I'd like to welcome to the stage Richard Young, President and CEO. Now, great to have you.
How are you?
Very good.
Great to be here.
This is not Richard's first rodeo as CEO. He's been with several companies in the CEO role, and each of them has ended in significant shareholder value creation. Founder and eventually CEO of Teranga Gold Corp., sold to Endeavour Mining, CEO of Argonaut Gold, eventually acquired by Alamos Gold, and then currently present CEO of i-80. Over to you, Richard. Thank you.
Well, thank you very much, and I've got forward-looking statements as I will be making forward-looking statements through the course of today. i-80, how did we get our name? We're named after Interstate 80, which transverses across northern Nevada, where some of the largest gold mines have been discovered over the last 30 years. We own four past-producing mines acquired from either Barrick or Newmont as they were downsizing after M&A activity. We're one of the largest resource holders in Nevada, behind Nevada Gold Mines, Barrick, and Anglo. We currently produce about 50,000 oz of gold per year, and we've got a Three-Phased growth plan to take us to over 600,000 oz by the early 2030s. I joined about 18 months ago, and since then, we've added management depth to be able to execute on this plan.
We've also refreshed our Board to make sure that we've got the skill set at the Board level to be able to execute on that plan. When you look at our resource base, we have nothing in reserves today, but that'll begin changing this quarter. We've got 6.5 million oz of measured and indicated gold, 7.5 million oz of inferred, so overall 14 million oz of gold, roughly 200 million oz of silver. On a gold equivalent basis, that's about 16.5 million oz. Over the course of last year and this year, we're working to convert the blue bars to gold bars. We're infill drilling to convert inferred into measured and indicated as we prepare feasibility studies for the five gold projects in the development plan.
I just want to point out that Lone Tree open pit is not part of this plan. It will likely be phase four. As I mentioned earlier, we've got a Three-Phased growth plan. Phase one is constructing and ramping up the first two underground mines, as well as refurbishing our autoclave. We're one of two companies in Nevada with a permanent autoclave, the other being Nevada Gold Mines. I'll speak a little bit more about that refurbishment later. With the ramp-up of those two underground mines, the refurbishment, we're about 200,000 oz per year. Phase two, we basically double that. Phase three, when we bring in Mineral Point, we get to over 600,000 oz per year. I'd like to underline that we are now fully financed to be able to execute on all three of these phases without having to go back to the equity markets.
When we filed our PAs a year ago, we had a production profile out to 2047. One of the things we've changed is we've added that sort of bluish-gray bar. The goal is to create a mid-tier that can produce into the 2050s. When we look at where we stand today, we're about 4 million oz contained short of being able to produce that 600,000 oz per year. Where we think that might come from, and I'll talk about in a few minutes, but part of it, bringing in Lone Tree, that's a 3 million oz resource. We believe we can add another 1 million oz at Mineral Point, our flagship asset. Conservatively, we think that we can add a couple million ounces through our three underground mines, and we've got a couple oxide open pits that aren't included in the current plan that we'll bring in.
So we believe we've got a strong case to create a solid mid-tier gold producer in Nevada through the early 2050s. So we put out the new development plan in the fall of 2024. We indicated that we'd file PAs that would support that. We did that at the end of the first quarter of last year, and that shows the growth potential of the asset base.
We only ran sensitivities to $3,000 gold. Who would have known? And so at $3,000 gold, the NAV of these five gold assets was $5 billion. We think at current metal prices, it's about 10. And that's not giving any credit for Lone Tree or our autoclave that will be refurbished shortly. So this was the Gantt chart that we put out back in the fall of 2024. We're on track to meet that. And this shows how each of the assets are proceeding through their phases of permitting and development, and we're on track.
The one item that I would mention is currently, Mineral Point sits in phase three. With the new administration that came in a year ago, we are looking at opportunities to try and move that project forward. It is our flagship project, and I'll speak about that shortly. So one of the problems when I first joined in the fall of 2024, we had $200 million of debt that was maturing over the following 12 to 24 months, and we had no possible plan of repaying that. So we needed to put a plan together that would allow us to do that. That was the development plan that we laid out just on a couple of slides earlier, and then we've been able to recap the balance sheet since then.
We raised $300 million of equity, including warrants, this time last year. Earlier in the first quarter, we completed a royalty financing with Franco-Nevada, as I would describe as the foundational capital. That allowed us to bring in National Bank and Macquarie on a senior debt basis for a prepay. We just recently completed a convertible. We are now fully funded through the three phases of our development plan. From our perspective, we believe that all the warrants will be exercised, the convertible debenture will be exercised, so with all of that, we'll have about 1.2 billion shares outstanding. At today's share price, that's about a $2 billion U.S. market cap. Again, as I mentioned earlier, we think that the value of our assets is $10 billion, and we think we can do better than that.
We continue to trade at a discount. Since the management change back in the fall of 2024, we put out a new development plan. You may recall that the previous management group was focusing on the base metal. We think the base metals are excellent, but they're just earlier stage. We needed to focus on something that could give us tangible cash flows to be able to restructure that debt. We put out the PAs. We've stabilized Granite Creek underground. There were some water issues. Those have now been addressed. We've moved forward with refurbishment of the autoclave, putting out a feasibility study and moving it into construction.
We've permitted and begun construction of our second underground mine, Archimedes, completed the recap, and all the while improving both the depth of the management group as well as the Board, which will be so pivotal as we move forward. In terms of near-term catalysts, we've got of our five deposits in the development plan, we have feasibility studies for the first two underground deposits coming out this quarter, Cove and Granite Creek. Meanwhile, we're working on the thesis for the next three, which we expect to be complete by mid-next year. We've got an $85 million drill program underway to allow us to convert inferred into measured and indicated, as well as some step-out drilling. With respect to Lone Tree, by the end of this week, we'll have ordered all the long lead equipment.
By the end of the quarter, we'll be about 50% committed on the project. We're going to begin the demolition this quarter and commence construction in Q4, and would expect to be commissioning as early as September, with first pour in December, and then ramping up in the first quarter of 2028. Archimedes, we began construction in Q3 of last year. That's proceeding on schedule. We expect to touch ore in the fourth quarter of this year and ramp up next year. Last week, we participated at the Franco Investor Day, and we put out some drill results from the infill and step-out program, which we think are going quite well. Maybe just spending a couple of minutes going through some of these key assets in phase one. Granite Creek is our first underground mine.
It is a small mine, and people would look at that and why are you there? It's a higher cost mine at this point in time, poor ground conditions, but it is within 10 km of Turquoise Ridge. Turquoise Ridge is a Nevada Gold Mines operation. 30 million oz has been discovered. Our senior team comes from Turquoise Ridge. They all say this looks exactly like Turquoise Ridge. Our underground contractor still works at Turquoise Ridge, says the same thing. For those of you who were around in the 1990s when Placer bought Getchell, this is behaving a lot like Getchell did in the upper zones, narrow, poor ground conditions, grade not so great, but as Turquoise Ridge got deeper, ground conditions got better, grades improved, and you got more lateral extent. We've got the PFS coming out in Q2. That's going to be positive.
We've got another $10 million program there this year. Our VP Geology believed this is the asset in our portfolio with the most upside, so we'll continue to work on that. We have addressed the water issue. It had been a huge issue when I first started. We were moving about developing three and a half feet per day through the end of last year. In February and March of this year, we're developing 12 feet per day on average. We've addressed the water. Now we've got to catch up on our development and then drill out an ore body, and that's what we're aiming to do. Archimedes, we began construction in Q3 a little bit later than we had indicated in the PEA. However, we are well on budget in terms of moving that forward.
It's $40 million to develop that asset, plus another $10 million of surface infrastructure for a 100,000-oz-per-year mine. We believe this mine is going to get bigger. The early drill results have been very good. The system looks like it could get larger, so we've got a $30 million program this year. We'll have the feasibility study out in the first quarter next year. This one's going to be a good one. The refurbishment of the Lone Tree process facility, this was built by Hatch. Hatch is doing the EPCM on this project. Santa Fe built it. Newmont acquired it. They ran it until 2006. It's been on care maintenance. We bought it in 2001. We're one of two companies in Nevada with a permitted autoclave, the other being Nevada Gold Mines. The refurbishment is well underway.
Some of the major updates will be a new oxygen plant because the original oxygen plant was used. We're going to replace the CIL circuit because it had worn away, a new refinery. We're going to move from traditional tails to dry stack tails, and then just update nuts and bolts and get it up to today's standards, including environmentally. That's well underway, and we expect that to proceed without issue. The last thing I want to talk about is Mineral Point. Mineral Point is the largest asset within our portfolio, 5.5 million oz of gold, 200 million oz of silver. In the PEA, it averaged 282,000 gold equivalent oz over a 17-year mine life at $1,400 AISC. We think this deposit's going to get bigger. It's going to be a wonderful asset. It's a heap leach with very good gold recoveries.
The silver recoveries we're working on, in the PEA, they were 41%. We're going to see what we can do on that. It's $1 billion to build, but with the current government, there may be an ability to be able to move that forward in our production profile, and we believe that's significant because it's the most valuable asset at current gold prices. The NAV might be $6 billion-$7 billion. Why us and why now? First of all, we're in a tier one jurisdiction.
We've got a very large resource base, and we've got an organic growth profile. Why now? Because the plan is now fully funded. Our execution is on track, and we're trading at a significant discount to our peers. As I mentioned earlier, on a fully diluted basis, our market cap is about $2 billion. We believe, just based on the PAs alone, the NAV of this asset base is $10 billion. That doesn't include the roaster, it doesn't include Lone Tree, or any of the drilling that we think will expand reserves as we move forward over the next few years. Don, that's the i-80 story.
Thank you very much, Richard. We do have a couple of minutes for questions if anyone in the audience has a question. Front row, go ahead.
Hi, Richard. Can I ask you about labor in Nevada?
Yeah.
You're competing with Newmont, Barrick, Kinross. They have very high turnover at their operations, so I'm just wondering how you're thinking about your labor force that you're going to need for these mines and how are you going to compete with these other companies there?
Great question. First of all, we match Nevada Gold Mines on the comp side. That takes that issue off the table. We hadn't hired anyone until we completed the equity issue in Q2 of last year, and we've hired about 30 people, and a lot of those 30 people are mining engineers, metallurgists, resource modelers. We're four or five resumes deep, and we hired superstars. When we went through the recap, everyone that came back said we've got a great site-based team. It is getting a little bit tighter the last couple of months. We just had a call this week about that. Barrick and Newmont are still working through some issues, and there still apparently is a little bit of tension. i-80, well before I joined, had a great culture.
We've revised our mission, vision, values, and performance management system to try and lever off that and ensure as we build the company, we continue with those values. We think that we offer something different. At this point, we're fully staffed, though we do have about 25 or 30 positions we'll be filling through the course of this year as we build out Granite Creek, Archimedes, some of the drill programs, some of our sustainability work that we do in the communities. The one thing I'd come back and say, and you'll know this, so when you look back in the 1990s, the industry in Nevada was much larger than it is today. There is a lot of talent. Now, some of it's gotten a little bit older, and they work on the consulting side, but there is a tremendous amount of depth in Nevada. It makes it truly unique.
Thank you. We have time for another question if anyone from the audience has one. Richard, if I may, Mineral Point being it's a flagship asset, and you mentioned its silver endowment. Of course, it had many positive attributes, but silver in particular is hard to find anywhere. Let alone North America, but yet there are some producers who are really looking for it in North America. Can you just give us a little bit of color on some of the parameters at Mineral Point with respect to the annual production? I think it's 2.5 m illion oz a year, but the annual production, the opportunity to increase recoveries, and maybe even the exploration upside on silver.
Yeah. We've got 200 million oz of Measured, Indicated, Inferred silver, and we recovered 72 million in the PEA, about a 41% recovery rate. We're working to improve that. There is a bit of a clash between silver and gold recovery rates that we've got to work through in a heap leach environment. We are working to improve it realistically, maybe another five points. We're not really exploring for it. What we did identify was Barrick ran the pit at Ruby Hill at Mineral Point at $800 per ounce. As we look at those drill results and where they ended, that's why we think that we can add to the ore body. We will get gold and silver. We're not looking for one over the other. The most valuable deposit that we can assemble.
Okay. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.
Awesome.
This is Richard Young from i-80 Gold Corp.
Thank you very much.