Hello, and welcome to Virtual Investor Conferences. On behalf of OTC Markets, we're very pleased you joined us for the second day of the Precious Metals and Critical Minerals Conference. The next presentation is from Liberty Gold. Please note, you may submit questions for the presenter in the box to the left of the slides, and you can view a company's availability for one-on-one meetings by clicking Book a Meeting. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome Jon Gilligan. He's the President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director of Liberty Gold, which trades in the OTCQX Best Market under the symbol LGDTF, and on the TSX under the symbol LGD. Welcome back, Jon.
John, thanks very much indeed. I really appreciate it, and thank you to the folk at OTC for giving us the opportunity. I'd like to thank everyone online for dialing in to listen to this, an update on Liberty Gold. I have presented to the OTC last year, pretty much immediately after I became the new CEO in June last year. And it's a very great pleasure to be back. At the end of this period, I'd like you to be in a position to take away a view of what does a disciplined developer with a large, long life U.S. gold asset look like, that is progressing along a clear technical path, and really getting into the strong process of permitting? I will be making forward-looking statements, so please read those at your leisure.
The first of my forward-looking statements is this curve, which many of you will know, this is the Lassonde Curve. Developers have traditionally sat in that, in the center of the screen, the orphan period. And as developers move down that path of surety, some surety in the technical piece, improvements in permitting, they follow a rerate, a fairly well-defined rerate path, and Black Pine and Liberty Gold, we believe, is on that rerate path. Late-stage heap leach developers, such as Rio2, a great example. Once the market gets the view that these are... They look like they are buildable assets, we see that rerate curve happening very nicely, and we believe that Black Pine is right in that drop zone today. Next slide, please.
We came out with a preliminary feasibility study on our preliminary asset, Black Pine, which is in Southeast Idaho. Yesterday, we had a resource update, which took us to just a hair under 5,000,000 oz in indicated, in a full oxide gold, all accessible by open pit, with the ability to process that in a very large-scale heap leach operation. The pre-feasibility study metrics we came out were very attractive. A long life, 17-year mine life, just over 2,000,000 oz of gold produced. Great economics at $2,000 gold, which really was only 18 months ago. I think today we're just touching $5,100, I think I saw in the market today. And I'll tell you a little bit more about the leverage these economics have to the metal price.
And really, this was a signal for the company to go from an explorer-developer, sorry, an explorer-discoverer, into a developer and ultimately a builder of an asset. This is a very strong asset, and, and we believe it's a foundational asset for a company. We like the jurisdiction in the U.S., the Great Basin, the geology is very well known to the company. Its MO, originally, was exploring and really understanding, leveraging knowledge of the, of the geology in the Great Basin, particularly around oxides and Carlin-style gold systems. And, we've applied that knowledge to, to successful discovery in the, in the basin, and we're now applying that same knowledge to, taking Black Pine through feasibility into a build. Next, please. This is a high-level view of the team. Just a quick shout-out to Lauren Roberts, bottom left.
He came onto the board in September last year. Deep executive expertise in operations and, particularly oxide operations and build. And so he is really the brains trust on the board, along with myself, around operating and operating strategy. And recent addition to the management team, Brad Ralph, very strong capital markets background, and he really brings that sort of corporate capital markets sense into the management team, and we're very happy to have him on the team. Next one, please. From the capital structure, just over 500 million shares outstanding. We had $32 million in treasury at last reporting, that was Q3. That's come down a little, obviously with the finishing of drilling last year. But we have warrants.
You can see $0.45 warrants that are the two sets, one that expire in April-May this year and one April the following year. With the current cash in treasury, with those warrants, and with some additional funds, $2 million coming in in October this year, the final tranche of the sale of our Turkish asset, we are fully funded at a corporate level and to take the Black Pine project through feasibility, through permitting, to a construction decision at the end of 2027. So that puts us with a very strong balance sheet, and a very, very strong position relative, not needing to go for more equity. In September last year, we brought Centerra Gold into the register as a strategic shareholder.
They came in with a 9.9%, and that was really what underpinned that, that was $20 million at a 10% premium to share price. So that's what really underpinned our cash position. We have strong institutional support with long-term institutional holders such as VanEck, Konwave, Amati, Franklin, Merk, RCF, and others. 4% held by management, and Wheaton Precious Metals came into the stock a couple of years ago at 4%, or 4% now, 5% then. They hold the only royalty that we have on Black Pine, which is a 0.5% royalty, of which we have a buyback right of 50%. So as you see, the economics on the project, it's modeled with a quarter percent royalty, which is a pretty unusual amount for a U.S. asset.
We have great analyst coverage, and just to give you a sense of the price target, the average price target, consensus price target from these analysts is CAD 3.45. You could see from that market capitalization at just under CAD 700 million, we've been trading at CAD 1.33 in early February. I think today we're at CAD 1.46. So, you know, we have some runway, and as I mentioned, I think as we get into that recognition that we're moving as a late-stage developer into a buildable asset, we're going to see that re-rate, I think, really happening for us. Next one. We do have two principal assets, not only the Black Pine large oxide gold system in Idaho, but we also have a smaller oxide gold system, Goldstrike, in southern Utah.
We picked up some, so a critical minerals asset, to go with the antimony mineralization that we discovered in Goldstrike, and last year, we announced that we would be spinning out those, those critical metals assets. I don't propose to talk any more about those now, and the focus of this talk will be on Black Pine. Key catalysts. We did release that mineral resource yesterday, which I'll talk about in a little while. We also got accepted into the FAST-41 federal permitting framework, which, again, I will talk about in a moment, but that's really, I think, helping us advance our permitting timeline. Of course, permitting is a critical path to the build, and so that really gives us, I think, some opportunity here to look at timeframes and see how we can do that.
Lots of news coming up over the next nine months. Key to this is at the end in October this year, we will be releasing our feasibility study. We're deep in the engineering right now, and that obviously will be a definitive feasibility study upon which we will be able to raise project finance to actually construct this thing, taking a construction decision in late 2027. Next, please. So where is Black Pine? As I said, it's right on the Idaho border, just on the north end of the shores of the Great Salt Lake. There was a shoreline literally opposite the deposit about 10,000 years ago. That's been retreating as the area has been desiccating. So this is a dry, arid region.
We have no surface water around Black Pine, so no streams, no lakes. That means no aquatic species. That means, you know, a major issue that is faced in many other areas, we don't face that issue. Furthermore, all of the mining we do above the water table, so we don't have any pit lakes, we don't have any pit depressurization or pit dewatering. So that's another huge positive. No threatened and endangered species in the area, and large swaths of the project area have been burned repeatedly over the last two decades in large range fires. And so we don't have substantive vegetation in this region. And all in all, it is a very favorable place to open or reopen a mine. This was previously operated in the 1990s by a company called Pegasus.
They ran an open-pit heap leach operation in very much the same way that we're proposing to do now. So this is a brownfields mine reopen, which gives it a very different flavor when you're in conversations for permitting. Next, please, Susie. So to the nice results, always nice to come out with a good resource estimate. This one came out yesterday, puts it at 4,880,00, so 4,900,00 oz of oxide gold, so four oxides, sitting in Indicated. That will form the basis for the feasibility reserve that we're working on right now. So this resource is actually undergoing mine planning as we speak. That then feeds into those production schedules, feed into the design for the heap, which will happen sort of middle of the year.
The cost base that we do the costs estimate on will be June, July, and then we will put it together with the economics for an October release. We're very pleased that driving the economics in this entire deposit is all the material that you see in pink or purple in that image and that is that high-grade core. So we're looking at above 0.5 g cutoff, a 1 g, 0.99 g, per ton, 1 g, just under 2 ,000,000 oz at 1 g in indicated. That is driving the whole economic output, and the rest of the material sits as an envelope around that and goes to substantively reduce strip ratio to create an economic outcome. So very positive work, very pleased with the team. This is a snapshot in time.
We see, we see a lot of opportunity for further resource growth over time. We are putting drills back into the field this year for two reasons. One, to do some final technical drilling. When we get into detail engineering, we need to understand what the short-term grade control model looks like, so we need to do some drilling for that. And we're also going to be doing some exploration drilling, step out around the margins of the mineralization we've seen, and also new exploration in the periphery to the current mineralization. So that's exciting for us. This is simply a summary of where we came from. We were basically at a 3 million reserve.
We don't know where that's going yet because we haven't done the study, but we've put another 700,000 oz odd into indicated, and we would look to convert as much of that as we can into reserves. So look for that 3 million reserve to grow, but a nice increase in the feasibility, in the PFS resource into feasibility. Very comfortable with that. Next one, please. I think this is an interesting slide because, you know, this is our fourth formal resource release, and you can see this very nice, progressive growth of the resource. We see this continuing going forward, and as we do further drilling, I think we're going to see incremental growth in this over time. A great analog here is the Marigold mine. Marigold started owned by SSR Mining.
That started life in 1989 with a nine-year mine life. Has mined every year since, so that's some 30+ years, and today still has a nine-year mine life. And they've achieved that by annual progressive drilling programs and growth increments. This is exactly the same style of deposit and grade distribution. And you can see in the outline on the right-hand side, that's the pit shell that defines the resource. And you can see the sort of the mineralized centers, where in the previous slide you saw Discovery has a high-grade core, as does Range Front. As price increases, the mineralization that links those high-grade zones comes into the resource shell and ultimately the reserve shell. And these pits start to coalesce to quite large and quite substantial open-pit mining opportunities.
A feature that was seen very nicely in Marigold, and we believe will also happen over the years, future years at Black Pine. A quick cross-section from Range Front, which is the center down in the bottom left-hand corner of that inset. You can see in purple the high-grade lenses, sort of flat-lying lenses, and then there's a sea of lower-grade material surrounding those. And all of that is mineralized, all of that is ore in the pre-feasibility study. And that, and that low strip ratio, as you can see, there's not a lot of waste in that, in that image, really allows us to drive the economics of this project. And some of that growth I was showing you, you can see this here in the discovery. You can see the black line, that is the trace of the resource shell.
So anything outside that, that's colored a block, is mineralized material that has a gold grade in it, that does not fit in the current resource shell. That's due to either stripping or lack of drilling, and it points to upside growth opportunity in these resources over time. Again, this resource is a snapshot. We will see further growth. Next, please, Susie. So this, it repeats the information from one of the first slides I showed you, just to give you a sense of the economics. Bottom line, where you see the numbers in white, that's a $2,000 gold. So we had a just over $500 million NPV, three-year payback, 32% IRR. These are all after-tax. What is remarkable about these styles of deposit is the leverage to metal price.
So the lower line, the lower row of the economics, $3,000 gold, so $500 million goes to $1.8 billion. Payback drops to just under, just over a year. At $4,000 or $5,000 gold, we're in $2 billion-$3 billion, touching $4 billion NPV. And to give you a sense of the torque here, a $100 movement in the gold price puts approximately $125 million onto NPV. So we see tremendous upside opportunity in a rising gold environment for these deposits to really shine. Modest initial capital, $327 million to get in. That's something that a company of our size very much can do from a sort of access to capital markets and access to funding. So, so the...
This is not a big build from neither a monetary point of view, or if we go to the next slide, please, or from a technical complexity. This is a site layout. This is a very simple site. We have multiple open pits in grey that are labeled, Discovery and Range Front being the two big ones, some satellite pits, a single large heap leach facility, which is at a very favorable structural site from a point of view of stability of the heap. It's flat-lying, gently sloping, no valleys, no peaks, no hills. This is a fantastic site to build a heap. We build a small ADR, which is the processing facility that extracts the gold from the solutions that you circulate on the heap.
Then we build where it says site services, that's a truck shop, a fuel station, and some offices. Very, very simple site. Power line exists to the front gate already, is energized, and we simply have to install a transformer. Water wells that you see center right, they exist and are currently pumping, and they're providing water supply to local farmers, irrigated farms. We have an arrangement with those farms. We take the farms out of production, retask the water to the mine, use that water in closed loop for the irrigation, and then when the mine closes, we return that water supply to the farmers, and the farmers carry on farming.
No net draw on the basin as a result of mining, which is a huge positive from a sort of stewardship point of view, from a conservation point of view, and from, and from an impact to the local aquifer point of view. No, no, no impact at all. And in fact, the hydrologic work we've done suggests that we may see some aquifer recovery as a result of us managing those, that well field, from a point of view of, mining requirements versus, agricultural. So we're quite excited about that. We have, the resource, result that I showed you, it really comes out of this drilling program in green. That was the 40,000 m that we did across the deposit, mainly focused on Range Front over last year.
We have some large diameter column metallurgical tests still completing now. Those are largely confirmation, confirmatory in nature, and we would expect to have those done and press released sometime Q2, early Q3. 2025 was really the year to do the sort of the technical engineering in-field processes, which then feed into the current sort of desk work that we do at for feasibility. Next, please, Susie. So we're moving the permitting, the engineering piece down very nicely. Obviously, permitting is a key piece for us. We have both Forest Service land, which is the land in the image in green, and then everything else to the right of that is the BLM. So we have both agencies involved in our permitting piece.
We started permitting in earnest in January of last year and made some very good progress. Once we got towards what's called the Notice of Intent, we made the decision to put ourselves into the FAST-41 program. And we made that application late last year, got accepted in January 20th of January this year, into what's called the covered framework for FAST-41. And what that means is sort of a full concierge service where you have FAST-41 team members accountable for your project and managing a schedule. The first piece of that approval is to go into a 60-day schedule review with the federal agencies.
So the FAST-41 team, the local federal agencies, review the schedule, and you'll see the schedule in a moment, that we're currently, it's currently under review, to see what opportunities exist to make it to improve the schedule time frame, to make the schedule more realistic, and ultimately, if necessary, inject resources into the permitting team, as required to meet those timelines. So we're very excited about that. We're also working very closely with the state of Idaho for the key permits that we need through the state. Those are principally the consolidation permit and the air quality permit. So we have a very well-experienced in-house permitting team managing the interface to multiple agencies to take us through the process. This is where you see that timeline.
If you look at environment and NEPA, the second bar, we have the notice of intent is now with the in Washington, with the federal agencies, and we're anticipating to receive that in the we've said the first quarter. The schedule review that I mentioned under FAST-41 is due to complete at the end of March, and we will come out with an updated and sort of agreed by all, re-agreed by all, permitting schedule late March. And that will really confirm and set this time frame, and it'll let us move from what I think historically has been somewhat of an open-ended timeline to a very clearly defined federal permitting path. Today, we're anticipating records of decision, the draft record of decision, late 2027, final record of decision, early 2028.
We will see whether there's any opportunity to improve upon that. And that will be subject to some further disclosures in a few months. The time frame, however, that we have assumes that we see no improvement, that we get a decision in Q1 2028, we immediately go into construction activities. This is a short construction period, some nine months, because the construction is not complicated. It's some earthworks, a few buildings, and some steel tanks, pumps, and pipes. This is not a complex issue. We're not crushing, it's run of mine, so no crushers, no stackers. A very simple process, and we're targeting gold production in December 2028. Main catalysts. Main catalysts this year, updated mineral resource came out yesterday. We will have some final drill assay results from the 2025 program.
There were some 21,000 m of drilling in 2025 that did not make it into the mineral resource estimate, so that will go into the next one. And we will see metallurgical results, and other engineering results come out over the next period, leading to the feasibility study release in October. The permitting process, as I mentioned, I think the key critical path here is the schedule review and re-release of the schedule, end of March, and that really sets the new timeframe for permitting and ultimately construction and then first metal. Obviously, as we move through feasibility, we're going to start the capital markets piece. Conversations are already ongoing around project financing, and those will simply ramp up as we get closer and closer to our full feasibility study.
So what we have here, I think, as I mentioned to start with, we, we are running a, a very large, long life U.S. oxide gold story. Black Pine is moving strongly down that sort of late stage heap leach developers path. And I think as we get into some improved degree of certainty on permitting, that's at the point where, where developers start to be considered less as a sort of, as a long-dated option, and much more as a real buildable asset. And we, we expect that that will have a translation into our, into a re-rate, and really bring us into the main body of, of developers from a value point of view. So thank you for that time. I will have a look at the Q&A. We do have some questions. Thank you for those.
What do I see as the, as the most important de-risking milestones at Black Pine over the next 12-18 months? Well, I think the feasibility study will come out before that. It will come out in approximately nine months. But going into the next 12-18, I think the key things are placing orders for long lead items, announcing project financing packages, confirming initiation and completion in that time frame of detailed engineering, and ultimately, within 18 months, close to within 18 months, we should be not far off a... We would have issued the final EIS, and we'd be expecting a project go decision within that time frame.
A couple of months ago, you were mentioned that you were working on ways that you may not need to raise capital for bringing Liberty Black Pine into production. There will, of course, be a loan complement. Can you tell if this possibility still exists? If so, give us a hint of what it may be. Yes, I think that possibly very much does exist. We do see a route to be able to raise the $450 million we're going to need to build this without going to equity. You know, traditionally, one would have a 70/30, 60/40 mix. You know, the $400 million kind of size is a sweet spot for the royalty companies, for the debt folk.
It's the kind of size that they like to deploy. The long life of this asset de-risks it from sort of a debt repayment point of view, and we've had a number of conversations with various companies, that, in principle, support that view. So, I think, yes, it's very much alive, and we will progress that, over the next 6-8 months. I think my time is up. If we did not answer your questions, we will reply to you, offline. If anyone would like any further information, please don't hesitate to call Susie Bell, who runs IR for us. Her name is on the presentation and on our website. So thank you very much, everyone, for attending.
It was a pleasure to give you this view of Liberty Gold.