If you click on that, you'll see Q&A as an option. Just bring up that box and type in your question. I'll read it out, and the team from Liberty will answer them. So joining us today from Liberty, we have Susie Bell, Manager of Investor Relations, and Jon Gilligan, CEO. Jon, please go ahead.
Michael, thank you very much indeed. Appreciate the introduction, and thank you to the team at Sidoti for hosting us to get the opportunity to give you this call. We've had some interesting conversations with individual investors today and looking forward to tomorrow. So much appreciated. Welcome to people listening. Thank you for the opportunity to let me tell you a bit about Liberty Gold. Liberty Gold is a development company focused on oxide gold in the U.S. Great Basin. We're a Canadian-based company, but we're a U.S. gold development story. And what I hope you'll take away from this presentation is what does an oxide gold developer look like? What's the sort of opportunities that we see in the Great Basin? And what are the investment drivers for this style of deposit? Next slide, please, Susie.
I will be making forward-looking statements, so these are the disclosure notes. Please read them at your leisure. This, for those who are not aware, this is the Lassonde Curve. It tracks the mining industry from exploration on the left-hand side of this graph to a producer on the right-hand side. It looks at the change in share price over those three distinct phases from exploration and discovery through development and production on the right-hand side. The bit in the middle is either called the orphan period or the valley of death.
And it's the space where developers, groups who, after the rush of discovery and the increase in share price, who decide that that's a suitable resource to build a mine on and take that brave decision to go through the permitting piece, the engineering piece, you know, perhaps that not so exciting part of the industry that, of course, is fundamental to have any kind of producing mine. So Liberty's taken that decision, effective the early part of this year and migrated ourselves from a very successful explorer discoverer who very nicely tracked up the curve on the left-hand side. We have been in the doldrums for the last few years of our share price.
And in announcing to the world and migrating the company, evolving the company from an explorer to a developer, we've just seen this year our share price start to track up that initial part of the curve on the right-hand side. And so Black Pine sits there sort of, I think, looking upwards as a tremendous opportunity from a share rerate point of view as we consolidate ourselves as a developer. And as we move into that ultimately construction and production phase, so exciting times for Liberty, really focused on our Black Pine asset, which is in southern Idaho. Go back one, please. This is the pre-feasibility study that we did on Black Pine last year. We published it in October. It lays out a very interesting gold development opportunity.
In the grand scheme, we are talking open pit, large scale heap leach mining, heap leach processing. For those who don't or are not familiar with what oxide gold is, there's two ways of processing gold. First of all, or gold ores. First of all, you can grind them up and to a very fine dust. You can treat that fine pulp material, extract the gold, and then put the residual into a tailings dam. That's the sort of traditional way to process sulfides. Oxide, so near-surface gold that's oxidized can be treated in a much simpler, lower footprint, more environmentally friendly way by simply putting it out on a piece of plastic and irrigating that with a solution that dissolves the gold. No crushing, no grinding, no power, lower water consumption, cheaper to build and cheaper to operate.
So the oxide gold projects allow you to mine much lower grades, and allow you to mine an operator scale that the sulfide gold, the grinding and tailings facilities do not allow. So we think this is a great place to be. We think it's the right style of mine for the era, and we are developing a mine production company that is focused on that style of deposit. Next one, please. Next slide, please, Susie. So we've put together a team to do that. We have a strong technical team, who came on to the company in the middle of the year as we refocused ourselves from explorer to developer.
We have a strong in-house technical team that has all of the experience in this style of mineralization, both on an operating and at a development scale to take us through the next phase of studies, through the engineering to allow us to get to a construction decision. We recently brought on a senior vice president of corporate development who is going to support the company in financing this. We have strong in-house permitting capacity. Matt Zietlow has got 15 years experience permitting NEPA projects in the U.S., and we recently brought onto our board Lauren Roberts, who is a senior executive in the industry with deep experience in operations and construction, and he rounds out that board's oversight skill so that we cover right across from mine operations and constructions all the way through legal, financial, sustainability, and geology.
So very strong support from our board, very strong oversight capacity. We have the team in place to credibly be a developer and take us through to a construction decision. Next one, please. What does the company look like? We recently brought in Centerra Gold as a corporate, strategic hold. They came in at 9.9 in September. Strong endorsement from a senior player in the industry. They did extensive due diligence and were highly supportive of the technical work done at pre-feasibility on Black Pine and were very comfortable letting us as a company take this project through feasibility into construction. So they put $20 million into the treasury. So you can see our cash position as we last filed was $32 million. That's a very strong cash position. We also have warrants due in May 2026 and April 2027.
Those are CAD 0.45 warrants. And our current share price is around about CAD 0.80. So we have some belief that those will come in over the next 16 months. Between the warrants and the cash and an additional payment in 2026 of $2.6 million from a divestment of our Turkish assets, we have enough money to take us through the feasibility study, detailed engineering to get to a construction decision in 2027, late 2027. 30% institutions in terms of ownership, the capital structure here. That's long sticky money from the big names in the business. VanEck is our senior institutional shareholder. Just below them, Franklin, then Merck's, Wheaton Precious Metals hold the 0.5% royalty on Black Pine. That's the only royalty we have. And we have a 50% buyback right on that royalty.
We also have RCF, Amati, Konwave, Commodity Capital, Libra, and Extract to name some of the significant players in the game. And of course, we have insiders just under 4%. So we are strongly motivated to see this work. So we have the team in place and we have the cash position in the company, which means I don't have to go back to shareholders to get this through to a construction decision, allowing us to focus on how do we finance the project. Next one, please, Susie. Black Pine is located in southern Utah. We do have another asset, Goldstrike in southern, sorry, southern Idaho. Goldstrike is in southern Utah. Goldstrike has been drilled out. It is at the pre-feasibility stage. It is on hold as we look for to confirm a water supply for that deposit.
And until we do that, we're not, we are focused 100% on Black Pine. Next, please. Black Pine itself is just on the Idaho border, Idaho-Utah border, about two hours north of Salt Lake. Excellent access. You can drive on I-84. You can see the project driving past it on I-84. It's a previously producing site, so we have power to the front gate of the mine site. No access roads required to be built. They're all there. We have secured the water rights for the asset by purchasing assets from local farm water assets from local farmers. So we're not extracting any new water from the local basin to fund this mine or to run the mine, which is a huge environmental positive. This is a very dry, arid area. It's the northern shores of the original Salt Lake.
Low rainfall, low vegetation, very little wildlife, no previous inhabitants in this area, and so we are mining above the water table, so we have no pit lakes, no substantive environmental challenges, no surface waters, no aquatic species, no fish. This is a great place to build a mine. Next, please. Resources and reserves from the pre-feasibility study. This is October last year based on drilling that was closed in February last year. On February 24, we are just about to finish internally with a new update to this resource model that we're proposing to publish early next year, which will put something in the order of an additional 40,000-50,000 meters into the resource. But at pre-feas, we were just under 5 million ounces of resource with a 3 million ounce reserve. That's a significant gold deposit in the Great Basin.
And we see some tremendous upside potential for resource growth. You can see some of the pastel colors around the deep colors in the pits. The deep colors are resource. The pastel colors are blocks of estimated gold mineralization in rock that doesn't fit into a resource. And the reason it doesn't fit is because it hasn't been drilled adequately. So there is a lot of upside growth opportunity in the resource. And we will start to see some of that in the new resource model as we move forward. Next, please. Results from the pre-feasibility study in last year. This is when $2,000 gold, which is the lower box, the yellow box, the upper numbers in the yellow box. That was when $2,000 gold seemed like a pretty good price for gold.
It's doubled since then, of course, as many of you know, but some pretty nice economics, $500 million NPV at $2,000 gold at spot. The NPV is just around $3 billion. Payback at spot would be around about a year for a triple digit IRR. I mentioned that these are low capital intensity, so $327 million to build this is a very accessible number, not a crazy amount of capital. We will see some negative pressure on that in going into feasibility. There's cost escalation around labor and certainly some of the construction materials, so we anticipate that to rise slightly at feasibility. Same on the all-in sustaining AISC. That's all-in sustaining cost of $1,400 an ounce. You know, we see that rising to $1,500-$1,600, but even at $1,600, that is a very nice margin to spot.
This is a good size mine and 138-183,000 ounces a year production for the first five years and a nice life at 17. Given that resource upside, I think there is very, very good upside for mine life extension over a significant period of time. Next, please. This is what it looks like. I mentioned this is simple. So in gray, center left, these are the open pits that we're proposing to excavate. Those are in exactly the same place as the previous open pits. I mentioned this was a previous producer. So we are expanding current pits that are excavated. So we are not creating new disturbance. This is a previously disturbed site. So we're not impacting Pristine Viewshed, which is a very important aspect from ease of permitting in the U.S. at the moment. We produce a single heap leach facility.
So that's the area where we pile up the ore and that is then irrigated and the gold's extracted through a solution, processed in that small footprint process facility. We pour gold bars on site, Doré bars. And we have a relatively small area for site services. That's really maintenance shops and some offices. So a very simple, very low footprint operation. The water wells you can see there, those are the wells that are currently in operation for farming. We take those farms out of production, take the water that's currently in wells and currently being pumped, and we use that for our process water. And then when the mine finishes, we hand the permits back to the farmer and they carry on, using that water for farming irrigation.
Okay, there, no new water drawdown on the basin, which is a really, really important part of a mining operation these days. You have to be so careful in terms of water usage, competing usage for water and the mining impacts on broad water resources. This may well be one of the first projects where you see some basin recovery as a result of a mining company getting involved in water management, so an exciting opportunity and very strong community support as a result of that outcome. Next, please. This is the production schedule at pre-feasibility study. So you can see above 200,000 ounces in two of the first five years, averaging 183. It's quite a lumpy profile. You can see highs and lows in that profile and a bit of a midlife dip. That's just a function of drilling and drill density at pre-feasibility study.
In feasibility, we've spent this year drilling out areas of the resource to upgrade them, and we'll see a significant improvement in the shape of that profile going forward, a low strip ratio. That means the amount of waste you have to remove relative to a ton of ore, so 1.3 tons of waste to one ton of ore. We see that number reducing, so a more efficient operation as we move into feasibility, and we've drilled out areas that were previously modeled as waste, because we didn't have drilling. Now we've drilled them and have realized that they are in fact ore, so we're going to see an improvement in that, which will ultimately lead to an improvement in the overall operating costs. These are low cost mines.
The $9, $11 a ton, is a low cost mine, significantly lower relative to a sulfide deposit that I described where you grind up the ore and you then have to have a tailings facility. These are very competitive mines and allow you to economically mine significantly lower grades than were it to be a milling and a tailings dam facility. So lots of upside opportunity. Here's one where we can see these are cross sections through the range front deposit, which was the discovery we made in 2021, and you can see the larger drill traces with the bigger squares. The bigger squares are gold grades down hole, and you can see that we're seeing high grades. That's the purple that's above a gram, sitting outside the margins of the resource pit.
And that's material that will go into the new resource and is creating this growth opportunity in the resource numbers, not only now, but in the area where you see those blue sky targets. That's an area that will get drilled out over the life of the mine. And the rocks are continuous underneath that area in terms of this permissible mineralized unit. The structures are the same. So we have every reason to believe that we will see mineralization underneath that legacy heap pad and to the west in that area, the lower section where it says blue sky target. This is the field work we did this year to drill out the resources. All of those yellow dots are collars of drill holes that we've already drilled. And that's going to provide that upgrade to the resource in feasibility study.
We've also done significant metallurgical test work this year: large diameter columns, so this is coarse material in a four-foot diameter column that's 20 feet high, and we leach that, so we drip solution through it, extract the gold, and use that as a test for how the large heap performs, so this is not crushed. It's run-of-mine, so you dig it out of the ground, stick it as it is on the heap. No crushing, no agglomeration, no conveying. A very cheap and efficient way of processing material. Next, please. Where are we at with the timeline of the project? I mentioned we've just done the feasibility field works, the bar on the top.
We kicked off engineering in November and we are in the detailed design right now, or the feasibility design right now and expect to publish the feasibility study on Black Pine in October next year, October 26. From there, we then move into project financing where we talk with the debt companies and the royalty companies about how do we finance this thing. We need to raise $400 million to build it. I think that's a very doable number, given the interest in the gold space and given the size of the company. 2027 will be the year where we do all the detailed engineering to get to the ability to make a construction decision end 2027. The permitting stream, which is the columns below U.S. permitting stream, we've submitted our Mine Plan of Operations in February. We got our completeness review in November.
That allows us to apply for the notice of intent, which is the third column. This is the standard National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA process in the U.S. Once you have a notice of intent, which we anticipate receiving in Q1 next year, the clock starts 24 months from the notice of intent to a decision. That timeframe gets us to a decision late 2027, which allows us to make a construction decision at that point. Construction would start in Q1 2028. Given the simplicity of the project, it's a short build, nine months, which has us targeting metal production late 2028, so we are effectively today three years away from metal production, which is, goes faster than you think. Next slide, please, so what are the key things over the next short period that Liberty's going to be bringing to market?
We're going to have further assay results coming out in the market. We had a press release about two weeks ago on assay results. We're going to have further assay results coming out over the next month or so. We're going to see the resource update, feasibility resource update published in the first half of next year, which is going to show some significant improvement and increase in the resource size. We expect to get the notice of intent in Q1, notice of intent application in Q4, notice of intent reception in Q1 2026. That starts the clock and really sets the scene for the timeframe that I mentioned to allow us to construct in 2028 and have metal in late 2028. We're going to see progressive information coming out of engineering over the next eight months.
And of course, we're going to be starting, as I mentioned, the project finance work middle of the year to enable us to get to a project finance solution by the end of next year, end of 2026, early 2027. We have one more asset, Goldstrike, which I haven't really talked about in southern Utah. That's the, we announced that we would be spinning that asset out together with its antimony mineralization. We've been working through that reasonably diligently throughout this year and, we've made the commitment to get back to shareholders by the end of the year with an update on that project. So a lot happening in, at Liberty. We are very firmly an oxide gold development project. We have a tremendous asset, plus five million ounces in resource with growth opportunities to get to six to eight million ounces, which is our sort of target size.
We have a feasibility study that's in development and will be out before the end of next year. And we see metal production inside three years. So, in terms of other styles of opportunities in the Great Basin, this is, this is somewhat of a unicorn. The size and scale of this operation, there's no other asset of this nature that's not held in the hands of a major. So we see this as a, a material opportunity to grow a new mining company. And we're excited to keep informing you about the story. Thank you, Michael. Well, very good. Very interesting. We do have some questions from the floor. Let me start with that partnership with Centerra Gold. Could you just talk a little bit more about that, if their involvement in your operation will accelerate your development in some way?
So I think, I mean, yeah, first of all, their involvement gave us the funding to be able to take this thing through to production decision without having to go back to shareholders. So I think it secured that funding and a critical piece in the company's development. Secondly, that investment came with a standard investor rights package, which is again industry standard, but they have no control or no particular rights over the company. We're a fully independent and able to do what we want to do, and they are very supportive of the technical team. It does come with a technical committee, so we do meet with Centerra and Centerra technical folk on a regular basis, and we present to them our plans for the various technical aspects, the engineering and the detailed engineering. That is an advisory group.
So, again, we still have the ability to do what we want to do, but we benefit hugely from some of their in-house expertise, and so I think it's a way of us having another oversight group, from a technical perspective that's, you know, helping us make the right decisions and engineer the right project. Good. Some more questions from the floor. They're really coming in. You mentioned that you might spin off the Goldstrike asset. Can you talk about the rationale for doing that? Yeah, look, I think Antimony Ridge is the eastern extension of the Goldstrike system. And that's the area where we found this sort of fairly extensive high-grade antimony mineralization. We've taken the view that that is better developed in a different vehicle.
Originally, we felt that the gold mineralization on Goldstrike would be better packaged up with the antimony and spun out as a combined entity, leaving Liberty with just Black Pine. However, the change in the gold price over the last year, I think has brought the gold opportunity at Goldstrike much more into focus for Liberty. And my feeling is that's a better asset to keep in Liberty as a second string to Black Pine. But the antimony mineralization still makes sense in a different vehicle. And so we've spent half of this year working through what does that mean? How do we create an asset base that's meaningful for a new critical minerals company?
We still see the rationale to spin out Antimony Ridge, but I think much lesser rationale to include the gold piece in it. So I think as we go forward, you're going to see some movement around Antimony Ridge, and Goldstrike's going to stay in Liberty to provide Liberty with optionality, and we did commit to get back to shareholders by the end of the year on that. So look for some announcement before the end of the year. Okay. And we have time for one more. Can you talk about the permitting process? How long does it take to get approval for a permit? So I think the simple answer is it's getting significantly better in the U.S. The administration is obviously pushing very hard. They’ve deregulated parts of that process.
I think that is filtering through to the agencies at the moment. They're still in the process of sort of resetting what the rules of the game are. That's created some short-term sort of uncertainty, but that seems to be being worked through. You know, the BLM have recently come out with an idea that clock period that I mentioned at 24 months. The BLM have indicated that there is a possibility for some projects to do that in 12. The Forest Service are still working through that. But it's the current regulations are 24 months from notice to decision and generally a year to two from the mine plan to the notice. So sort of traditionally it's a three to four year process.
I think it's heading towards a two- to three-year process. And I think we're going to see that over the next 18 months sort of consolidate.
Okay. Well, great. We have come to the end of our time. Thank you very much. A very interesting presentation. Thank you for joining us today. And everyone who participated in the session, thank you for joining us also. And we'll see you next time.
Thank you very much, Michael. And happy holidays to yourself, to everyone at Sidoti and to everyone who's watching. Take care.