Okay. I'm told it's time to go. Today is kind of for me, a special day. This is the 25th time I've had the privilege of standing up here and presenting to shareholders. 25 years has gone by like it was yesterday. It's been a lot of fun, ups and downs during the years. What I think we've got in terms of our assets and our ability to grow a company here at i-80 is very special. I really thank a very supportive board. I think we've built a great board of directors that I work with here and the management team at i-80.
I'd like to welcome today Christina McCarthy as our newest member of our board. I've been fortunate to have a lot of successes in my career.
We've Right now, one thing I can say is we have two projects under development that we essentially discovered, Cove, that we're doing, and Equinox is building Hardrock. I still call it Hardrock, but the Greenstone mine, which is a project we had in Premier. This year, given it's 25 years, I thought it's an opportune time. There's a few people I should acknowledge that I've worked with over the years. We've had great long-term shareholders. Everyone like John Hathaway was a shareholder of Wolfden back in 2000, and he's still one of the people I talk to the most as a shareholder more than 20 years later. Cam Currie, a friend of mine who phones me every day and tells me why gold's going up.
One of the first people who I worked with is a gentleman named John Pollock. John Pollock, one day I worked with my dad in the field and for John Pollock, and one day he said, "You got all these ideas. Why don't you start a public company and I'll finance it?" I did, and he actually funded that company. Wish John was here, and I've had a great opportunity to work with a lot of professional mining guys. I didn't take mining engineering at school, everything I've learned is from people. One of our first chairmans was John Cook, who spent a lot of time taking me through mines and what it takes to make a mine and build a mine.
John Begeman, who was with me at Wolfden back in the day, and we've worked together ever since, was the chairman of Premier. Ebe Scherkus was a key guy. I view him as a bit of a mentor. He's the guy who said, you know, "You can build a real company, like, but you have to build it. You can't just sell it." We sold Premier, but anyway, I think the opportunity we have here is to do something special like Ebe said. He always said a polymetallic mine is like LaRonde is the best. I think what we're doing at Ruby Hill, including the FAD deposit that we acquired from Paycore, is something that is much like a LaRonde.
I have a slide in today's presentation to talk about LaRonde and Ib and what he did with Agnico. Now I learn from Ron Clayton as our new Chairman. Kind of every meeting I learn something new about mining or metallurgy or something, and it's really good. I was really hoping that Don Ross was gonna be here today, 'cause Don took us public in 1998. He was here almost every meeting and unfortunately couldn't come today. Just somebody who when I started Wolfden, I was taking it public. Bre-X happened. We were trying to raise $450,000 to go public. We couldn't raise it. Don Ross, at the last day.
We had a bit of issues because I was this guy who knew nothing about public companies going public. The last day he goes, "How much do you need to go public?" I said, "Another a hundred and something grand." He wrote the check. We went public, and he showed up at every AGM almost, except he couldn't make it today. We first launched as a over-the-counter company. The first AGM, Don was sitting like right here, and during my presentation he says, "How come the share price never goes up?" I said, "Well, you're a market maker.
Why don't you tell me?" He said, "Touche." And then Peter Brown, who I got to know, who I knew I was kinda making it in the industry when I used to get the call from Peter in his bathtub. People who know the bathtub story with Peter Brown, that's pretty unique. He's been a great guy to work with. And my father. Sorry. I lost him in August, and I'm a guy following his footsteps as a kid, walking around the bush, following right behind him, looking at head frames, getting little bunny rabbits that the drill scared the family away. There's a baby bunny. So I kind of followed his footsteps into the industry, and he's not here to listen today.
The support of my beautiful wife has been key. She's back.
Anyway, that's just my bit of a softie. Now we'll move on with the presentation. 25th year presenting, I kind of view i-80 as a continuation of Wolfden. We started Wolfden. It was taken over. We spun out Premier. Premier's taken over. We spun out i-80. It's been a really fun ride. I love working with the people I do, the bankers, the brokers, everybody. There's a lot of bad days, stock's going down, I'm getting shit. Next day, a lot of people phoning, "Hey, your stock's performing well." Do a bit of a forward-looking statement there.
There will be forward-looking statements made here. I'm gonna be promoting a bit of what we're doing.
I urge everybody to read this when they have time. The participants here today that we have and that I'd like you to talk to who are helping build the company. Myself, I'm the CEO. We have Matt Gilli sitting right there, our President, Chief Operating Officer. Ryan Snow right here, he's our Chief Financial Officer, and Matthew Gollat, who I've worked with for 16 years today. Also like to acknowledge somebody else, John Seaman sitting here. 24 of the 25 years he's been with me. Great guy to work with and a boss, I think, legal for basically 25.
Pretty close.
A lot of people have had the fortunate opportunity to work with, and it's working with these people have allowed me to learn of what to do and how to build companies. I really think this is going to be the best one we've done to date. i-80's been around for two years. This is our second AGM. We've had the peer best share performance in our first two years. In 2021, our share price increased by 29% and 22%. This year we're off a bit. We'll catch up. Trust me, we've got a lot going on, a lot of successes, particularly in exploration and in our exploration programs. We've discovered recently the Hilltop Zone that is a real focus of our drilling at Ruby Hill.
What I believe to be one of the world's highest grade new discoveries and combining it with FAD, I think is going to make for a world-class mine that'll be around for decades to come in the future. The South Pacific Zone is to become our core deposit at the Granite Creek Mine. I think our plan is to start mining the South Pacific Zone in Q1 of next year is when we hope to get into it. That's our ambitious plan for now. We are progressing mine development. As some people might have noticed, we had our first gold production or gold ounces produced out of Granite Creek in the Q1, and we'll see more here in the Q2 as things continue to improve.
We're delivering material to both Lone Tree and Twin Creeks for processing.
Twin Creeks is a Nevada Gold Mines operation. Moving forward, there'll be less going to Lone Tree and more going off-site. Our permit submissions have been made for the underground development at Ruby Hill. Ruby Hill as a project I think is really going to be the biggest part of the future for our company. It's really a project that's worked really well for us and continues to. The exploration decline is more than 70% complete right now at Cove, and today we released our first drill results from that program. This year we expect substantial growth in our resources given that the South Pacific Zone is going to come into resource sometime this year when we release our more up-to-date studies.
We are recently hit about a 250 meters step out in the Ruby Deep Zone at Ruby Hill that we will be infilling this year to bring that to resource. That'll add to our resources, or we expect it to, assuming success. The 428 zone discovery that's at what we believe might be an actually a higher grade deposit at Ruby Hill will be the subject of some drilling in the second half of this year. Hopefully we get enough holes and prove enough continuity that it becomes part of our resource. Maybe a small part, but at least becomes part of our company's resources by year-end. One of the real highlights we expect is to complete following this year's drill program, resource estimates for the polymetallic deposits at Ruby Hill.
That's expected to include the Blackjack deposit, the Hilltop deposit, and the FAD deposit. We expect it to be a very material increase in our company's resources. Talk a bit about gold. My friend Cam always harps on me that we gotta be the biggest promoter of our industry and why do people own gold? I think what we're seeing today is a real change in people's perceptions towards money. There's almost a currency war going on between the East and the West, as you might put it. With that currency disruption. W e're seeing the U.S. dollar with the ever-increasing debt that we see here in Canada and in the U.S. is making the dollar probably less and less attractive.
There are challenges, especially the Chinese yuan, to the reserve status of the US dollar. If there is diversification away from the US dollar going forward, gold, we expect, will be the major benefactor of that. I'm expecting this year to see all-time highs in gold, and I'm expecting to see those sustained. We're also seeing countries significantly increase their buying of gold for reserves, and I think China just announced another eight tons for last month. We're seeing some of these countries really increasing their gold, and they're backing their currency with gold. As I said earlier, I think gold will be the biggest benefactor as there is some diversification away from the U.S. dollar.
Since 2020, so a 2023-year period, gold has been one of the few currencies that has realized average gains of 9%. That's when you look at other currencies, it has and it will continue to significantly outperform. One thing, one of my friends says to me, gold is the world's only currency that has no political attachment, no debt obligation, and no printing press. That's why I think gold is gonna be a store of value for a long time to come. We're not just a gold company now. We are expecting to be a significant producer of base metals or polymetallic resources in the future.
One of the main metals we're looking at is zinc.
Something that few people know is in 2021, zinc was added to the critical metals list of, by the U.S. Geological Survey, whereas copper wasn't. Zinc is now used in batteries. The zinc-ion batteries are, some believe, a safer alternative to lithium-ion batteries. In the future, we could see an increase in battery production. If governments can really put in all the infrastructure they're talking about in going net zero, we're gonna need a lot more base metals. The companies are gonna perform the best, I think, as we both need more gold and we need more metals to achieve this green or electrified future, I think the mining companies will be the ones who will really benefit from this going forward. Some things is about supply. It's supply and demand.
If we are going to see significantly increased demand over the next few years, it's how do we make enough of these minerals to meet that demand? Because it takes 5 to 10 years to permit and build a mine. If you look at Greenstone, for example, that Equinox is building this year, we did the first drilling there in 2008, and today is 2023. 15 years later, it is in development, and in 2024 it will produce its first gold. That's a 16-year period from first drill hole to production. That's why I think we're going to see a significant increase in the companies who do produce share prices going forward.
The companies like ours who have advanced stage permits and existing infrastructure will be one of the biggest benefactors of that. Going to the kind of the exploration development part of today's presentation. Last week or the week before, we operate 100% in Nevada, USA. Nevada was once again ranked as the number one mining jurisdiction in the world by the Fraser Institute. Consistently there's a reason why we only work in Nevada, because it is a very pro-mining state, and we're very welcome to be there. Having experience in Canada and Mexico, I definitely view Nevada as a significant tier up from working in the other countries.
The Carlin and Battle Mountain Trends shown here in this image, they're two structural corridors running through North Central Nevada, collectively represent the world's most productive gold district. Nevada Gold Mines, all of their production comes from this picture. If it were a separate company, it would be the fourth largest gold producer in the world, next to its two owners and Agnico Eagle. It is a very gold rich area. Next to Nevada Gold Mines, we are now the second largest holder in these districts in terms of gold resources, and we also have significant silver resources. In all categories, almost 180 million ounces. One thing that I think really gives us competitive advantage in this state is the fact that we have two existing permitted processing facilities.
We were able to secure a deal with Nevada Gold Mines to acquire one of their four refractory processing facilities. That's the Lone Tree site. Lone Tree is a processing facility. We're advancing multiple deposits to ultimately feed and is expected to be the core asset within our portfolio. We're just working on sort of timing of permitting the various projects required to fill that facility. Sequencing is something we're working through as a board and as a management team. How do we sequence these two facilities?
We also have Ruby Hill, and Ruby Hill, we've released studies that we're advancing that as, not as a gold plant, as we're gonna convert the Ruby Hill plant to a flotation plant, likely producing two or three separate concentrates and moving concentrates to wherever we can in the world, in the market. We don't really think that it would be prudent for us to try to build both of them at once. The financial needs would be significant. We're just working through the final kind of trade-off work at which of the two facilities we're planning to start up first.
As you can see, a lot of work's going into Ruby Hill, and the acquisition of Paycore is demonstrating that we are definitely looking at beefing up our polymetallics or the base metal part of our company in making that decision. The plan for us is to build multiple mines feeding two facilities, essentially. Over the next 5 years, our target is to produce, on a gold equivalent basis, more than 400,000 ounces a year. That will make us the second or third largest gold producer in the United States.
So now let's get the work done, Hit the marks of all the drilling we need, the underground development, the test mining, the bulk sampling, feasibility, economic studies, and then ultimately ramp up the development of these two sites.
We're fortunate that as part of the acquisition of Lone Tree, we secured two processing arrangements with Nevada Gold Mines such that they will process approximately 1,750 tons of material a day on our behalf until we get our own facility up and running. That allows us to ramp up in the interim period without having to spend the major capital immediately on our own autoclaves. It's been, I think, a really good working relationship with Nevada Gold Mines. Matt Gili was once the ran one of their major operations, so good relationships, and we definitely try to maintain that relationship as we grow our company.
As I said earlier, we are right now one of the largest holders of gold and silver resources in all of the United States. We are growing our resource base through acquisitions like the FAD acquisition and also through successful exploration. As I mentioned earlier, we are upgrading the South Pacific Zone at Granite Creek to resource status. The Ruby Deep in 428 deposits. We expect to ultimately add additional resources at Ruby Hill. We're working currently with multiple drills at both FAD and at the Hilltop and Blackjack area. We're working to elevate all of those deposits to 43-101 resource status at the end of this year.
We expect that that will move us significantly higher in terms of a company in holding resources in the United States. Ruby Hill is quickly becoming our company's flagship asset.
It is the project that we have the majority of our drilling going in 2023. With the acquisition of Paycore, we're adding 2 drills to our efforts there right now. The Eureka District, which is where Ruby Hill is situated, is a really unique area. It's really. We call it the ultimate optionality. There's just all kinds of different mineralization found here. It's also a district that has a very long and strong history of mining, 150 years of production that started in 1864. The last of the mining happened in 1966. During that over 100 year period of production, most of the production was from carbonate replacement deposits, CRD, polymetallic mineralization.
It wasn't until Homestake came along, ultimately taken over by Barrick and found the Archimedes pit, that you can see in the lower image here, that Carlin-style mineralization was identified here and mined.
That was mined for several years till there was this slope or a pit wall failure. Barrick sold the asset, and we were fortunate enough to acquire it in 2021. In 2022, we discovered the Hilltop Zone in our first exploration program for generative exploration targets. I'll talk a little more about that. But some of the zones that we're drilling were actually drilled by Homestake and Barrick. Some of the intercepts, when we went back and look at drill core, when they hit polymetallic mineralization, obviously, they didn't even sample the base metals. They were just looking at the gold value. Really opened up a new area.
When you see this kind of history of production in a district like this, it's a real head-scratcher. Sometimes people are like horses. They get their blinders on, and they're only looking for one thing, and you miss the forest for the trees, so to speak. With the addition of Paycore to our portfolio in the FAD deposit, we really now control the majority of the productive part of the Eureka District. As I said, we call it the ultimate optionality. There's refractory gold. The Ruby Deeps deposit and the 426 zone are primarily refractory gold deposits, so sulfide mineralization. We have oxide underground mineralization we've identified in the 426 zone. There's a large, seen here in red, Mineral Point, a very large, moderate grade open pit opportunity.
It's an oxide open pit project that we call Mineral Point that we are going to be looking at advancing over the next several years. There's polymetallic CRD like we're seeing at Hilltop and at FAD. We have skarn base metal or zinc mineralization right underneath the pit in the Blackjack Zone that we're drilling. One thing we did in press release but we'll talk a bit about today is, we actually have now hit skarn's kinda copper moly mineralization on the side of one of the intrusives in a new hole that was drilled actually on the FAD property.
That opens up a new area for exploration in the future, and hopefully, we can identify in the future significant copper mineralization on this property.
If you look at the geological setup, it's almost perfect that somewhere there should be a big porphyry copper deposit in this district. Not saying it's going to be necessarily on our property, but there should be one in the district, and we are going to be doing some exploration over the next few years looking at that opportunity as well. Taking the blinders off, we're open. We hit high-grade lithium, maybe we'll start looking for lithium. You know, that seems to be the hot thing today. What's really unique about Ruby Hill is there is an operating heap leach facility, so we are producing gold off that heap leach today.
There's an on-site oxide milling facility, that is the mill that we are currently doing work on and doing metallurgical work on the various deposits, looking at converting that to a base metal plant. Ruby Hill in the future, I think, will be a very unique mine and you turn left, you go to gold, you turn right, you go to base metals. It'll be a unique operation that on the same decline will mine both gold and base metals. I'm looking forward to that. As Eeb Jurka said, you know, these polymetallic deposits are the best deposits.
They survive metal cycles more than just one metal deposits, and they are the most profitable. I'll talk a little bit about LaRonde, just a bit of a comparison to LaRonde.
It's a bit of a thank you to Eeb, who's always said, "Get a polymetallic deposit." He's not with us on our board anymore, but Eeb, we finally did it. We're completing the permitting.
This year, we've got a lot going on, completing the permitting for underground programs, working on a preliminary economic assessment resource update for the Ruby Deep's deposit. That's gold only. We're not yet in a status where we can move the base metals into PEA. Hopefully, by the end of the year, we'll start doing the economic studies on the polymetallic deposits. We're doing the metallurgy on the various deposits that form the polymetallic zones at Ruby Hill, as we're looking at, do we convert this plant to flotation?
We've got significant exploration and definition drilling going in multiple areas, and expecting multiple year-end resources at this project. Or they'll be released early next year, but we'll be drilling hopefully until about November, December on these deposits and then have a cutoff date and start working on the resources. The Hilltop discovery that we made is part of this major structural trend. It's a north-south striking fault structure. Some of the faults, there's the Jackson fault is being referred to, the Holly fault . There's various large-scale faults that run for, as we know it, more than 10 km through the district. The image on the right, all the red dots are polymetallic deposits, whereas the yellow dots are Carlin-type deposits. The district just seems to be more endowed with polymetallic mineralization or base metal mineralization than gold.
We, in our portfolio, feel that the best mine in terms of mine ability within our portfolio is Ruby Deep's. That's something that we'll be talking more and more about this year. These polymetallic deposits in the Eureka districts are very unique in terms of grade. The historic Ruby Hill Mine, which is really the up-faulted part of the FAD deposit, if it were in production today, I believe it would be the highest grade gold mine running in the United States right now. It also had multi-ounce silver, over 15% lead. It's a really classic deposit. The area between FAD and Hilltop is all alluvial covered, and there is essentially no drilling in that two kilometers.
We think there's a great opportunity to find significantly more mineralization as we drill out this structural trend in the future. We're permitting. We have to go through the BLM to get permits to drill in that area. It wasn't previously permitted for drilling. We're going to do additional geophysics to make sure that we're using all the tools necessary to hopefully make the best decision on where to drill and have the most success. The Hilltop fault structure is something that we've identified over really the last six months. Since mid-2022, in June, when we hit the upper Hilltop zone or the lower Hilltop zone, we have made seven new discoveries on the property.
That's almost a discovery a month when you look at it. We've discovered the lower Hilltop zone, the upper Hilltop zone, the East Hilltop, which is a skarn zone.
The 428 gold zone, we drilled our first hole into in November of last year. We have yet to follow it up, even though that intercept was 12.3 grams over 10.7 meters. The East Hilltop CRD is something brand new that we just hit as we were drilling the eastern extension of the Hilltop Fault. Just, I think last week, we announced that we discovered mineralization, the CRD breccia zone, to the west of the Lower Hilltop Zone. It's likely the continuation of Lower Hilltop. We need the infill drilling to prove that it is continuous now. At depth, we hit a new zone called the Getty CRD, with an intercept of over 9% zinc that at some point we'll follow it up. It's not something that I think we'll be looking at in the near future.
It's just been pretty remarkable, but it is one of these northwest striking fault structures we've identified. That's really where we find the controlling mineralization. The closer you are to the fault, the higher grade material. You start to move away, the grade drops off. They occur in lenses, which is quite typical of CRD mineralization. Right underneath the pit, unfortunately, it's very difficult to drill because there was a pit wall failure that you can see in the lower right of the pit, and we're not allowed to access that part of the pit for drilling. We're doing some directional drilling with moderate success getting to the target. We are starting to get some intercepts into the Blackjack so that we can upgrade it to resource status.
On a sort of a sectional view or a long section view, the upper Hilltop Zone has been fairly densely drilled. We're hoping to do with some additional drilling later this year once we get the permits for the new drill pad, is to hopefully do enough drilling into that zone so that it can be classified as indicated mineralization. We can start looking at economic work or wrapping economic parameters around it. The East Hilltop is fairly shallow as well. Once we get the new ability to set up new setups, we'll probably do a bit more definition in that area.
At depth, we have the lower Hilltop zone and the Gedde's horizon that will be subject to some drilling, but not really a big focus because they are deeper and would be many years out in terms of any mine planning, assuming we get there. Talking about the development plan, we are planning to put in 2 portals out of the kind of the mid-depths of the Archimedes pit, driving north towards the 426. That's a gold zone. As you can see in this image, you turn right, you head towards Blackjack, and you head south, and you go to the Hilltop zone. We're, we've got a great mine team that we've assembled at i-80, and they're working through the planning of how do we, how do we do this? How are we gonna pull it off?
I'm sure we will once we get to it. The layout of the site is shown on the image on the right, that is something that we're expecting the permit, we can start the groundworks and setting up for the underground program in 2023. This is one of the conceptual models of how are we gonna mine all these zones. The 426 and the Ruby Deeps are the Carlin-style refractory mineralization. Blackjack is skarn and zinc mineralization, the upper and lower hilltop zones are CRD polymetallic mineralization. As I said, all of these are being looked at.
How will we mine this?
The base metal material hopefully will get processed right on site with the conversion of the mill that you can see the image of here to a flotation plant.
The refractory mineralization will be trucked either early on to Nevada Gold Mines as part of our interim processing agreement, but ultimately one of the main deposits to help fill our own autoclave ultimately and make ourselves a self-sustaining company in the state. Mineral Point is the biggest deposit in our portfolio, something that isn't in our general corporate presentation, but it is there. It's right beside the existing Archimedes pit. It is, when you include indicated and inferred mineralization, it's nearly five million ounces of gold and almost 170 million ounces of silver. In terms of one single deposit, it is actually the largest deposit in our portfolio, but it isn't part of our five-year plans.
We're kind of working with a five-year plan, but it is something that we're looking at. In the.
Our 10-year plan, how are we gonna grow? We can grow organically, hopefully, with projects like Mineral Point. The first hole, we were actually drilling polymetallics, but we drilled through a Mineral Point earlier this year, the drill hole was 1.2 grams over 50 meters. Really good grade mineralization. That deposit does have some upside opportunity, but it's not something we're targeting in the near future. The addition of Paycore, we think, is gonna be a real key acquisition for our ability to develop a deposit that will go long-term in this district. It provides us with about 2.5 kilometer extension along that sort of route, Jackson fault structure down to the south, that runs up to the Hilltop fault and the Hawley fault, which runs parallel to it.
It also consolidates the northern part of the district, with our advanced stage of permitting and existing infrastructure. No problem. You can do that. It will allow for us, I think the Paycore shareholders to benefit from our infrastructure. If Paycore were going it alone, I believe it would take a long time to be able to permit, to de-water, to build the infrastructure. By combining the two assets with our advanced stage permitting that we're doing at Ruby Hill, more for us to move it forward be through amendments to existing permits rather than brand-new permits. It should allow for the permitting process to accelerate to develop a project, and what I believe to be a world-class project like the FAD project at Paycore.
This image is taking that earlier development image and sort of looking at how does this look long term? The big picture, so to speak. We have all of the mineralization proximal to the Archimedes pit at the north part. We're looking east in this image. Then at a similar depth as the lower hilltop is the FAD deposit about two kilometers away. It has the old FAD shaft is there, so people who I hope some people in this room have either been there or are gonna come see the project, and you'll see the FAD shaft and all the infrastructure that sits there.
Ultimately, likely using that as a ventilation raise or something and linking the two, and that will provide us significant access to that 2 kilometers in between that is essentially untested and we believe has the potential for multiple deposits. The FAD deposit is, in my opinion, one of the world's premier polymetallic deposits. It's that one deposit that you look at and, as I said, Ib Shurkis is one of my.
I call him my mentors, is when it came to, are we really gonna build a mining company? It was like Ib who was like, "We can do this. Like, don't be scared." Ib was always like, "You gotta find one of these things," and FAD really fits that mold. If you look at the drill holes they did in 2022's, fantastic results.
The last hole was PC2210 that hit 27 meters of 8 grams gold and over 11% lead zinc. That's world-class in any district, and that deposit is open. One thing that they did very little work on that we may advance, and we'll wanna look at what the metallurgical properties will be, is Gold Hill at drilling the oxide mineralization around that historic mine. Is there an open pit opportunity? Hole 2 of their 2022 program hit 2 intercepts, 23.9 meters at 2.3 grams gold and about 4.5% lead zinc, and a second intercept of one gram gold and over 5% lead zinc. It does identify that there is a potential significant scale and maybe significant scale open pitable project here that I don't think we're planning to drill.
If Tyler were here, he'd tell me. I'm never planning to drill it this year. Something we'll probably do a little more work on in 2024. I put this in here for my friend Ib because he took a bunch of us to see LaRonde when he joined Premier. Really proud of what they built there. One thing he discussed is how you build a real company. LaRonde is still one of their flagship operations. I point out the grade of FAD here because FAD's actually higher grade than LaRonde. I'm not throwing dirt at LaRonde. It's a great mine.
FAD is one of those deposits when you combine it with the Hilltop and Blackjack that I think gives us a world-class opportunity in a polymetallic deposit. Even when he was working with us, he talked about when they built Agnico, they almost ran out of money. I think he was using his own bank account for salary, he was telling us about one point, because the market was so bad they couldn't raise money. They were building 3 mines at the same time. People thought they were crazy. At that time, when LaRonde came on, they were trading at $3.50. I reference that because that's roughly where our stock is trading today. If you look at Agnico today, it's one of the most respected companies in the world, and that's what I hope we're gonna build here with IE.
Quickly, just look at the FAD deposit, the copper potential. In the area this year, and as many of the analysts know, we've been talking about somewhere there should be a porphyry. We're doing some just cursory work around that. Hole 2316 that was drilled this year on the FAD property, an RC hole tested an intersection of structures, and you can see in the magnetics here that that sort of maps out what they call the Ruby Hill intrusive body. It's an intrusive, potentially could be porphyry at depth. When we did drill that hole, we hit over 100 meters of magnetite-bearing skarn mineralization locally, what our geologists have identified as being copper, bornite, and moly mineralization within that hole.
Not expecting it to be a barn burner, by the way, but it proves that there is a different style of mineralization in this camp that's never been looked at, and is something that with the geophysics will further our knowledge of this target and be ultimately do more drilling. The Ruby Deeps in the 428 zone, 426 zone, and now the 428 zone are the Carlin-style refractory, mostly refractory gold mineralization that we see here. Hole nine of our drill program at Ruby Hill this year, we intersected 7.3 grams over 10 meters, about 250 meters south of our southernmost drilling from last year in the Ruby Deep zone. That opens a pretty significant area up for extension of that deposit.
Later this year we will do that infill drilling with the hope of adding resources to our Ruby Deeps deposit. We're also planning from in the area we're doing all the groundworks in the pit later this year for the ultimate underground plan, is doing some additional drilling. You're down quite a bit in elevation, it saves us a lot of money in drilling. We're gonna wait till we're down in the pit to do more drilling in the 428 zone. It is something that could become a part of the future of this operation if we can demonstrate continuity in that structure. The grades and widths and mineralization at Ruby Hill are very impressive.
We're expecting to see an increase in grade based on our drilling in this deposit that will be used in our economic studies, compared to what was done by Waterton prior to us acquiring the asset. I put this image here of the core because for a Carlin-style gold deposit in Nevada, the ground conditions appear very, very competent, and for us that means easier mining and more tons. It's a project that I think is going to really, it is really the deposit, I think, that's gonna help us build the autoclave ultimately once we get that site up and running. Again, on this long section view on the right, you can see the location of hole nine from this year.
Mineralization immediately underneath the Bullwacker Sill , exactly what we see with the Ruby Hill deposit. The main part of the Ruby Hill deposit, 200 meters to the north. The 428 zone is kind of in between Blackjack and the Ruby Deeps deposit. It was actually a single drill hole there drilled by Homestake into a deeper rock unit that they really didn't target in the open pit area other than the 1 hole. It was 1428 and, but it was 15 grams over 5.5 meters. We said, "Well, that's a pretty good hole. We should at least put one hole in and see what it looks like." We hit 10.3 grams over 10.7 meters, completely open for expansion.
It is a target for us later this year that we hope adds high grade, even higher grade resource ounces to the Ruby Deeps deposit. Next I'll talk about Cove, because today we put out results from Cove. Cove is a project that we acquired, I think Tyler said the first drill hole was it 10 or 12 years ago? Maybe it was 15 years ago. Time's flying. We stopped drilling the Cove deposit in 2018. Five years ago, we stopped drilling it in favor of advancing permitting to go underground because it is a deposit that occurs at about a depth of the upper parts of the Helen Zone are about 550 meters and goes down to about 700 meters, which is what's known.
To do a definition drill program, as you can see, our current resource is about 1.7 million ounces at nearly 11 grams. The bulk of that, 1.3 million tons is inferred. You can't do feasibility studies in inferred resources. We need to complete a significant infill drill program to complete a feasibility study. We did the analysis to drill all these holes from surface. We're gonna lose some because of deviation as you go down. What's the cost of that program? We felt it was gonna be well over $30 million to do the definition drill program. We did the analysis, well, what does it cost to put in the decline and drill it from underground?
It came out, our analysis was it should be less.
We decided to permit, put in the underground, and drill it from underground, which actually saves money, but it took time to permit. The drill holes that we announced today, I think really confirm what we've always felt about Cove. I think a lot of people forgot about this asset, in the first 4 holes drilled into the gap zone, the darker blue that you see in this image, we had intercepts up to 36 meters of nearly 13 grams. It does in place have really good widths, relatively good ground conditions, we expect, and this drill program is about a 40,000 meter drill program that we're doing.
We should see a lot of results over the next 12 months as we continue to drill this, and maybe a bit of step out drilling to the southeast later in the program. Lastly, we'll talk a bit about Granite Creek before we take a few questions on the floor, if there are any. Or else, hopefully everybody will join us for a bit of a celebratory drink for 25 years of being up here. Cove, Granite Creek is one of Nevada's newest high-grade gold operations that we are just doing a lot of work at ramping up. Granite Creek property is situated right beside Turquoise Ridge and Twin Creeks, which is, I believe, the third largest operation of Nevada Gold Mines, up against the Osgood Stock.
It's an intrusive, complex fault structure, runs along the eastern contact of the Osgood Stock. The north end of that stock is Turquoise Ridge. It's about a 25 million ounce mine. It's a great operation. On the south end of the stock is where the Pinson, or what we call Granite Creek, is located. Last year, or early in the program, we discovered what we call the South Pacific Zone, which occurs immediately north of the historic mine workings and the primary OG Zone, which is the zone that we're developing right now underground. Our plan is to get into the South Pacific, because you can see in this image, the South Pacific Zone has a significantly larger strike length that we've identified than the OG Zone.
Hopefully tons per vertical meter, as we get into mining more and more in the future, will increase by including the South Pacific Zone, and that's some of the work we're advancing right now on the property. I am going to not just take all the thunder today. I'm going to let Matt Gili come up and talk a bit about the underground work that we've been doing over the last year at Granite Creek and some of the, I guess, the good, the bad, and the beautiful that comes out of this kind of work. I'll let him end the presentation today and urge everybody to come talk to us after the presentation here. Thanks.
Thank you very much, Ewan Downie. I'm gonna take you through three slides to talk about Granite Creek. Just really show, you know, first, what we're currently doing. I wanna talk about how, the second slide, how the development ramp-up is progressing. We're seeing a really steadily increase in our production or development rates, or execution of the development plan. Lastly, touch on what does that all mean, really bringing in the South Pacific. On this first slide here, what you see is these are the current production areas. The areas to the left of this slide, that's what we refer to as the OG Zone. There's currently four sub-levels in production on the OG Zone. We mine underhand.
What you see on a sub-level in the OG zone, the top cut of the sub-level is the cut you see there, and we'll be mining down on the subsequent three cuts. Okay? That's what you see there. You do see on the Otto side, which is the right hand of that side, you do see two active work areas we have. We have some remnant mining happening around the 4,600 level. Then you see we have put in one new sub-level in the 4,500 level area. That's the small sub-level. We're really focusing on the OG, and that's the area of most importance for us right now. We talked about the top cuts.
We'd also talked about, look, we're proceeding cautiously on this.
This is a very high-grade deposit.
It is also very tricky. We're learning a lot. We're using these top cuts on these sub-levels to understand where the ore envelopes exist. We're doing a lot of pausing for cover drilling to better delineate the ore. We want to make sure we do this correctly, and do it efficiently. It's really then all that data you get from the top cut then translates immediately below you. That's when you really start seeing the pickup in the rate of mining coming out of there. Some statistics for the quarter.
We shipped 9,389 tons of material to Lone Tree. That's oxide material. We are encountering quite a bit of oxide material coming out of Granite Creek.
In fact, the majority of what we produce right now is oxide material. OG is primarily oxide. We need to do something with that oxide material. For the last quarter of last year and the very beginning of this quarter and this year, we were shipping that material to Lone Tree for leaching. We're leaching that on a dedicated portion of the Lone Tree pad. It's got its own cyanide train now. We can process that separately from the rest of the heap leach there. Really do a high-intensity leach. We're getting gold off there. You know, we sold 444 ounces for the Q1. That gold continues to come off there. It's working. It's really not ideal. We're looking for better alternatives.
Right now, we've stopped shipping ore to Lone Tree. We're stockpiling the oxide on site, and we're looking at better alternatives for how to process that oxide, and we will certainly keep all of you informed as we progress with that. For the quarter, we did mine 16,000 tons at 9.9 grams. That's all ore types combined. We completed 1,870 feet of development. As I said, we sold 440 ounces. I'm sorry. The development ramp up. What we're really pleased with is this curve, okay? We have, we had a really steady ramp up when we initiated in 2021. We kind of plateaued on the second half of 2022, and it's really picked up dramatically this year. What is the cause of that pause?
We encountered two issues as a company. One, we started to hit water. Not a lot of water. We're talking, in mining terms, 150, 200 gallons a minute of water. What we need to do. That water had above level limits for arsenic. We couldn't just discharge it as we normally do, so we had to work out better methods, safe, environmentally safe methods to contain that water. We've worked through a lot of that process. We understand the water better, and so we've been able to take that knowledge and better water management, and that really helps development rates. When you're driving a decline that's wet, you're swimming in water, and the water you can remove makes everything go better.
The other thing that's happened is there's been some changes in the, in the mining industry in Nevada. There's been some major operations that have gone care and maintenance. We have been able to take the best talent and the best equipment from those other operations and deploy them at Granite Creek, and that's part of what you see as the increase in production rates there for development. What you're seeing on this isometric view here is the upper areas, the OG and Otto, as I talked about before, and then you're seeing where the South Pacific comes into play. We're about one more sublevel away from being coming across onto the top of the South Pacific.
As Ewan pointed out, we are on schedule to blast our first stope in the South Pacific zone in the Q1 of next year. Covered everything there, Ewan. Lastly, I want to talk about the South Pacific zone itself and what we're seeing there. This is a long section. Again, I point out the current workings, I point out the lower OG, and I point out the South Pacific. We will continue down that main OG ramp, as I said, coming across at the end of this year to the top of the South Pacific and start down on that side as well. What you do see here is you see a gap in South Pacific, we don't believe that that gap is necessarily there. We're lacking data, right?
We're proposing a 12-hole program, 21,000 feet of surface holes to fill in that area. There's some inferred resource. There's the lower part of South Pacific has the widest intervals, and it has the best grade. We propose a 12-hole program, 21,000 feet, to fill in that area and provide better knowledge for our planning and for our technical reports as we go forward on that. That's pretty much what I have with regards to Granite Creek. Ewan Downie, is there anything else? Do you want to come back up and close out?
No.
All right. Well, it's been a fantastic honor to be here, with you today, Ewan. Thank you very much for taking us through it all. It's a fantastic company to work with and for. I'm very honored to be here, and thank you very much.
Thank you, everybody. We do have a microphone here if anybody wanted to answer, ask a question. If somebody doesn't wanna ask a public question, wants it to be more private, we're all going to be here for the next half hour or so, feel free to either come up. If nobody, see nobody moving, let's mingle a bit and very happy, oh.
Could you comment on cash flow? I understand you're gonna have a little bit more gold over the balance of the year production and you've got cash, but will all that cover the ambitious plans you have or what are your thoughts?
Mining's a pretty capital-intensive business is a good way to put it. I would say that the amount of gold we're producing this year is not gonna make us cash flow positive this year. Our goal is at Granite Creek for it itself next year is hopefully it becomes on its own cash flow positive. As we're developing Cove, obviously we're not producing any gold out of that. Ruby Hill likely won't be until the year after next, where we'll start to see a ramp up in production. I think you'll really see us have to use existing cash, whatever cash we do get from gold production. We'll obviously continue to look at other alternatives at how we finance our growth over the next couple of years.
Jump in. Go ahead.
I'm sorry to disappoint everyone that I don't have a question. I just have a comment.
Seen you at a lot of our AGMs. It's been great to see you again.
I have been coming to this meeting for almost 10 years, today I learned more than what I have learned all these years. I have moved so much in the first 3 minutes of your talk, and I'm sure everyone else must have moved with this talk. I just want to acknowledge that I'm in good company, both figurative, figuratively and literally, in the sense I'm with good people as well as in good companies that I'm invested in. I hope you will continue the good work that you have been doing. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. Sure.
Just had one question about the drilling from Ruby Hill. You mentioned the trade-off study at Cove, what was better drilled with the underground access versus from surface. With the declines planned to go into Ruby Hill, are there portions that you're thinking might hold off drilling that are better tackled from an underground access versus from surface?
Much like we were doing at Cove, the plan is for all of the infill drilling in Ruby Deep's in the 426 zone to do it from underground. You get a lot better precision on your drilling. Underground drilling is actually a lot cheaper than surface drilling. We actually want to get underground drill because it starts saving us money. Getting that underground access will be critical for us doing the infill. Much like we're seeing at Granite Creek, it will provide a platform for us to start, as I'd say, test mining. We can look at are we gonna take top cuts? Are we in a long hole?
We can try different mining methods, which one works, so then ultimately, when we deliver a feasibility study for Ruby Hill, it will be based on real-time data, not just a bunch of surface drill holes, and let's hope this works when we get in there. It'll be a lot more advanced than I think you'd typically see out of a junior development company.
Got it. No, that makes sense. The other question I had is maybe better directed to Matt Gili, the ground conditions at Granite Creek. 'Cause I know that can be a tough shear to mine on, so any kind of color there on what you're seeing or how you kind of plan to tackle the South Pacific Zone or any differences there versus OG?
Great question. We were extremely cautious when we first entered into Granite Creek, and we had, we did a lot of test mining. We have on-site in-instant delivery of shotcrete always available. In our development drives, we do shotcreting on cycle. The ground conditions on the OG side have been incredibly surprising. Very good, right. We are really not, ground conditions on the OG side are really not a limiting factor to how we advance, other than just the water, right. The Otto side is a very much more difficult ore body to mine. You see, we're really not focusing much on the Otto. We only have two sub-levels there that we're even doing any work on, and we're really not talking about putting in more sub-levels there. You're right.
I mean, where we are now, we are very pleasantly pleased with the ground conditions, and they're not a limiting factor in how we progress what you expect. It just keeps seem to be. It seems to be getting better as we go deeper. What you're seeing on the South Pacific is a really competent host rock. That's, you know, that's what makes it easy for us, is if your development openings are easy to maintain, you don't have to go back and rehabilitate your development, you can just progress more rapidly.
Perfect. Thanks. Thanks a lot for all the detail today.
I think it's an understatement for me to say you have a lot going on.
That's an understatement.
My question is: How are you prioritizing what needs to be done? Like, what do you see going forward? Do you already have a plan as far as, you know, one deposit over another? Because you could spead, I'm sure, $100 million if you had it. What's your priorities, and what do you feel is gonna come first and second?
I'd say our priority on the gold side is ultimately, we wanna start up the Lone Tree autoclave. Autoclaves run hot, so like really hot. You're cooking ore, and you don't wanna be heating that up and cooling it off. When we turn on the autoclave, we need to be filling that every day. It's gotta be. To do that, we need three mines. If you look at Nevada Gold Mines, their autoclaves and roasters that they're using, they're being fed by multiple mines to keep them full. We need to do the same thing. In terms of developing our gold portfolio, the Carlin-style gold mineralization, we have to prioritize all three deposits. That's why by year-end, we expect to be underground on three.
Big, ambitious plans, as you say. We've got a great team, we're gonna pull this off. The other side of it is what do we do with the Ruby Hill plant? Ruby Hill, converting it to base metals or polymetallic production on a capital basis looks to be lower than starting the Lone Tree site. We probably will be able to access significant ore in the Hilltop Blackjack zones before we get all three gold operations going. I'd say, for me personally, we're sort of leaning towards starting up the Ruby Hill plant first, as we advance technical studies, feasibilities on our project, we have to get Cove up and running. We need to dewater that. That really controls the timeline of starting the autoclave. Right now, we're leaning towards probably starting up the Ruby Hill plant first.
We do have the benefit of our interim processing agreements with Nevada Gold Mines to process refractory ores. That allows us to ramp up. I think Nevada Gold Mines, when we did this, one of the first questions was, we were talking about Lone Tree, was, "How are you gonna fill this thing?" We're like, "Well, we're gonna buy Ruby Hill, and We got Cove, we're going to, we've got Granite Creek, so the three of them will fill that." They were like, "Okay, but you guys aren't gonna have enough capital to build three, stockpile all this ore to start it up." The working capital will be insurmountable for us, so that's where the interim processing came in, is it helps us ramp up all three operations and then start the autoclave.
That agreement was key for us to be able to grow our business, I would say. I'd say we're prioritizing everything and just like Yves Harvey did when he built 3 operations to make Agnico at once. Penple told him he was crazy, him and Sean Boyd, but they did it. Look at them today. That's kinda what I look at is that's who we're gonna be. That's what we're gonna build.
Thank you.
Thank you. Any chance of bringing Yes back? No, we got a great team. We got a great team. I mean, we keep in touch as a director consult.
You can always call him.
We still keep in touch. John sees him quite often down in Florida. Yves Harvey sort of, retired now, or would be mostly retired.
Can you give us a little more color on the dewatering timelines at Cove? When can we expect to have an updated resource and an economic study around this deposit?
The question for those online was, development or dewatering timeline for Cove and when we expect to get the feasibility done. Matthew Gollat running that side of the business. I'll let him take care of that.
All right. Great questions on Cove. You know, the Cove pit was, of course, dewatered by Echo Bay. It. So technically, it's completely feasible and was done. We're gonna wanna dewater it faster than Echo Bay did when they got Cove. Right now we have begun the process for the EIS to dewater that pit back to its condition as it was with Echo Bay. We anticipate that being a three-year process to go through that. In that time, we'll be drilling the wells necessary. It's a 15-well field is what we see there. It's at Cove. A 15-well field, putting in the rapid infiltration basin where we You know, so we're not consuming that water.
We're taking that water out of the pit area, and we're reinjecting it into the same aquifer just downstream.
It goes back in.
It, some of it goes back in. This is the system. We just stay with the system. Okay? We're anticipating a 3-year program to continue with that. In the meantime, what we're gonna be doing at Cove is we're driving this development decline down for exploration. That horizon you see at Cove, that elevation of the exploration decline, is about 10 feet higher than the water is, right? That's why it's there, which is down as far as we can go right now. We'll finish drilling that out over the course of this year. We'll complete an upgraded study for Cove in 2024. I would anticipate that going straight to FS. I don't anticipate needing to do a PFS at Cove.
I think we'll have enough information.
With that much infill drilling, we should easily have identified the indicated resource and be able to do a full feasibility study on that. That's the plan for our advancement.
I don't see anybody else with a hand up. Please, everybody, join us in the corner for a glass of water or something else. We also have snacks here as well for everybody. We've got a lot of our team. I think our entire board and our entire senior management team's here. Please feel free to come say hi, and thank you for the very kind words.
You're welcome.