Good morning, everyone. Thank you all very much for joining us here today in person and on the webcast. Before we get started, I just have a couple housekeeping issues to go through. This morning we will be making forward-looking statements, so I would encourage you to have a look at this slide as well as our accompanying press release that we issued this morning. In terms of our plans for the morning, we'll have an introduction first by Paul Rollinson, President and CEO, and then we'll pass it over to Paul Tomory and his team to go through some of our North American projects and give you a bit of a review and an update on where we stand. Namely Great Bear, Manh Choh, and Curlew.
We plan to spend just under an hour on the formal presentation, followed by 30 or 40 minutes of Q&A. Ideally, if you could hold your questions to the Q&A session, that'd be appreciated, just so we can get through all of our material. We'll also stick around at the end for a short period just to address any follow-ups if there are any. That's it for me. With that, I will turn it over to Paul.
Thanks, Chris. Yeah, I'm just gonna give a quick welcome. Good to see everyone. Lots of familiar faces. We're pretty excited to have everyone here this morning. This isn't something we've done in a while, so we've got our technical experts here. We've got drill core, we've got sections, and it's a great opportunity to get into that next level of detail. We chose this time because we didn't wanna overload the quarter. I know it's a busy time at the quarter. There's a lot to digest, and we thought we'd get in early and try to give you a preemptive look, and save time for the quarter. Look, it's really all about the team here today. I'm just here to make an intro.
My brief overview here is, we've come through a lot this year. Everyone's aware. The company has fundamentally changed from its geographic footprint perspective. We are now largely an Americas company, Alaska to Chile, with a world-class asset over in Tasiast in Mauritania, which of course, as many of you know, Tasiast is coming into some of its best years ever. As we're winding up, the 21k Phase is established, we're gonna be over 600,000 oz, 24k Phase on track for next year. We're firing on all cylinders. We've got a great balance sheet. We've got good visibility in our organic pipeline out into the next decade. Today it's all about giving you guys a little bit more insight into that pipeline. We're not happy with our share price.
We think we were over-rotated to the negative, and we're gonna be out double timing on our marketing effort, telling our story and trying to get you guys all back up to speed. With that, I'll turn it over to Paul to introduce the technical team we've got here today.
All right. Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Just before we get into the introductions, these three projects, what they have in common is that in general, they're probably understood by the market in general. Obviously, we've talked a lot about Great Bear, a big splash and acquisition. Even so, we think that the potential of the asset is not well-recognized by the market. That's one of the reasons we're here today, is to really convey our enthusiasm and show you how great we think that this asset will be. Manh Choh and Curlew on another level, they're just two assets we haven't talked a lot about. We're excited about the geology, we're excited about the transformative nature of Manh Choh for Fort Knox's production profile, and we're cautiously encouraged by the prospectivity at Curlew.
If we go on to the next slide, who's got the clicker?
Oh, it's right here.
We've got a good team here in front of us. Jeremy, to my left here, is our VP and General Manager for the Ontario assets. He's in charge of all aspects of Great Bear from the drilling, the project studies, and most importantly, the stakeholder engagement plan. Jeremy spent four years up in Alaska running the Fort Knox mine and is also intimately familiar with what we're doing at Manh Choh. Richard heads up our global brownfields exploration program. There's Richard. He's been instrumental over the last few years at mine life extensions at Chirano, Kupol, our U.S. assets, and has been one of the key proponents internally of the Curlew project. Guy Bourassa, he is the project director right now on Manh Choh, has led the engineering work.
He previously led the feasibility study and the execution of the Tasiast 12K project, and after that, worked on the Vantage Complex project. Graham Long, up here at the table with me is our Global Head of Greenfields Exploration and has a long history in Canada, really understands rocks in Ontario and Quebec, and has been one of the champions internally on the Great Bear asset long before we made the acquisition. Nicos, standing at the left, heads up our global resource geology function, is involved with all of our assets in building our resource models, and has been taking the lead on putting the Great Bear model together. Welcome to the team, and they'll be helping me answer questions.
I should also mention that in the audience are Ned and Yves right behind. Yves heads up metallurgy and processing, and Ned is our Senior Vice President of Technical Services for Mining and Geology. Let's get on to Great Bear. We were just up there last week. I was telling some people we were walking the site, and one thing I can confirm is there are a lot of mosquitoes, black flies, and ticks. We walked out to where the portal, the underground portal that we want to put in starting in a couple of years, and the group of five of us walked out with about 12 ticks, and one of them even jumped from Luke onto Nicos in the core shed. Fortunately, not Lyme disease type ticks, but it was fun.
We want to begin with acknowledging the partnership that we're developing with the First Nations. Truly, we are envisaging a partnership here with the Lac Seul and the Wabauskang First Nations, and we've begun early consultation with them. Jeremy spends a lot of time with the two respective chiefs, and we look forward to working with the First Nations in advancing the project. Where are we? I think everybody knows Red Lake. It's just outside of town. It's a 20-minute, half-an-hour drive from the principal hotel. The Tim Hortons beside it on a good road. As you can see on the map, the power line runs through the property.
The power is probably not quite enough to supply what we envision here down the road, but it is more a question of what upgrades need to be made to both transmission and distribution infrastructure rather than piloting a new power line into the site. Good access, like I said, on the road, heads south to Dryden, connected to the TransCanada there. There's no issue bringing heavy equipment and other things to site. One other thing I should touch on is the land. One of the big focuses of the study over the next year will be understanding overburden conditions and water and making sure that we don't run into some of the pitfalls that other developers in Northern Ontario have run into.
Should also add that the property is under active logging and there's a couple operating gravel pits, so the land is already disturbed. In a way, that's a good thing in that some of the area has already been cleared, made it easier to access the site with our exploration and our RC rigs. Geologically, I hope you had a chance to have a look at some of the core out there. We're seeing in the core visible gold, like we really haven't seen anywhere else on any of our projects. For example, last week, we pulled a hole at 600 meters depth that had 30 meters of visible gold throughout that 30 meters. Really impressive.
Again, if you hadn't had a chance to see it, there's our large diameter metallurgical hole, which wasn't meant to necessarily find gold or VG, but it had some of the most spectacular instances of visible gold that we've pulled there. Truly every single hole that we've put into the deposit has returned gold, and that's also quite remarkable. A key thing is that we have the LP zone, which is the main event here. We're looking at about 11 km of strike length, very attractive, somewhat analogous to Hemlo. We'll be talking about that a little bit more. That's where we see the potential for a high-grade open pit, meaning 2 grams -3 grams, depending on how we adjust the cutoffs, but a really robust open pit at high grade and low cost.
Strong continued mineralization below that into the LP depths, where we envisage a medium tonnage underground mine, and again, very attractive grades. In general, what we're imagining here is 2 grams -3 grams out of the open pit, depending on where we pick the cutoff and the pit size, transitioning then into a 6- 7- 8 gram underground after that. We're sizing the mill based on building up a stockpile during the open pit period and then using that to supplement the high-grade feed from the underground. Just to the south, you can see the hinge and limb and associated deposits. That's more of the classic Red Lake mineralization that is on the property, which was what's the reason why Great Bear went there to begin with.
Even there, we see really good grades and the strong possibility of developing an underground mine. Nicos will talk about the advanced exploration decline we intend to put in in a couple of years, but the program there will be to target drilling into both the LP and the hinge and limb deposits. The other thing that we really like about this asset, and in the last 15 years at Kinross, we really haven't had a true greenfield project, and this allows us to shape this mine to be a mine of the future. There's many aspects to that, is really strong collaboration, as I mentioned earlier, with our stakeholders, with our local communities, with the First Nations, but also to aim towards a zero emission mine of the future. We're looking at different technologies.
We're already advancing the discussions with vendors on how we would work on not only underground electrification, but also in the open pit. It's a real opportunity to get things right, ground up, not just on optimizing the flow sheet, the scope and the ultimate objective of the project, but also how we get there on some of these more future-proofed topics. All right. I'll hand it over to Graham . As I said, Graham been looking at this project for years and has been really pounding the table for us to take a look at this project for years now. Graham , over to you on what the setting looks like.
Sure. Thanks, Paul. We're in the Red Lake Greenstone Belt, and as Paul mentioned, we're 25 km southeast of the town of Red Lake, right along Highway 105. Basically, the underlying geology is bimodal volcanics. What you see in dark green and light green are the mafic volcanic rocks, basalt and andesite. The yellow is the felsic volcanic package, gray is the sediments, and these are all cut by late intrusives, pink. These are granitoid type stocks. There are two styles of mineralization, and we can't emphasize this enough on the property. There's the hinge and limb zone, which are classic Red Lake style mineralization. Then there's the atypical LP fault zone, which is a large deformation corridor.
The analog here is the Hemlo style deposit simply for the reason that it occurs in felsic, predominantly felsic volcanics, which you can see in yellow, and some sediments. That's pretty much it for the project. 4.5 km of the main zone of the LP fault zone is in the felsic volcanics, and there's lots of strike length to explore, and we'll discuss that a little later on, and we'll go into more details in the next slides.
Graham, we're quite pleased by the fact that there's not a lot of faulting and diking. It's actually quite homogeneous and predictable, and it's helping us build the model that Nicos will talk about.
That's right.
Okay. A little bit of an overview on the dimensions of the LP zone. You can see there the 10.8 km of strike length that we have some drill testing on. We anticipate the LP zone extending the full length of the property, so roughly 18 kilometers based on our geophysics datasets. Inside of the dense drilling, we have about 4.6 km really well defined, down to about 500 meters. We have 11 drills currently turning on the property, and we're starting to see holes between 500 meters and 800 meters. What we're encountering with those holes is very consistent with what we find in the above 500 meters. We're hitting, you know, the same domains we have modeled just deeper in the system at consistent grades.
We do see a lot of visible gold at depth, and I think you've had the opportunity to see some of that core today. We like the Hemlo analogy for LP. Recall that Hemlo has produced more than 20 million oz, and the vast majority of that occurred at depths below 500 meters. We like Hemlo as an analogy for LP because, as Graham mentioned, it's hosted in the same felsic volcanic rocks. I spent time working at Hemlo, and I can tell you know, the geology bears a lot of similarities. We know we have a deep, high-order structure that acts as the primary fluid conduit. We know that the main zone of mineralization occurs at a flexure along that structure, and the ore body manifests itself as a series of wide, continuous stacked lenses that are easy to trace.
Not the traditional Red Lake style at all here. I wanted to highlight a few of our recent intercepts. I won't go through everything here, but this gives you an idea of the extent of our exploration outside of what could be considered a conceptual open pit target. Worth highlighting, our BR-537, which intersected 3.6 meters of 18.6 grams, and that's at a depth of below 700 meters in the Yuma area. Some of the holes that Paul was referencing are occurring in the Oro area, so that would be BR-623, BR-624, and we have a couple others going in there. We don't have assay results for those yet, but what we see is an incredible amount of visible gold occurring at depths around 650 meters.
Nicos, this gets back into what we're studying here. We're looking at the open pit, as I said earlier, and we are now very confident that under the open pit there's another, in effect, replicated zone down below which we will mine from the underground. Some of the things that we're looking at in the study right now are when do we ramp up that underground mine? Is there opportunity to mine the open pit and the underground at the same time? Certainly, as we do the deeper drilling that Nicos described, we are absolutely seeing those grades that would support a robust underground mine in the LP depths.
To date, we have about 55 highly continuous domains modeled through the LP zone. This is a recent increase. We're working through our geology model update and our ultimately our estimation domain update that will serve for our year-end resource estimate. We've got 55 of these domains. In any given section, you're 20-25 domains across strike. These are very continuous stacked systems, so I think the cross-section does a good job of depicting that. You know, we're seeing consistent widths, you know, 20 meters in some cases. And we're seeing, you know, robust grades as we extend deeper below our conceptual open pit target. On the right-hand side there, you can see an example long section. That's through our Oro zone that I discussed earlier.
You can see, you know, the entire average grade of that single bulk domain is coming in at about 3.5 grams of 13 meters of true width. Then within that, we're seeing higher grade plunges. You can see there we have 7 grams over 18 meters of width. We're now starting to get a sense of where these plunges are going. We think it's predominantly controlled by folding, and it's extending steeply vertical, but to the north. Just an example of some of the visible gold we're seeing. The hole on the left there is the Oro zone hole that we drilled for metallurgical purposes. It's here today. I'd encourage you to take a look at it. The Yauro subzone hole intersected 80 grams per tonne over 10 meters.
Those are kind of, you know, two examples that span the proposed open pit target. Then given the immense potential we're seeing at depth, we're considering driving an exploration decline. This would occur in 2024. It would serve as drill access for LP at depth, so it would go in on the footwell side at a depth below 500 meters and facilitate
Dense drilling down to about a kilometer of depth. We would also run a spiral on the hinge and limb, and this would allow for infill drilling on hinge and limb. Eventually, down the road, it could also serve for potential production access.
Let me talk a little bit about our strategy for resource characterization and resource to the market. We've used analogies here with Hemlo. We deliberately pick Hemlo to indicate what we think might be a quantum of total ounces here. It's all drill constrained. We've got a 200,000-meter program this year, and the goal of that program is to get to a declaration principally of inferred, focused on the open pit with some indications in the underground. We think that number will land in the 4 million-5 million range, so plus minus that range, depending on how the resource model comes together. That is step one. As Nico has alluded to, we are drilling at the depths below the open pit.
Most of that won't yet be at a drill density that we can declare a resource on. There will be some indication of it. That will form the basis of this program here, is as we get underground at Hinge and Limb and LP, we then see, as I said, we're using analogies here, a replication of what we see in the LP open pit down below. You can estimate there, what we think will be in the LP and the Hinge and Limbs in terms of a quantum. It will take years to build up to that.
That's one of the important things to convey here is that we see tremendous potential in the mineralization here, but it will come out in steps, rate limited by our ability to drill and to put in this decline. This decline is gonna be really strategic from the perspective of getting ahead on the underground drilling. Graham, we'll hand it back to you to talk more about the broader prospectivity.
When we're looking at this huge project, we divided it up into future exploration targets into some broad bins here. One is definitely the target area where we're concentrating right now. Our 11 drills are doing the down-dip extension and in-field drilling on the LP fault zone that's been delineated itself. Two are the northwest and southeast extensions of the LP fault zone. As we've mentioned, Great Bear is delineated or has some indications that it exists 10.8 km in strike length, but there is about 18 km of strike length that still remains to be tested and totally infilled. Three is the hanging wall zone to the felsic volcanics. This is an area that Great Bear has put a couple of holes down.
They have identified a fault zone they call the North Fault, and it does have some felsic volcanics in it that does contain low-grade gold. This is definitely an area of interest to us, and we'll get to that in the future. Four is the very large basalt package. Again, the Red Lake style mineralization that hosts the hinge and limb, Arrow and Midwest zones. I'll show you in the next slides some of the detailed geophysics. The targets are incredible out there. There's so many different targets, and the potential to find new hinge and limb zones is very very high. Looking a little closer, this is the photo on the left of BR-85 is the limb style mineralization.
This is a silica sulfide replacement that does occur in the Red Lake camp. In this case, this BR-85 ran 9.7 grams per ton over 20.1 meters. This is the panel which is the limb zone itself, and it's continuous for about a kilometer on strike, and we have indications that it exists below 900 meters vertically. On the right-hand side is the classic Red Lake style mineralization, quartz veins with incredible visible gold. This sample here ran 68.7 grams per ton over 7 meters. Looking at the plan map and then a section on the right, as I mentioned, the geophysics, the magnetic system shows the limb, hinge, and the southwest zone very clearly.
These are tight isoclinal folds, and the hydrothermal fluids have used the weak planes of the contacts between the basalts and the andesites and the sediments as weak planes for fluid migration path. You can see the Dixie limb zone, again, a kilometer in strike length. It forms the north limb of the fold. The south limb of the fold is the new zone that was discovered called Midwest. Then the hinge zone is the actual plane cleavage of these tight isoclinal folds. This can be continued. You can see it's interpreted in the mag. When Great Bear tested one of these areas, they discovered the Arrow zone, which was pretty incredible. 19.3 grams per ton over 2.1 meters, and there's not a lot of holes in there.
You can see in the interpretation of the mag, the other targets, there are just so many targets in this large upside potential area. If you look on the right-hand side, this gives you a spatial perspective of how the LP zone in the felsic volcanics in yellow sits with relation to the hinge and limb areas. There's about 800 meters horizontally between the two of them. You can see here that the hinge and limb have been tested down to about 900 meters, and it's open at depth and along strike. The LP zone itself, the deepest hole is about 850 meters in the LP zone vertically. The upside potential for the down-dip extension is absolutely incredible.
Okay. Getting into immediate activities here, we're advancing the project, and we talked about the exploration program. Let me just paint the picture for what we're seeing here. seven, eight, nine years of high grade open pit, and that's 2-3 grams. The reason I hedged down to the 2 gram is because we're actually finding more low grade than we initially thought, which allows us to actually pull more inventory into a pit. That's not a bad thing to take the grade down to, let's say, it comes down closer to pulling more gold. Phase two is right now very high confidence on an LP bulk tonnage underground at those 5, 6, 7, 8 grams. Then third phase is prospectivity on the property. We see three buckets of production.
seven, eight, nine years out of the open pit at LP, replicate that in an underground at LP with prospectivity beyond. As we do our studies right now, we're looking at how do we layer in hinge and limb undergrounds, how do we manage the grade profile, and ultimately, how we look at throughput. We've indicated publicly that we're in that 10-15K range.
We're probably biasing to the upper end of that range because of the preponderance of low grade we're now finding in the pit, and it will give us a good amount of flexibility on managing high grade feed from the pit, stockpiling lower grades, pulling high grades at the same time as from hinge and limb, blending up the grade, building up stockpiles, which is why we bias to that 15,000 ton a day as we look at these three big buckets of potential. Jeremy, we'll talk a little bit about what's going on on the ground right now.
Yep. We set ourselves for 2022, a very ambitious program for 200,000 meters of purely diamond drill. We're so far 83 km into that, running at about the midyear. We're very comfortable with achieving the other 117. We've ramped up from six diamond drills at the beginning of the year to just in the last month, 11. Things are going very well there. For the first part of the year leading up to the fall, we've been purely focusing on LP and building out that our inferred maiden resource. Starting in the fall, we'll start to divert some of those drills, but not all, to drilling out some of the inventory to indicated for the future PFS.
Some of the other rigs, though, will continue to focus on growing that inferred resource and hitting some of our exploration targets. Things are going very well on the ground. The other activity on the ground, in addition to those 200 km, is 35 km of RC drilling. These are two RC drills dedicated solely to what we're calling grade control drilling. Picture instead of the 75-ish meters for inferred, this is drilling about 8-10 meters apart and drilling out about a quarter's worth of future open pit production. The reason we're doing this is, of course, because it informs what will actually happen when we start mining in a specific area, and that informs our capping strategy, for example, in our resource model.
Is this a little early to be doing this type of drilling? Yes. As we are very confident in building a mine and mining there in the future, we would rather have this information sooner than later. Other activities on the ground revolve around permitting. Of course, with permitting in any jurisdiction, best practices come down to submitting a project description that we stick with, and that is why we're doing the PEA study this year. Second is building the right team, and we are working with a team of experts and consultants who have essentially permitted a lot of the big name mines in Ontario over the past decade. The third is getting the clock ticking as soon as you can.
With that, with baseline studies, comes down to developing about two years' worth of baseline data. Those studies, there's about eight of them, have already kicked off. We kicked off our last ones in May of this year. That two-year timeline for the baseline studies, the clock is already ticking there. Of course, the fourth area of getting permitting right is relationships with our First Nations partners. As Paul mentioned, we are partnered with Wabauskang First Nation and Lac Seul First Nation. Before us, Great Bear Resources did just an excellent job of establishing good, genuine relationships with the two nations, and Kinross has continued that since the acquisition.
We currently have in place an early exploration agreement or framework, and we'll continue to work with Wabauskang and Lac Seul on an advanced exploration framework and then ultimately the larger project framework as well. Both nations are very positive on mining and on us building a mine. As Paul mentioned, I have gotten to know Chief Petiquan and Chief Bull very well. The question I get, you know, most of the time is when can we build a mine together? Very positive there. I'll hand it back to Paul to talk about some of the longer range aspects of the project.
I talked about the study and sizing the mill. I just want to touch on one of the permitting points here. Ontario is a super friendly place to permit. Virtually every mine that's ever been advanced has been permitted. We just need to make sure we do the work 'cause on the one hand, yes, every mine has been permitted, but we have many examples in Ontario of mines that ran into roadblocks or delays or CapEx blowouts. We wanna make sure we do our work, and we do it all early, particularly on the permitting, but also on the test work side. The ore is very clean. We're very confident in the recoveries we're gonna be able to get here.
As I mentioned, we're targeting the upper end of the 10,000 ton -15,000 ton a day range. Given the amount of visible gold, we're also looking at a gravity circuit to get that easy gravity type gold out of it. The conceptual schedule, this is the one we get a lot of questions on. I get a lot of pressure from my boss on, and basically it relates to the schedule. The way to look at the schedule is twin tracks. There's the technical work stream, which is drilling, resource modeling, metallurgical test work, engineering studies, and construction. We have a pretty good handle on that. Kinross has a long history over the last decade of advancing and delivering projects successfully. We're very confident in that work stream.
The other work stream broadly is the stakeholder management one, principally as it relates to advancing the permitting process in Ontario. There's a First Nations agreement, but as Jeremy mentioned, we have an excellent relationship with them. It's really around the timeline of baseline studies, EIA submittals, and getting all the many, many things that, the Ontario process requires to have in place to advance the permit successfully. What we don't wanna have happen is advance down the road, and then there's some sort of scope change. When you look at other projects in Ontario that have gone wrong, it's ultimately because of a scope change or something was changed. It almost resets the process and introduces another one to two years. We just wanna get that right. We do see a path to schedule acceleration, but we're not.
We don't yet wanna say that. We wanna do our work on, as I said, the technical and the stakeholder management work streams. We do see a path to potential schedule compression as we advance Great Bear. That concludes our commentary on Great Bear here. I hope we're conveying the enthusiasm that we feel for this project. I mean, it's really exciting whenever we get out to site to have a look at the core to see what's emerging on Nicos' hypotheses around what the resource model will look like. It's exciting as we look to the timeline of things we'll be able to release. We're chomping at the bit to get you more information. Obviously, we have limitations on the regulatory side.
What we're trying to provide here to you is a glimpse of that enthusiasm that we feel internally for this project. With that, we'll do a bit of a switch. We're gonna save questions to the end and ask Guy and Richard to join us up here. You stay here? Yeah. As we switch to Kinross Alaska. While Guy and Richard are getting set up, let me just give a context on how we look at Kinross Alaska, and that's a deliberate name. We are now mining the Gil deposit. We have commissioned and successfully built again on schedule, under budget, the second leach pad, the Barnes Creek leach pad at Fort Knox. The mill has significant idle capacity, and the pit is permitted for tailings.
We have an asset there that can take additional feed. That's why we brought online the Gil mine, which is a satellite very proximal to Fort Knox. That is going well. We are mining there actively this year, and this was the principal thesis on the acquisition of the Manh Choh deposit, is to bring it into Alaska, into Kinross Alaska. Well, the feasibility study is right in the. We're now dotting the I's and crossing the T's on the FS, and we're gonna have more detailed results on the FS with our Q2 numbers, but we thought we'd give you a sneak preview on what we're looking at here. The grade's in good shape. You can see the measured and indicated and the inferred ounce totals.
We're still targeting first production in the latter part of 2024 with 4 years-4.5 years of mine life, but probably 6.5 years of employment when you look at predevelopment, stripping, and mining. The total production contribution is in that range of 600-650. Those are produced ounces, and we're targeting initial CapEx $170-$190, plus some potential reallocations of what was previously OpEx into CapEx. We'll provide more detail on that on the quarter. Those would be reallocations. The big one we're looking at there is on the ore haul, the road haul. That was gonna be 100% contracted in the original version of the model.
We're now looking at buying those trucks and then contracting out the operations of the ore haul. What that gets us to for Fort Knox, for Kinross Alaska, is an average production of 350-400, gets it up to be a very solid mine there for a number of years. Upping the grade, I mean, as you know, Fort Knox is the lowest grade mine in the portfolio. It ups the grade to 0.45 on a blended basis with a resultant AISC in the $1,100-$1,200 range in those three principal years. Obviously, Fort Knox continues producing beyond there, but those are the principal years for Manh Choh feed. In a nutshell, that's what we're looking at for this project.
Richard will describe what we're finding in the rocks there and the nature of it.
Thanks, Paul. Geologically, the Manh Choh deposit is purely metasedimentary types of rock that is being altered and it's got a series of gold, copper, and a lot of sulfides. The good thing is that one of the pits, which is the north pit, is almost oxidized, so we have about 50 meters of completely oxidized material. Then the main pit is the one that is not oxidized. Basically, we are looking at purely metasedimentary material that has been metamorphosed and altered into skarn projects. That's it, Paul.
All right, Guy Bourassa, over to you.
Okay. Just to locate the project, you can see up on the top where our Fort Knox gold mine is located, just north of Fairbanks. The Manh Choh project is down to the right along the Alaska Highway, about 400 km southeast of Fairbanks. Ore will be transported in tandem trailers, as you see in the inset photo. Those are designed. They'll be loaded with about 50 tons of material each, and we're gonna be running about 60 of those trips per day. In terms of the capital project, on this slide, we'll have to modify the Fort Knox mill to allow for the higher grade of the Manh Choh ore.
That means increased use of cyanide, so we have to build up our facilities there to for additional cyanide and commensurate with that will be additional detoxification. We're gonna have to add some detoxification for that cyanide. Project will create about 400-600 new jobs. That's both with trucking. The trucking operation will run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can imagine that. A round trip takes a full day for a worker. It's gonna be like a 12-hour shift. At the mine, of course, there a lot more jobs at the mine. Next slide, please.
When we get closer to the mine, as you see on the right, along the ice, the Alaska Highway that we for Manh Choh this year and next year, essentially, we've just gotta build a road to get there. It's about 18 miles long, so 40 km, of which we're gonna do about half of that this year, subject to getting our permitting done. Our permit applications were done last year, at the end of last year, and we are confident that we will get our permits in July, and we're about ready to award a contract, so that's being tendered, and start the road construction for this year.
In Alaska, work stops in the wintertime because of the harshness of winter, so there'll be a gap in the wintertime, and then next spring, we would start and finalize the construction of the road all the way up to the pit, as well as mobilize the mining contractor, probably in end of Q1, early Q2 next year.
We had previously signaled completion of this FS in the latter part of this year. We've advanced it to mid-year to take advantage of the construction season, in the summer here.
As you can see in the top picture, there are two relatively small pits at Manh Choh. The top one is the north pit, and then further one to the south that will be mined first, and then the south pit. The north pit would then be used to store waste material as well. We'll fill in the north pit as we go along with that. We're currently in the process of finalizing the ore haul contract. We've gone out for tender for a second time to firm prices. We expect to award that shortly after sanction, which we're hoping for the end of this month. End of July, excuse me. We're also out for tender for a mining contract.
We've gone through different studies as to evaluate whether we should self-perform the mining or contract mining. As part of that analysis, we're actually out for tender today for contract mining.
As you all know, I mean, this is a tough time to be doing projects. Inflation has hit particularly major construction projects pretty heavily. We've kept a cap on it here, but I certainly wouldn't wanna be entering a billion-dollar project into this environment right now, given what we're seeing on inflation. In terms of our global portfolio, where we see the strongest inflation is Brazil and Alaska. Alaska is really driven by a very tight supply chain, as many others ramp up both resource and infrastructure development in state. A quick snapshot of the mine plan here. Richard talked about the the deposit. I think we'll skip over this in the interest of time, but as Richard and Guy said, there's two pits that we're gonna be mining and trucking to Fort Knox. Lastly, on community development.
Yeah. I had the great pleasure of being the general manager in Alaska for the last four or five years. You know, a project like this would not be possible without the excellent reputation that Fort Knox has built. It's the biggest gold mine in Alaska. They've been mining there responsibly for the last 25 years. In terms of the land package, it's on Tetlin Native land. It's a land package of 675,000 acres, so it's a little bit under Rhode Island in terms of size. It's a very unique setup in terms of tribal land. The Tetlin tribe owns the surface and subsurface rights there. This is very much their project.
They were the ones who invited developers onto their land in about 2008, 2009, to start looking for resources, and they found it, and then they were looking for the right partner. It's a great combination. That's a photo there of Chief Michael Sam and the Tetlin council there, who are very supportive of the project and have gone to bat for us many times. The community, both of the local community of Tok, and then also in Fairbanks, are excited about the job prospects that Paul and Guy both mentioned, and the investment in both communities as well.
Okay. Then we'll move on to our last project here. This is one that if it weren't for Great Bear, this would be probably the most exciting thing in the company from an exploration point of view. We've had a really good run here on the drill bit for the last 18 months. This is an overhead drone shot of the site. The entire Curlew site fits onto that, what you see there. You see the portal near the top of the photo with a waste rock dump there in front, and then office and maintenance facilities, as well as the mine dry in the bottom right. So it's an extremely compact land package.
Just to orient you, geographically, you can see in the top left the Buckhorn mine, which we ran 3.1 million oz at 13 grams, and then some of the other historic mines in the district. You see the Kettle River Mill down in the bottom right. That was probably a 120 km trucking that we did from Buckhorn. You can see that the Curlew project is more proximal, about half the distance away. You can see some of the historical production. When you look at the Curlew, the K2 mine, that was operated by Kinross Echo Bay, and you can see the quantum of production there historically. That mine did end in grade.
There were open faces of ore, but at the time, gold prices were lower, the grade wasn't quite enough, and the Buckhorn mine was being brought on stream. This is what we're looking at from a geometry perspective. You can see on the top left there, the K-2, that was the original mine. There was an underground mine workings there. There's a deposit called Emmanuel Creek that had been mined out. Over on the right is the old K1 mine, which we call the Granny Mine, which is the first of the feeder mines to the Kettle River Mill. The hypothesis here is a continuous mineralization from K2 to K1. What we've done here in the program is we did some surface drilling.
We knew that the mineralization continues, so about a year and a half ago, we approved both the rehab of the old K2 mine access, as well as new development, to get down into some of the targets that Richard is about to talk about. We will be completing that decline in September. We'll demobilize the contractor, but we've advanced a lot of underground mining. We've opened up a lot of ore faces along the way, and we've made several new discoveries, and Richard will talk about those now.
Basically, the Curlew deposit is purely an andesite volcanic material. In this type of deposit, it is the vein structures. There's very little sulfides, and it's like 99% gold. Most of the time, all that you're trying to hit is the veins. When we started drilling from surface, we were missing some of the veins. When we diverted the old underground and started putting in a drift, we got closer to the veins, and anytime we drill, we hit a lot more veins than we had previously predicted. The Stealth area is part of the old K2 mine that was mined some years back. Drilling on the western side of it, we found out a lot more wider veins than previously mined, which is something of interest.
The veins are also becoming a lot more sequential than previously. That is one advantage of drilling from underground, especially for a typical epithermal deposit like we have. For example, the hole that we have shown over there is the 6 meters at 20 grams, was one of these new additional vein targets that we picked out during the course of the drilling. The next area is very interesting, the Galaxy vein structures. We actually drilled a hole from surface in 2014 and 2015 when we're putting a few holes. We went underground and realized that we missed a particular vein by just 12 meters. We drilled the vein again, and we hit it. We went back to surface to test it. We still missed it.
We decided to drill all these Galaxy veins from underground. Subsequently, we've been getting a lot more veins that is coming through, and the grades are also significantly as high as we expected. The good thing here is that now that we've been able to model the veins, you predict where you expect the next vein to be, and then you put in a hole. The minimum deviation that you might get is probably five or ten meters. The Lower Portal, this is also quite interesting. This is on the northern end of the veins that we're currently drilling. Interestingly, this structure comes a little towards the paleosurface, and the paleosurface is basically mudstone type.
In fact, some of the holes, when you get into the core shed, you think probably it's a gas station because of the hydrocarbons. The good thing is that these hydrocarbons are not carbonaceous hydrocarbons, so it's not going to impact on any of the recovery. What we've also found out is that just underneath of it, we have a zone we call the pervasively mineralized zone to the paleosurface. Four out of the 10 holes that you drill into those areas, you hit a quite significant high grade. Now, what is happening here is that we're seeing a lot more higher grades from the underground drilling than when we drilled the Lower Portal from surface around 2015. K5 had been drilled, but it wasn't part of the old mining.
Subsequently, in our current program, we earmarked to drill that in the third quarter. When we did the drift, which we are calling the Roadrunner Drift, and we mapped the drift, we picked in a series of veins that shows that at least there is a continuation of the K5 about 100 meters east of where we known, and towards an area where we have the Cyan Barracuda target area, which we have drilled from surface and picked that. What it means is that we believe when we get to K5 and start drilling, we will be able to increase the material there as opposed to what it used to be there. It's quite an interesting area to drill because of what we've seen in the Roadrunner Drift.
Apart from the underground targets that we've mentioned, we've also done a series of drilling on the surface, what we call the Yuma district, and we've been picking a series of these targets. Then also when we show from the first table, you saw that Yuma is not just only epithermal-type deposit. There are a series of various types of deposit. We have the skarn and the massive sulfide like we'd mine at Buckhorn. One of the targets that we'll be looking at is like a Buckhorn-type mineralization within the district. Also, geologically, we believe that we are in an area where there's a lot more to find, and we will be able to leverage on all the infrastructure and what is currently at play.
Once we get Curlew itself running, the opportunity to get a lot more of this material aside. The good thing is that here you see a series of short strike, probably 300 meters -500 meters, strike ore bodies, but anytime you hit these ones, they are quite of higher grade, as we've seen that within the area, always you get around 7 grams -8 grams. Paul.
We'll conclude our presentation here on Curlew, just to say, Richard and I were underground there, and it's really remarkable to walk down the decline to see how many of these veins are faced up in our development headings. What's our strategy there is to continue drilling, finish the decline, and put out a resource at the end of this year. We're targeting a pretty decent number there, somewhere in the total resource in the 800 to 1 million range. Then we need to advance permitting works on a potential reopening strategy at the Kettle River Mill. With that, Chris and team will open up for questions. Chris, what's the format here on the Q&A?
If you have a question, just raise your hand, we'll bring the mic, and we may get to you.
Perfect. I'll ask Eve and Ed to come up as well.
Hi. Can you go back to Red Lake and you talked about a tight RC drill program, 35,000 meters. Can you give us a sense of how deep there is that RC program? Is it fleshing out the full 500 meters or less?
Sure. What we're doing is we're drilling an 8-by-10-meter grid. We're drilling down 50 meters, so approximately 5 benches. We have about 20 meters or so of overburden to get through, and then we're testing about five benches, looking at approximately a quarter of open pit production to reconcile our resource estimate against.
The principal objective there is to make sure that the first several years of production that we put into any study are rock solid. Anita?
Hi. Thanks. On the Dixie project, if we go back to the slide with the LP faults, I think you've got 4.6 kilometers that you say is what you've got good drill density on. But the central zone, what's the extent of that, and what's the drill density that you have right now, and what are you guys targeting before you you know put it into a reserve category?
Yeah. Nicos, you take that again.
Sure. In the core there, we do have some drilling sub 50 meters, which we're hopeful, you know, will have a portion of the resource at indicated. The bulk will be inferred, and we're talking about kind of 75 meter centers for that material.
Is that by year-end that you will get that?
That will be by year-end, yes.
By year end, 7 meters -7.5 meters inferred. I'm looking at, it looks like about, you know, a kilometer and a half in that central zone. Is that the only zone that you're gonna be targeting right now?
We'll target, for resource, an open pit portion in the central area, and then as well as an underground portion at LP, which will be dominantly inferred.
I'm sorry. The open pit would be indicated or inferred?
It'll be a combination.
Our strategy is to push to a bigger inferred number in the early to give you a perspective on what this could be. Then as we advance to a PFS, we will do the infill on indicated. Our strategy is to paint the picture to what this could be via an inferred and then move to indicated.
I think you mentioned the First Nations are positive on building a mine, but is there any community consultation? Like, my understanding of Red Lake is that there's not a lot of big open pits, it's mostly underground there.
In Red Lake, a lot, mostly underground mining, but very pro mining community. Of course, with the provincial government, very pro mining as well, and pro development in the north as well. It will be one of the first and largest open pits, so that'll be part of the consultation in terms of bringing that to life for folks so that they understand both what that'll look like during the mining phase, but also during closure as well.
My last question before I pass it off is on Manh Choh. I'm just taking a look at the prior estimates that we, I guess, got in October 2020, so a year and a half or so now. I think you were targeting AISC of $750, and the mill feed was supposed to be 6 gram per ton material, which is what's in the press release. I'm just trying to understand why the all-in sustaining cost went up so materially. I also see a footnote saying it's at $1,500 per oz. Now that's the resource, so I'm just wondering what you're gonna do the reserve at. I'm assuming those parameters that you've given us are at the reserve.
Yeah. The AISC question, this is blended Fort Knox AISC. That $750 was Manh Choh segment AISC. Because we're blending it in with Fort Knox, this is how we're gonna look at it. We look at it as one mine. The AISC itself for Manh Choh has gone up, but that's not an apples to apples number. This is blended Fort Knox AISC. Your second question, remind me, was?
I guess I'm trying to get a read on what
Oh, yeah.
This is what you're doing to the reserves at, if.
We've had inflation. What we're doing right now is if you layer on two years of inflation on the 1,200 number, we're looking at something in the $1,350-$1,400 range. We haven't settled on that for sure, but we are likely to go with a higher reserve price at year-end. Let's say you pick 1,400. What we would do for our sites more broadly is the instruction to run the $1,400 pit shell, but don't allow it to pull any more materials. In other words, keep the 1,400 simply to preserve our reserves.
I guess the second question would be then when you're doing your reserves, it's only the operating cost, right? Not the sustaining capital that you're including in this.
No, we do fully loaded reserves.
Okay. You're doing-
Fully, completely, yeah.
It'd be on a, like, basically on an AISC basis?
Essentially, yes.
Okay. All right, thank you.
Yeah. You know, we fully load our reserves always.
Sustaining's blowing out more than operating costs right now, so.
Yeah.
You'd get margin erosion if you didn't include that, yeah.
That's right. That's right.
You're not required to. No.
Yeah.
You do it because it's better for mine planning.
Yeah. It's a true representation of how much we actually make. We do every single reserve fully loaded.
I see.
If you don't mind just saying your name and firm before you ask your question, that'd be helpful.
Sorry, that was Anita from CIBC.
Thank you.
Jackie.
Thanks. Jackie Przybylowski from BMO. Paul, I just had a question. You mentioned in the presentation on Great Bear that you see opportunity for schedule compression. Can you give us a little more color on maybe what the opportunity is there?
As I said, technically, if you draw a perfect line through the technical work, meaning resource geology, mine planning, engineering, construction, we can get to 2028. The tougher part is the permitting, and that's going through all the baseline studies that Jeremy talked about. You need two years of baseline, and then all the various submittals that have to take place along the way. I mean, we can get into the detail on that, but it really is a question around whether or not all the steps can be done to get that permit in time to enable the early construction. We do see the window on construction. We just wanna get comfortable with the permitting. Maybe Jeremy put a little bit more color on that.
Yeah. I think the few things that we wanna make sure that we get right to make sure that the straight line on the technical side is also straight on the permitting side is the baseline studies, getting them kicked off as soon as possible, which we've done, maintaining positive relationships with First Nations and making sure they are genuinely collaborating from the beginning, so including things like coming on site to do environmental monitoring, for example. Not changing our minds is the third one. In other words, making sure that the first project description that we submit is the one that we stick with, and that's where it marries up with the technical side of things.
The other area of play that we will look for in terms of schedule compression is what can be done before we have the permits, with only leases in hand. If we can do any early civil works, we will. You better believe that we'll be ready to do it, if we can. That's another area of schedule compression that we're looking at.
Thanks. Maybe one completely different question for Richard. On Curlew, it looks like because it's so veiny, it looks like it's gonna be really difficult to drill a long mine life, at least. Can you talk a little bit about what the targets are in terms of, like, how long a mine life you'd be looking at before you'd make any kind of decision on that?
That is why we said that our target is to find a minimum of 1 million ounces inventory, because we've been drilling around for some few time, some years ago, and now that we've got the drift in, we have access to the veins. As I said, the closer you are in the underground, the better you are able to define a vein and then even the strike extension of these veins. Within the last few years, starting from last year when we started drilling from underground, the understanding of the vein structure and understanding of the geology has been so high, such that the guys on site will always interpret that this drill hole is going to hit these various types of veins. The good thing is that we have always come very, very close to it.
The whole target is for us to get that minimum of 1 million oz, then we'll run the economics, and based on that, we'll also continue the exploration. We will not end the exploration in that once it makes money at 1 million oz. Then also, knowing that we have a very nice prospective district and also we have the infrastructure. If that first pass makes money, then we'll continue the exploration within the district and also in the underground veins.
The critical path to having a mine here will also run through permitting, not through the technical work. We will almost certainly have a minable reserve or resource before we have a permit.
That, that's it for me. Thank you.
A couple of questions. Sorry. It's Greg Barnes from TD. On slide 17, just if you pull it up, there's multiple stacked zones in the LP zone, I think. There was just dozens of them. Yeah. What defines those?
Nicos.
Yeah. It's a combination of geology and mineralization. We do have a series of different geologic units that make up that felsic package. What we're doing is making sure that, you know, where you have mineralization, it's consistent because there's a lithologic control, and then we're also looking for
The context of the mineralization. If it's a little more brecciated, we wanna be sure we're joining up brecciated zones together, right? We're not mixing populations. Essentially, it's a combination of grade and geology, typical estimation domains.
Is it continuous along the package like this, the 4.5 km, looks like that across the entire strike length?
Yeah. Our video shows it well. We've got 55 domains. There's kind of 20-25 in any given cross-section. There are cross-cutting shears that control some of the higher grade plunging zones, and we've got those modeled up really nicely now. You know, kind of offsets and moves around. There's flexures and bends, but it is consistent across the package for the full. I think we've got it modeled actually for 5.5 km.
The width of that package is what?
It's pretty consistent. On the far strike extensions, it does get a little narrower. Certainly in the core, in this 4.6 km, we've got some really good width, especially when you get into those flexure zones or as I mentioned, with the cross-cutting shears, it kind of bulges out, and that's where you get the really nice, juicy open pit stuff.
As Nicos has done the preliminary resource work, there are 2 key findings that are emerging, which are both positive. The high grade core, the high grade domains are really robust, so this hangs together at very high, elevated cutoffs. As I alluded to earlier, we're picking up more low grade. We've been signaling an open pit of 3 grams. It'll probably be closer to 2 grams, but it's not a bad thing because we're pulling a lot more material that was previously either waste or not mined, which would support a higher throughput. The more the domaining work we do, the more we understand the behavior of the high and the low grades.
That leads right into the next question then.
Greg, can I?
Yeah.
I just wanna take advantage of the video that Nicos mentioned. It's playing in the other room, but there's a link to it in the press release. Greg, I think you'd really enjoy it 'cause you could actually fly around in it and see the structures that Nicos is talking about. Please, make sure you don't miss that.
If you know me, you know I'd get motion sickness if I do that. The next question that leads directly into that is the 15,000 tons a day seems pretty modest for what you're lighting up here.
Yeah. Okay. There's two points on that. One is capital complexity. We have a view that anything in more than the 12,000 ton-15,000 ton a day range leads to the introduction of degrees of freedom in capital project management around engineering construction that lend themselves to projects going off track. Look at it. I mean, you look at scope, and things blow out at that 15,000 range. That's reason number one, but that's not the principal reason. The real reason we're targeting that 15,000 ton a day is to maintain a very high grade, high cash flow, high margin mine. We don't wanna push low grade for the sake of pushing low grade.
With 15,000 tons a day, we can run, call it 2 grams for eight, nine, 10 years, build up a stockpile, and then get into the LP here. I'm just looking at it sequentially. You have 8, 9, 6, 7, 8, 9 coming out of the mine, blend it with a lower grade stockpile so that your average grade stays in that 2-3 range. A 15,000 ton a day mill at 2 grams -2.5 grams is a super high cash flow, super resilient to different moves in the gold cycle. What we don't wanna do is go 20-25, have a capital blowout or increase the risk of a capital blowout, and then maybe get into a cycle where you're into low gold price.
At 15,000 tons a day, it's a super high quality, very high cash flow mine. That's the bottom line.
You're gonna be building this huge stockpile then, I assume.
It's gonna be a fairly substantial stockpile, yeah.
Yeah. Okay.
One other point there. We think we can improve that too by concurrent hinge and limb mining, which is higher grade. It's not the story doesn't just stop there, and which of course will build an even bigger stockpile.
Hey, Paul. A related question. Carey MacRury from Canaccord Genuity.
Oh, there you are. Yeah.
Yeah. Related question, you talked about a medium tonnage underground operation. What are you thinking there in terms of tons potential from the underground?
There's two underground potentials there. There's the more bulk tonnage LP type, which we're looking at 3-5, in that range, 3,000-5,000 tons a day. Then in the hinge and limb, which is more selective Red Lake style, we're probably looking at 500 tons -1,000 tons a day. In a conceptual plan, we could see ourselves ramping up to between 6,000 tons- 7,000 tons a day out of an underground combined hinge and limb and an LP. That would be a gradual ramp up. We don't think it's responsible to say we're gonna do 7,000 tons a day from day one.
In terms of stockpile grade, you're thinking something like one gram?
Yeah. Ned, why don't you take that one?
On stockpile grade, we'll probably stockpile anything above 0.3 grams per ton, and we'll probably have two stockpiles between 0.3 grams and 0.5 grams and above 0.5 grams.
Great. Thank you.
Robert Cohen from 1832 Asset Management. You haven't mentioned any drilling on the northern fault. I think that could possibly be another repetition of the LP. I'm just wondering, have you done any drilling on it since the acquisition? Are you planning on doing any drilling? If not, why not?
Graham?
Yeah. Robert, we do plan on drilling that, but right now we're focused on trying to build the largest inferred category on the LP, the main 4.5 km. Great Bear did do a couple of drill holes out there, and they did hit mineralization, as I mentioned, but it was sub 1 gram per ton material. We know the system is auriferous, but we're looking forward to that. That's gonna be one of the main targets when we probably in Q4, when we dedicate a drill to that area.
This, this actually speaks to drilling strategy. We were concerned at the time of the acquisition that we would have a hard time, given supply chain challenges, ramping up drills. We've done a better job than we thought we could on ramping up drills, which opens up the door to doing some of that exploration work. We're absolutely Gung ho on doing some exploration work like that, but it's also managing the priority of getting to as big an inferred to paint the picture on what the open pit looks like. Talk about what we're doing here on potentially adding drills here as we look at ramping them up. Just talk about drill productivity.
Yeah. The notion originally was that come the fall, we would take all of the drills, and at the time it was six or seven, and dedicate it strictly to indicated. We've seen as we've grown to 11 that we have the capacity from a people standpoint, and from a core shack and storage standpoint and lab standpoint. The strategy will now be two or three different prongs. One will be dedicating some of the drills to indicated, and as Nicos has grown the zones from 16 to 55, that means a little bit more indicated drilling than we had thought, which is a good thing. Also then taking some of those drills and striking along the length of LP.
One of the biggest challenges we have is having to do condemnation drilling. We don't wanna put the mill somewhere where there's a lot of gold. Some of the drills will be dedicated to condemnation drilling and then drilling out along the strike length of LP as well. I'll just add as well, there are some targets that for you know for any other mining company that would be where they put all of their drills like Arrow and Midwest. We had to walk away from those. We had to pause them because we wanted to focus everything on LP. We're very much looking forward to taking some of those drills and focusing back on some of those generative targets.
I'm just gonna bring a question in from the webcast. Someone's asking how are we gonna manage around the complexity around the number of domains when it comes to underground mining? Yeah, Nico and Ed.
Yeah, we see that as a benefit, right? Our ounce per vertical meter is gonna be relatively high. Capital development intensity is gonna be relatively low. Whenever we have that many stacked veins, you know, we're in a good position in terms of infrastructure. Some of the veins will be mined together, and as we said, you know, mid-sized underground mine at LP, so we will be kind of bulk mining in some areas. In other areas, it will make more sense to be more selective and look at conventional long hole mining. Yeah, I think it'll be case by case, but we won't be focused on a single mining method for the entire 4.6 kilometers.
Right.
Hi, it's Tanya Jakusconek from Scotiabank. Maybe for Paul, just coming back to Great Bear. I think when we originally, when you originally thought about this pit, I thought you were thinking more in originally higher grade material in the sort of 500-600 thousand oz production range or thereabout. No, 400-600, sorry, I think was what we were originally thinking. With this lower grade material, are we more in that 400 thousand to 500 or?
No. Net-net, the move to a lower grade is a good thing because we're pulling more material and allows us to run the mill at the 15. When we talked originally, we were probably modeling a 12,000-ton-a-day mill.
Mm-hmm.
What we're doing right now is we're going, we're thinking 15,000 tons a day. We haven't landed for sure. That allows us to pull some of the lower grade material, which will push the production profile up to 500+. We're not down at that 400 anymore.
Okay.
The combination of throughput, more lower grade material, and potential concurrent underground mining of hinge and limb pushes us to that half a million plus range. As you can appreciate, we're running multitudes of mine plans, but these are all moves that solidify a production profile towards the higher end of the previously communicated range.
I just still think about that $1 billion CapEx for this, you know, plus the $200 million we need to spend to-
Yes.
get the studies and the drilling done and the $600-$800 per oz and all-in sustaining costs. Are those still-
Yes. Yes.
Numbers we can think about?
Yes. Yes, all those. Yeah.
Then just maybe on the resource that is going to be released in, I guess, with your Q4 financials in 2023. We've got how many holes would the resource be defined by? I think we have 75-meter interval. Then just how do we treat this visible gold within there?
Yeah, the question on VG is a really good one. We'll come back to that, but Nicos, talk about the resource model.
Sure. I think we're up to 480 holes or so on LP right now. As we mentioned, we'll continue marching. It's more than that, eh?
Yeah.
Yeah. Sorry. It's double that. That's where we started. We have twice that amount of holes. I think it's 988 in our current refinement that we're doing here with the geology domain. We'll continue drilling, right? We mentioned another 120 km or so to come.
And-
That's what we'll feed the estimate.
The VG, we view the preponderance of VG as a very positive thing, obviously, because it will indicate that the asset will likely bias to the positive when we mine it. It, as we talked about earlier, is very difficult to perfectly model the incidence of VG. We view it as a very positive indicator.
In our initial work, we're being fairly conservative, limiting how far.
We allow that visible gold to spread. Anything between 10 grams and 150 grams, we're really controlling how far that's spreading. The RC will ultimately answer that question of how far we're allowing that to extrapolate.
150 gram is your cap off, your capping factor?
It is in terms of getting rid of true outliers. Like I said, we're really restricting distance on anything above 10 grams right now.
Okay. Then just one final question, if I could. Just moving on to Curlew. Can we just talk about the permitting process? Because you've got, one, the permitting of the trucks to get to the mill, and then at the mill, because it's been down, it's just an amendment to permits there. Could we potentially see this, if everything goes well, contributing to production in 2026- 2027?
That is roughly how we're looking at it. The principal permit is around the tailings. The Kettle River mill has a traditional wet tailings disposal. What we're looking at from an engineering point of view is a dry stack, and that is the principal permit. That timeline, 2026- 2027, is roughly what we're looking at internally.
Okay, thank you.
Thanks. Mike Parkin from National Bank. Just back to Great Bear. In terms of your proposed underground mine life potential, what conceptual kind of depth are you thinking in? Do you have pretty good confidence that you've got further extent at depth?
Yeah. Ned, why don't you take how we're looking at the mine plan.
In terms of mine planning, in terms of the mine plan, I guess Nicos mentioned from a geological standpoint, we have drilled down to 500 meter, and we're seeing that continues down to around 1,000 meters, right? In terms of the way we're looking at the mine plan, underneath that pit, we'll go with in the LP zone, it's most likely gonna be highly productive open stoping method. That extends from, let's say, the pit potentially goes down 400 meters -450 meters, all the way below that pit, and it's open at depth, so we'll go down to a 1 km on that.
When you go to the discovery or the south side of the pit or hinge and limb, it's potentially more selective high-grade methods, like what Paul mentioned, like 500 tons -1,000 tons per day.
There's no geologic reason why it should end at a kilometer, right? We see these undergrounds going down 2 km. We just don't have drill holes down there yet.
Graham says it goes down to the mantle.
That's right.
I'm gonna pass this on here, but we just had one more question from the webcast. A couple have asked just any preliminary indications on the strip.
At Great Bear?
Yeah.
Again, it'll depend on how we characterize the grade and what cutoff we use, but we're looking at, with a bigger pit, something in the 6-8 range.
Okay. Anita Soni at CIBC again. Just in that strip, and you're continuing on with that 6-8, that's the overall of the pit, right?
Yes.
You know, how much of that, like, with the stockpiling, how much do you think is, that that's gonna be capitalized? Like the operating strip ratio.
That stumps me, that one.
two to three now? All right, I'll ask-
I think it's very early to say that.
All right. I'm gonna follow on to Tanya's question because if I model just two grams per ton material, I'm getting into, like, the 384. Like, if I was just trying to fill a 15,000 ton per day mill and 97% recovery rate, getting in the 300s. Will you be mining the hinge and limb at the same time? And is that possible? Like, and that's supplementing? 'Cause if I wanna get to 500, I've gotta have, like, 2.84 grams per ton material.
Yeah. As you can imagine, we're running a lot of these scenarios. There's, if we pull the grade down to two then you're right. It probably won't be as low as two. Certainly in the early years, it'll be a higher grade than that. In one of the scenarios we're working on where we do pull that to the lower end of that profile, we are concurrently mining hinge and limb, and that's how we build up to the half million plus. We're in the scoping study here. There's still a lot of moving parts on this. I think the point to communicate here is that we have a lot of optionality on sequencing, stockpiles, grade, open pit, and underground as we look at this to build up to a 500,000 ounce a year or a better mine.
I think, Paul, to add, maybe this will help understand the ore body. I think you mentioned it, and Nicos mentioned it, but I'm gonna say it with my words from a mining standpoint. Although we're seeing this low grade coming in, the high grade core is still there versus, you know, when we updated you several months ago. The high grade is still there. We're adding these low grade zones to it, which means we can target the same high grade material and stockpile the low grade. It's not like a dilution as such. We can achieve, you know, again, like Paul said, it's early.
Put another way, the 2 gram includes a whole bunch of stockpile material that doesn't go through the mill at the beginning.
Exactly.
In other words, the mill grade is probably closer to 3 gram.
Exactly.
We don't know exactly, but it's gonna be higher.
We don't know, but even from the pit, it's higher than 2 gram. It's too low for the pit to be 2 grams.
Yeah, it was just when I did the math on two, it didn't work.
No, no, it's not.
Yeah. No, it'll be a 2 gram pit, but much of the lower end of that may be everything until I don't know what the cutoff is on the field, but.
Yeah, like I say, again, it's very early, what, like what Paul's saying, but.
If you wanna run some sensitivities on models, I would assume the pit is somewhere in the 2.4gram-2.6 gram in the beginning, can add a little bit of the underground to it to get to that 500-600 range. Then the low grade comes in at the tail.
You said, with the low grade, it was 0.3 and 0.5. Those are the numbers I thought I heard. But point three, like, anything from 0.3 to 0.5 is considered low grade stockpile. Then do you have a medium grade stockpile that's
This is what we've done at Tasiast. Tasiast, we have grade bins. We have the reserve, we have the low grade reserve, and then we have the resource bin where we're gonna employ the same strategy. Then we'll probably even have mineralized waste, stuff that is not intended to go through, but if gold prices go to $2,500, it's gonna be sitting there as supplement. Yeah, we, on all our open pits, we will run bins, and we'll sequence those bins obviously from a cash flow perspective.
Paul, just to add to that, when I said 0.3, we learned throughout the years that stockpiling that maybe in the 15,000 ton per day case, it could be a mineralized waste. As time goes by, gold price goes higher, and those lower grade mineralized waste stockpile becomes ore later in life, so.
Well, Fort Knox, for years, subsisted on what was essentially a waste stockpile, but was separated as low-grade material that wasn't reserved at the time. There's a lot of moving parts here on grade bins, throughputs, what is the actual feed grade in a given period of time, and these are all the optimizations that we're working on right now.
Okay. Thanks.
We're not targeting a 300,000 oz a year mine. We're targeting a 500,000 plus mine here.
Yeah, the flip side, though, is that, I mean, you've got 6-8 strip ratio and high energy prices right now. You're moving all of this material up front, stockpiling it, rehandling it, pushing it back. We know lots of mines where the stockpile just sits on surface and, you know.
Yeah. The 6-8 strip ratio is the ultimate strip ratio. Obviously, in the early years it's not gonna be anywhere near that.
Okay. Thanks.
Josh Wolfson, RBC. Just on Manh Choh, the permitting that was talked about for July, is that for the final permits for the whole project, or is that just to start kinda the road construction?
I can take that, Jeremy.
One of the two. Yeah, go ahead .
Yeah. The July permit is the wetlands permit that allows us road construction. The operating and closure permits are expected in Q3.
Okay. I recall at some point there was some complexity with trucking and there was some pushback against that. Has that been resolved, or is that still in progress?
It's not resolved. What we found out is that the trucking, everything we're doing is completely legal and authorized. We're having a lot of cooperation from DOT in Alaska. They've recently set up a committee of stakeholders, of people all along the route, you know, from school boards to the various communities to put a plan together to address some concerns that the community might have. Also to influence. The federal government is spending a lot of money on improving the Alaska Highway, widening certain zones for, you know, passing zones. This is starting this year too. That committee will influence those aspects to make the trucking as safe as possible, so.
Got it. Okay. Sorry, for the full permit, that would include the resolution for trucking as well?
I don't think there's a resolution that's needed for trucking.
Okay.
Yeah.
There's no permit required for trucking.
There's no permit required for trucking.
There's no permit. Yeah.
And, and-
Those types of trucks run on the highway currently daily. You know, we see them. We've been doing some test hauls, and we see those kinds of vehicles, and they're allowed.
I think that would be it. Sorry, the full permit, that was third quarter 2022 or 2023?
2022.
Okay. Sorry, one final question. Because the project's not included in 2024 guidance, if you were to meet all these scheduling items, what sort of incremental production could you see there?
We'll talk more about that at our Q2 numbers there. This was a bit of an awkward timing here, coming a month before the actual FS is done. Let's hold that thought until Q2.
Okay. Thank you.
All right. If there are no more questions, just checking once more. No? Okay. I think that's it. Thank you very much for coming.