yet, is they floated material out of the open pit at Lone Tree and then ran that through the autoclave to recover the gold and as fuel. You know, you get sulfides in a cone. It gives you temperature for the autoclaves. You don't have to run the boilers as much, and you can oxidize things really nice. It went in care and maintenance in 2006.
I-80 got it down there in 2000. I should know the date, but 2020. You know, through that whole time, there's a heap leach that runs at Lone Tree. We still run that heap leach, get around 15-20 ounces a day off that heap leach. It's in operation. That heap leach ran the entire time, still pulling ounces off of it. Down at the bottom there, there's a proposed construction schedule. We are doing technical work with Hatch. This year we continue to work with Hatch on a class three engineering study. What we are doing this year, we did the acid-alkaline trade-off last year and into this year. What we are doing now is optimization. In other words, we did the full engineering. Now we want to make sure, do we really need that item?
If we have a duty standby, do we need to, or can we take the downtime? What's the trade-off? We're working on that, and that'll continue this year. Then construction in 2026. Plan is to finish that class three study in Q3 2025. Then we can get a proper number out to everybody on what the autoclave, what costs to get back in operation. I talked about this. It's just, you know, hub and spoke model we always talk about. If you really think about it, you know, it is three mines feeding into this. If you think about it from a tonnage standpoint, the Goldstrike autoclaves run around 14,000 tons a day. This autoclave is 2,500. It is from three mines, but it's a single autoclave. It's not that big.
It's pretty easy to run. You don't have the complexity of having six of them with downtime and rebuilds and everything like that.
All right. Let's get into s ome of the numbers here. Like I said, it's 2,500 tons per day. The design for this autoclave is 389 degrees Fahrenheit at 297 PSIG. Like I said, we've recently determined we can run acid autoclaving. We went into that earlier. I'm not going to go into a whole bunch of context on that, but it really gives us flexibility for ores that are more amenable to acid autoclaving. There's definitely some of them out there. When you do alkaline, you know, it's always lower recovery. Alkaline is always lower. Sometimes it's 3%, sometimes it's 30%. It just depends on the ore and how it goes through there.
Having the ability to run acid is quite the advantage for us. The availability is 85%. I want to go into a little bit, we'll make it pretty quick. You know, we have done a lot of work on the autoclave where we come out and did non-destructive testing on tanks and pipes, pumps, and looked at what, you know, just a massive amount of work, what's it going to take to get this facility going again? Because it has been sitting. Things are in pretty good shape. You know, the buildings are in good shape. The mill circuit, ball mill, sag mill, really good shape. Not a lot of work to do. The buildings are in good shape. Just need some work on the roofs.
It's more, you know, some things need updated and then some, there's some new things that I'll go into just because things have changed on the permitting side. I like this picture. It was in a Hatch calendar and had it hanging on my wall for a long time, but I asked them, they sent me the original. If you, if you, I'm not supposed to move here, I'd go over and point at stuff. You know, if we just talk about a few things here and what we're doing, we talked about a boiler. You know, when you run alkaline autoclaving, you need a bigger boiler. So we had to put a bigger boiler in. That's in that location. Mercury scrubber, you know, in 2006, you didn't have to have a mercury scrubber on the off gas on an autoclave.
In 2010, I think Goldstrike did the first one on their alkaline autoclaves to capture mercury. They used sulfur impregnated carbon to do that. That is the industry standard now. To get this autoclave going again, we have to put a large scrubber on to capture mercury, which is a good thing. That is where that system is down there. The carbon and leach is an interesting area. This picture actually shows all the tanks being rebuilt. That was our thought at one time. Now what we are looking at is some of those tanks, they are all in somewhat poor condition as far as they need, you know, new carbon screens on them and pumps. The tanks themselves, some of them are in better shape than others.
Our thought now is use the ones we can and then rebuild those tanks as sustaining capital as we operate this plant. This is totally normal when you run a plant. I worked at lots of plants. We take one tank down over about six months, rebuild it or recoat it with rubber. Then you get it going again because there's enough capacity in the other tanks to get the residence time that you need. Another big one we had to do, you know, this facility has a tailings dam, a TSF, and that's what Lone Tree used. That tailings facility from our analysis and what the state wants really isn't recommended to use again.
What we've done at Lone Tree with a lot of trade-off studies is he started to do a filtered tails or dry stack. That is what that building is out there. We also had to put in an RO plant to do that. Now the plan is we still have the tailings dam we need to close out. We are going to take the dry stack material, put it up on the tailings dam, and that will help close off that tailings dam. That gives us about two and a half to three years of capacity out of the autoclave. We will build in that time a sustaining capital, you know, about two years in, two and a half, we will build a dry stack tailings facility for the remaining, you know, other, 16 years of autoclave capacity. That is something new.
You do not see a lot of dry stacks in Nevada, pretty common elsewhere in the world, but it is something that you, you know, when you look at trade-off studies to close your costs versus dry stack, dry stack is always more upfront on operating and capital, but sometimes there is, you know, less cost downstream when you are closing off a tailings facility. The oxygen plant, that has been a fun one. You know, we are right now looking at, you know, can we use the oxygen plant that is there. That is one scenario we have. The other scenario is there is some new technology on oxygen plants where it might be cheaper just to build a new one. That is one of the trade-off studies we are doing with Hatch. There are just some pictures of the off gas system I talked about.
It uses, there's some cooling there, but it also mostly uses sulfur impregnated carbon, same carbon you use in like a CIL circuit, but this has sulfur in it. It complexes with the mercury. You change it out once in a while when it gets full of mercury and dispose of it properly. At the bottom there, you can see the dry stack tailings facility and the RO plant. These are, I wanted to show new things that are getting built, why there's some costs that are associated with the autoclave. This is just a picture of a little closer picture of the oxygen plant.
You know, we are going to put, you know, one thing that's super common when you have an oxygen plant, if you put oxygen into the CIL circuit, we're looking at this at other places too, you know, you get better recovery a lot of times. Since we have excess oxygen, we'll be looking at that too to see if the recovery can increase when we do feasibility studies. All right. Turn it back over to Matt.
Thank you, Todd. Awesome. All right. This is where we talk about the autoclave. Todd's gone through. He has been very succinct and clear. We have a facility that has, I believe it stopped operation in 2006, run by Newmont. They kept it on a level of care and maintenance through all that time.
There was a period in 2012 where they looked at restarting that autoclave and brought in a third party consultant to help them analyze that. We piggybacked off that and used the same group. I can say it because it's written on the slides, Hatch. And we used them to progress the PFS that we published two years ago and to progress on the feasibility study, which we're doing together. It's still in draft form. We spent a lot of money on this. I mean, for, and good, well spent money. What I'm saying here is this wasn't us just looking at a plant and kind of guessing what we thought we had needed to do in order to recommission this. All of the pipes, all of the pumps, all of the mills have been gone through and non-destructive tested and analyzed.
What do we really need to do to restart this plant? What are the real costs associated with restarting this plant? I'm very proud of the work that the team has done here to give us a true and accurate estimate of what needs to be done, including a tailings solution on the back end that Todd touched on that is very robust and sound and really improves our custodial ship of that site in getting closing out the existing tailings dam, which has never been loved and is not a particularly great tailings dam. The very holistic solution here, we're looking at rebuilding that plant with a 20-year mine life, operating at a nameplate of 2,500 tons per day that will meet our needs for the immediate future and then allow us to expand the refractory underground or surface tons as they become available.
Any questions? Peter.
Thanks. I'm just curious, and this is part of my ignorance about the autoclave, but the nameplate, the 2,500, what's the limiting factor in how that works?
Okay. Again, should I try? Yeah, you should. Okay. So here's what it is. You do the analysis in the alkaline environment, which was our base case. In the alkaline environment, you get the required oxidation at the operating conditions that Todd laid out, which is approximately 300 PSI, 300 degrees, 43 minutes is your residence time through that autoclave vessel. That becomes your determining factor. It's the volume of the vessel and the residence time you need for each particle as it moves through that vessel. 43 minutes, you do all that math, you come out at 2,500 tons a day, which is less than Lone Tree ran it at.
They ran it at 2,800 tons a day. Again, you have to adjust that residence time for the material that you're running through there and whether you're doing it in an acid or alkaline environment.
I think, you know, any processing plant I've worked on, we always run them higher than nameplate. It's just common, but you got to, I think under alkaline, that'd be tough on this one, but acid you might be able to, but you just got to play around with that when you get running.
Yeah. I mean, that's kind of the basis of my question because normally you have the ability to run it a bit faster, but obviously this is a slightly different beast than like a CIL mill or something. On all our technical studies, everything, we're saying 25 because we don't want to get ahead of ourselves.
That's something you work on later optimizing. Okay. Short time. Short time. That's probably the only, the only slide in the whole presentation that's in short time. Very good point, Lily. Yes. We are transitioning to international and there's, we have some rough spots. I don't know if you're going to tell us the capital cost that's coming in the feasibility study, but I can look at what it was two years ago. What has changed over the last two years to guide us to what that number probably is going to be? If you look at the last, the number we published two years ago, which is approximately $248, I believe, here's what you're going to see is changed.
One, we've added on the tailings solution that we were very clear, I hope we were very clear in when we laid that out that the previous work did not include what we were going to do with the tails. We have subsequently enlisted Golder to help guide us through the tailings trade-off analysis. There was all kinds of, you know, do we make a new tailings facility? Do we just re-wet the existing facility and raise it? Or do we go to some other option? We, through the analysis, it was pretty compelling to move over to dry stack tails. One is that the, the, the Newmont, I mean, I wouldn't say that, I don't want to bring anyone else into this conversation. The tailings facility that was there had an issue that in today's environment you wouldn't really want to live with.
There is not, the state regulators are not particularly interested in us re-wetting that. We are not interested in those sort of issues either. Taking the dry stack tails and using that for the first two and a half, three years to cap the existing tailings facility and then create that, you know, you want to create that shed of water off the top. That is a really compelling argument to close out. We own that, that is our tailings, that is our TSF now, right? We own the property, we own, we own the good and we own the bad. To close that off is really compelling for us. Then to switch over and to allow us to stay within our private land, we can then build a dry stack just immediately to the north of the autoclave. That reduces your closure expense.
It does have ramifications on, you know, you have to spend that capital upfront to put in the filter presses. That is your trade-off there. If you took the previous number and you added in a number for tails, which you probably want, but we are not going to, and then you did an escalation for two years, that is the number that you would get. Hey, Matt, you can be a little bit more specific than that. Okay. How specific? Just tell me the, because, because just tell me the number then. Sorry. Okay. You know, we have done that. We have added those items. The new number came in somewhere approximately around $380 million. What the team has done is looked at, the internal team has done, has looked at some value engineering of where they think they can cut some cost out of that estimate.
They have identified approximately $75 million or so that they think they can cut from that number. That is the work that we're talking about executing in 2025, is taking that back to the third party and saying, do you agree? And what's the number going to come in at? I think if we look at those numbers and we say, where do we sit today, we could talk about $320 million-ish today before we take into account the impacts of the potential tariffs that we're talking about and what that might look like on that capital two and a half years from now. We don't know yet, but we haven't analyzed that in those numbers yet. Yeah. That's more detailed than I would have done, but he's the boss. That, that's the number.
Now that number has to go through the, so I'm always hesitant because that number has to go through the normal engineering QP controls. They're going to want to do some escalation. They're going to want to analyze our ideas and make sure they're sound. They're going to want to do some further engineering on several ideas require more engineering. That's going to need to be done as well. One last one on that then. Shoot. This might be jumping ahead to the recapitalization, but like, do you look at the capital for the autoclave as something different than what you're looking at just to run the business? Like, is there a way to fund this without going to traditional sources, I guess?
That's going to be a bit of the strategic shift that we talk about when I come up and speak here shortly. Yes, we are exploring some options to fund the autoclave that would be outside of the traditional funding mechanisms. Yeah. Ken. Just curious, how much did you pay for the COVE and how much is the care and maintenance cost annually? Ken, do you mean COVE or do you, so Ken is asking how much do we pay for the asset and where do the care and maintenance costs? Ken, do you mean COVE or do you mean Lone Tree? Lone Tree. Lone Tree. Okay.
For Lone Tree, what the transaction that we did for Lone Tree was a swap with the 40% ownership of the South Arturo asset that we had for, that we, you know, when we formed the company, we had a 40% minority ownership of the South Arturo deposit with Barrick at the time. We did a swap for those. What was the book value of that transaction? I'm going from memory, but I believe it's around $180 million that we valued the transaction at when we did the swap. Yep. Holding costs is a really important question because Lone Tree, by the nature of having an autoclave facility and having a pit lake there that's less awesome than some of our other pit lakes, there is a holding cost associated with that.
That holding cost is offset by the 15 ounces a day that we are producing off of that heap leach facility. From a holding cost standpoint, I think we can pure holding. Yeah, it's approximately $9 million or so. In 2025, we anticipate that the revenue generated from the leaching at the Lone Tree will offset all of the holding costs and produce some positive Cash flow from Lone Tree. That's a little different than you would have heard last year. You know, the two things that have happened there is that cyanide prices have come up a little bit, but they're not too much, whereas gold has changed dramatically. We analyze that equation every month to make sure we're still doing the right thing by continuing to add cyanide. Right now, it's totally the right thing.
But, you know, you just have to keep doing that math to make sure you're making the right prudent decision. Yes, sir. Just so for alkaline versus acidic, it's essentially just you're looking at acid consumers in the ore and just doing the trade-off on acid and acid and acid offset by propane. When you add acid, you got, of course, you got to pay for that. But then, by adding the acid, you're adding fuel into the autoclave, which then is partially offset by lower propane consumption. The net increase is $35 a short ton. That's the net increase in operating costs. With that knowledge, you then offset that by your increased recovery.
For some of our deposits, notably the lower portions of Ruby Hill or Archimedes, I'm sorry, Archimedes, that trade-off in recovery increase versus operating costs is very strong. That is what compels you to start looking hard at acidic environment. Increased wear or corrosion on the facility or not materially? Todd, do you see it? Do you see a change in that aspect of the autoclaves? I mean, there are differences sometimes in alkaline. You can get more scale, but you know, you take an autoclave down to re-brick it at a certain interval, and that is when you would clean those things. You know, there are some differences, but not major. Okay. Maybe just one last one. On, I guess, acid availability, is that in current conditions, is that not really a major consideration?
Todd did a whole lot of work on this in the last three months. I'll let Todd answer that question. Yeah. You know, I reached out to a broker I used to use at Barrick and got, you know, current costs of acid and kind of the supply. Obviously, like any commodity, it can change, but it seems pretty stable right now. You know, different things, tariffs definitely could affect it a little bit. Sometimes if the copper market goes higher, they use sulfuric, but sometimes they produce sulfuric. Yeah, it's about $175 a ton right now. It's $150, kind of, it could escalate to $175. That's kind of what we used in the economic study was $175. Yep. In the context of the Northwestern United States, the kind of sulfuric acid quantities we're talking about are large, but certainly not.
They're no different than the amount of sulfuric acid that's going to some of the other processing facilities. Now, our processing facility is a little smaller than the others, but in the context of Northern Nevada, this is not a strange amount of sulfuric acid. No, we used to get a little more than this at Gold Strike. You know, we do have a rail siding, so we can bring it in. The broker told me most of it, right? If we did it right now, in probably two years, we would get it from Kennecott in Salt Lake, which is where we used to get it. They produce a lot of acid from the smelter there in Salt Lake City. Yeah, that's a really good point on the rail siding. That just changed the equation tremendously.
For those of you that don't follow us in great detail, we own a property called Argenta. That is an old Baker Hughes, Barrick, barite processing facility. We bought that, not to mine barite. We bought that because it has rail siding that's adjacent to Battle Mountain, and it came with water rights that we could use at Cove. Any questions from the audience? We do, we have a question online for Lone Tree that says, can you speak to any added complexity to the autoclaving process by running ore from multiple deposits? Okay. I can answer. Yeah, go ahead, Todd.
You know, it's super common when you have, you know, feeding a roaster or an autoclave, you have to hit certain targets on sulfides and carbonate. And so what you do is you never feed direct. You feed with a loader.
I used to work at places where you get half a bucket of this, one bucket of that, and four buckets of that. You do that to meet the blend going into the autoclave. The ore would come in from all the sites. We'd have one person, metallurgist, manage how you feed that into the autoclave. It's really important for acid ore autoclave to hit those targets. Otherwise, it makes it hard to run the autoclave. It's just simple math, making sure you feed it correctly and making sure the loader operator feeds the crusher properly. That's how it'll work. Stockpile and then feed appropriately to hit the right targets. Yeah, that's the secret. I, you know, this is the life that I, that we used to previously live in between Cortez and Goldstrike.
The secret there is you need to have sufficient stockpiles. You know, you can't, you can't just feed in as the mine produces. You need to have the ability to have stockpiles so that you can always be maintaining that blend and, and managing that, those stockpiles, is the, is the key to keeping the autoclave running consistently. It's not an issue. It's, it's just, it's a managed, how about this? It's a manageable issue. Yeah. Anything else, Katarina? All right. That ends kind of, let's call it the ops and technical section of what we're going to talk about today. I'm going to hand over to Mr. Ryan Snow.
Thanks, Matt. All right. We're going to do an update on the recapitalization plan and talk through a couple of items today.
First, I mean, as you can see from the presentation today so far, the team has been extremely busy publishing the five PEAs over the last month. I want to thank the team for that hard work, both here in the room and either in Reno or in Toronto. Those PEAs are critical to the next step in our recapitalization plan. They have given us the ability to put together the production slide that Matt showed you earlier today and really show what the cost is going to be to execute the plan that we have laid out that we can take to a finance partner in a defendable form. The NPV on the properties is robust as we have walked through today. Just a quick second to go through the table you see here. You know, again, at $2,175 gold, the NPV of the projects is $1.6 billion.
If we use spot price today, NPV is $4.5 billion. There is a lot of asset value here to be unlocked. Really what we're talking about is near-term balance sheet and how do we unlock the value that we see in this table. The capital requirements for the hub-and-spoke model are relatively modest. We're talking about $250 million approximately that will get us 250,000 ounces or so of annual production. Additionally, for about $244 million more dollars, we can get 130,000 ounces of annual production from the Granite Creek Open Pit. When we talk about Mineral Point, it is a larger CapEx, you know, approximately that $990 million number that we talked about earlier, but it does get you 280,000 ounces of gold equivalent production on an annual basis for 17 years.
This is the story that we need to, we needed to have compiled to go to our financing partners and execute the plan. With these updated PEAs, our next step is to update our internal life of mine model. The last PEA was just published this morning, hot off the presses. For those of you that have not had a chance to go through it yet, we apologize for making you sit through this today. I know you are going to go back and write your letters later, but I appreciate it. What we are going to do with that is take these updated PEAs, update our life of mine models, play with some flexibility that we have around timing, and look at what is the best path forward for the company to execute the refinancing plan and unlock the value.
I mean, the PEAs, the updated PEAs have demonstrated the value of refurbishing the Lone Tree Autoclave. We just walked through the Lone Tree piece. You've seen it kind of throughout the presentations today that there's tremendous value in us refurbishing the autoclave in our portfolio and unlocking that value. If you remember the Granite Creek presentation, we talked about this 30% increase in payability factors that come when in 2028 we have our autoclave up and running. This fact, in addition to the negotiations we've had with our toll milling partner over the last couple of weeks, have led us to really realize the importance and made us commit to updating the autoclave, refurbishing the autoclave ourselves in a more accelerated timeline.
In our November plan that we put out, we had a slightly different view of what we were going to do with the autoclave on a short or mid-term basis, but that has changed over the course of developing the PEAs and negotiating the new toll milling agreement with our partner. This is leading us down a path that will see a slight strategic shift to the recapitalization timeline that we spoke about in November, likely pushing us towards doing the full recapitalization sometime in the fourth quarter, along with the feasibility studies on the Granite Creek property, the Cove Underground, and the autoclave itself that we've been discussing throughout the day. We have seen, or we're currently pursuing, excuse me, a variety of financing options in parallel that will allow us to execute this recapitalization plan on the timeline we just discussed.
It'll allow us to recapitalize the balance sheet, provide the necessary capital to advance the plans we've walked through today, and minimize dilution to our existing shareholders. That is our goal. The paths that we're looking at are varied. We're looking at a potential term out of the existing gold prepay and silver purchase and sale agreement with either our existing partner or new partners. We're looking at rolling the existing converts or debentures potentially into a new piece of paper with maturities that align with the updated Cash flow s that we've presented to you today. We're exploring new debt instruments that would allow us to do the same. We are looking at a potential stream or royalty on our high-value mineral resources that we've walked through today, specifically Mineral Point.
We are also exploring the potential to put a royalty on the throughput capacity at the Lone Tree Autoclave that would allow us to fund the plans that we've laid out today. We are exploring non-core asset sales. However, as you've seen today, the properties that we've discussed in the presentation are all core to us. The one property we have that we have not discussed at length today is the FAD property that sits adjacent to Ruby Hill. That is the property that we are looking at for potential monetization. Finally, we would have equity offerings. Again, I want to stress that we're diligently working to form an efficient capital structure that would see us execute these plans and minimize dilution to our existing shareholders. The company currently has just over $200 million in debt.
That is across the gold prepay, the silver purchase and sale, the convertible loan, and convertible debenture instruments that are due through February of 2027. In the first quarter of 2025, we've completed the private placement that saw the company raise approximately $17 million. And we have been active in the ATM instrument and raised approximately $4 million under that instrument over that period of time. With the release of this press release today, we will be able to trade again in the market under the ATM, and we envision doing so next week to raise additional capital. We are also evaluating our capital allocation in 2025, and we are looking at plans to determine what has the largest return to our NAV of a varied of about four main work streams. First is permitting our future gold mines.
As Marcus walked through today, there are permitting actions at all of these properties, and we view advancing the permitting will significantly de-risk the projects as the future timeline for permitting can be difficult to manage and is largely outside of the control of the company. We anticipate allocating approximately $10 million to permitting activities in 2025. Next, we've allocated approximately $3 million to completing the autoclave refurbishment study that we just discussed previous to this section. That will help us remove the uncertainty related to our existing toll milling agreement, and as we've shown, it improves the life of mine economics as seen in the updated PEAs. Third is the completion of the feasibility studies for Granite Creek and Cove Underground, to which we've allocated $15 million in 2025, which includes approximately $9 million for the infill drill programs that Tyler has walked us through.
Finally is the development of the Archimedes Underground project, which would advance the next producing mine for the company, to which we plan to allocate $25 million in 2025. To summarize, we've completed all five updated PEAs, and for the first time, we've been able to show the full value of the company. This is critical in advancing our discussions with our financing partners and will allow us to advance, sorry, with our financing partners and will allow for us to advance the work streams we've outlined throughout the presentation today. I'd now like to open the floor to questions. Can I ask a question? Yes. I'm a bit surprised nobody else asked the question.
Is it possible for you to come up with a schedule where 2025, 2026, how much was, what was the scope of the work that you plan to do and how much is the budget and how are you going to get the funds for it? Yes, it's possible for us to do that, and that's the next step in the plan that I discussed. Now that we have all of the PEAs updated, we'll be updating our internal life of mine plan for exactly that reason. We've bolstered our team in the finance department at i-80 to allow us to do that. We've got new resources here in Toronto that will be doing that work with us. What we will plan on doing is taking that updated life of mine plan and presenting exactly what you're talking about. Okay, thanks.
For this year, you mentioned there is $10 million allocated to permitting. Yes. $3 million for autoclave studies. Yes. $15 million for Granite Creek. There is another one, $25 million for the advancement of the Ruby Hill underground. You have got the funds for it or you had to raise the funds for all of these projects? Yeah, we're going to raise the funds for all of those projects. Okay, thanks. Yep. You discussed a lot of different options for potential recapitalization and financing. Do you think you could just list a rough order of your preference for those different options and if you could maybe even like a percentage breakdown of, you know, how much you're going to rely on each option for potential funding for all of these projects?
I think it's a bit early to give you a percentage breakdown, but I'll definitely give you my preference. I think first would be the sale of the non-core asset, selling that FAD property. Hopefully, monetizing that would be first. Second would be the stream of royalty on Mineral Point is where I would go to next. In addition to that, the potential throughput royalty that we could see on the autoclave at Lone Tree. The rolling out of the existing gold prepay and silver instrument are probably, probably one and two A. I mean, those need to happen concurrently with the other two that I just mentioned. Rolling of the existing converts and debentures into a new instrument that aligns with our Cash flow profile that will come out of that updated life of mine plan would be next.
How long do you have with cash available you have right now? How much cash, how much time do you have to get some of these things in line?
Yeah, so we've got a little bit of time. We will have to do something early in the second quarter to raise capital to execute on the plans that we've walked through today. In addition to that, we'll need to be having conversations with our existing gold prepay and silver purchase and sale agreement holders to do something to defer repayments that are coming in March of this year at the end of the month. We have some questions online and somebody wants to know what is your timing and your cash raising objectives regarding the ATM sales? Yeah, so our ATM is an interesting one.
We have access to the ATM until we file our annual results for 2024, which is happening in March, March 27th in a couple of weeks. We have access to it until then because we've lost our foreign private issuer status with the SEC and we've become a domestic filer. When we do that, we're going to need to put a new shelf prospectus in place with the SEC. The ATM is valid through the 27th. With our existing blackout windows, we will have approximately three days next week that we will be trading under the ATM, and we plan on maximizing those three trading days next week. We go into blackout on our standard schedule two weeks before the release of our results. As of March 13th, we will be blacked out from using the ATM. How much is available under the ATM?
The ATM was put in at $50 million. We've raised approximately $30 million of that. There is a lot of headroom left. We definitely won't use the full $50 million in those three trading days.
Another online question. Remind us what we paid for FAD and what it might be worth today.
Yeah, the payment price for FAD was roughly $80 million. We've invested capital into FAD since then with the drill program that we were required to complete. I think all in investment in FAD is probably somewhere between $90-$100 million U.S. We are going through the process right now of trying to evaluate what we think we can get for FAD on the open market, but our goal is to recoup that investment.
Okay, one more question online that goes back to the autoclave.
Is there any plan to run ore through the autoclave for third parties as a way to generate additional revenue?
Yeah, that's definitely on the table. I would say that in the near term for the autoclave, as we've shown you today, we have plenty of capacity to fill it ourselves. That opportunity really comes at the back end in my mind, and Matt, you might feel differently, but comes in the back end after we've processed the material from our own properties. That being said, as Todd outlined, it's only the third, it is the third autoclave facility in Nevada, the other two being under control of one entity. We are the only other entity that can process refractory material in Nevada, and at some point there will be value in owning that processing capacity that we can sell to a third party.
Just wondering, I mean, given the size and the profile of Mineral Point, it really kind of looks a lot like some assets that some of your peers in the U.S. precious space have. Would you consider a partner for it? I mean, yes, I would say that would be on the table. Really, Mineral Point is going to be a whole nother funding exercise to fund that capital. At that point in time, we'll be exploring all the options to fund Mineral Point. Any more online questions, Katerina? All right. Just to close out with the same slide that we began the presentation with today, these are the four value drivers for i-80 Gold. Again, we've got the proven Nevada mining expertise, and hopefully that's shown through today in the discussions with the technical team that we've presented to you.
I do want to point out what you haven't had the opportunity to do today is meet the team below this team. They all have very qualified and experienced people working for them as well with a depth of Nevada experience. We have the high-grade organic growth pipeline, and we have the resource expansion potential on the brownfield sites in Nevada. As Tyler's mentioned, almost all of the resources that we have are open for expansion, and there is an opportunity to gain value through that as well. We have the strategic hub and spoke mining and processing model for the cost efficiencies that we walked through today. As Matt mentioned to start the slide, we don't need to build a processing facility at each of the undergrounds. We can process it through the centralized autoclave facility and gain efficiencies that way.
Finally, we have the restructuring and recapitalization plan for future growth that we just walked through. I want to thank everybody for coming today, and we will be around for a little bit after to take any questions you have that you did not ask in the public forum. Thank you all.