Thank you, Tim. From Southern Chile, we're gonna move to Western U.S., Southern Idaho, with Liberty Gold advancing the Blackpine oxide heap-leached gold deposit. You're too quick. Jon Gilligan, CEO of Liberty Gold.
Thank you very much, Joe. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for spending a few minutes with me, and thank you to those online for dialing in to hear a bit about Liberty Gold. We are a disciplined developer of oxide gold in the U.S. Oxide gold is material near surface that can be processed by simple open pit heap leaching, in our case, run-of-mine. That means no crushing. Leaching means no mills, no large process facility, and more importantly, no tailings facility. It's a very simple, low-footprint method, low-cost method of extracting gold, very well known in the U.S. I had the privilege of presenting here a year ago, gold at that time was $2,050. We were a company that had a pre-feasibility study on Blackpine, our flagship asset.
We thought we had a tiger by the tail. The market hadn't figured it out. We were a $0.30 stock. Today, gold is at $52.50, and there's a 5x on our share price, and we have a clear, disciplined way forward to produce metal in under 3 years. I've already made a bunch of forward-looking statements, so I hope you'll read this retroactively. Pretty much everything I say today seems to be a forward-looking statement, so here we go. Company highlights. These are the results of the pre-feasibility study that we published in October, and we felt that was October 24th. We felt that was good enough at a half a billion dollar NPV at a $2,000 gold price. We felt that was good enough to start a feasibility study. We like the U.S.
This asset is in southern Idaho. It is a great jurisdiction. The Great Basin geology is something that the company really understands well. This deposit is on the shelf of the Great Basin, which is an area that hasn't really received a lot of attention because all of the big mines are sitting right in the core of the basin. We felt that this was a really interesting asset. We picked it up in 2016 for about $800,000, a previously producing site with a very large land package. This is the capital structure of the company. We welcomed Centerra Gold into our share register last year after some extensive due diligence. They're in there at 9.7%. We've got long-term sticky money in the company, VanEck, Franklin, Merk, Amati, RCF.
Wheaton hold the only royalty on Blackpine, which is 0.5%, and we have a 50% buyback right on that. That's puts us in a unique position for a U.S. gold player. We're well-funded. We have a strong balance sheet, $32 million in treasury at the last reporting, which was the end of Q3. With that, with those funds and with funds coming in from warrant exercise due in May this year and in April next year, we are fully funded to get to a final investment decision to build Blackpine. That's a very strong position for a company like ours. Great analyst coverage, we're pleased to have those guys looking at our stock. This is where Blackpine is, right on the Idaho border, to Utah.
We are two hours north of Salt Lake, right on the old shoreline of the Great Salt Lake. This is an arid, dry environment, no surface waters, no streams, no lakes, no seeps, no springs, no aquatic species. That's a huge positive when you're in U.S. permitting. No jurisdictional waters. The area has been repeatedly burned over multiple decades, so we don't have threatened and endangered species. We don't have large timber values. All of our mining is above the water table, so we don't have any pit lakes, pit lake evaporation, and pit lake chemistry. A very favorable site, as I mentioned, previously producing, so the viewshed is already disturbed, and we are reopening an old mine, which puts us in a very strong position when we're negotiating permitting.
These are the results of the pre-feasibility study, same as I showed earlier. Key highlights here, $300 million to get into this thing, a very modest capital to get you to 183,000 ounce a year producer for the first 5 years. This price base is June 2024. We're right now in the middle of a feasibility study, which is due out in October this year, and we're going to see an improvement in gold production. We're gonna see an improvement in our production rate annually. You're gonna see inevitably an increase in costs. The last 2 years of inflation, we're starting to see, with lots of money floating in the industry, some pressure on construction labor and construction materials. Inevitably, we're gonna see an increase in capital costs.
Labor, operating labor definitely is increasing in the U.S., so we anticipate some move on our basic costs as well. You could see a really nice project, half a billion dollars at $2,000 gold. Our NPV is in excess of $4 billion at spot prices today. That's an interesting project. Very simple, as I mentioned, there's the I-84, that's a highway, 2 hours south to Salt Lake, 1 hour north of Burley. We're right on the road. Everything is there from the previously producing site. We have water wells that are drilled and pumping right now. We have a power line to site. We have a single leach facility on a very structurally favorable site, shallow dipping, flat site. Base of that, the process facility, that's a simple ADR plant. What does that mean?
It means pumps, pipes, and tanks, carbon columns, and then a process to pour doré on site. Site services means a truck shop, a wash bay, and a fuel bay, and that's about it. Oh, I forgot the front gate. Simple mine. Simple, simple mine. We came out with our updated mineral resource about a week and a half ago, which took us to a hair under 5 million ounces it indicated, which is a nice number to be putting into a feasibility study. There's also another 1 million ounces is inferred. That sits in waste as a reserve. Obviously we will be drilling that out over time. It's all underpinned by just under 2 million ounces at 1 gram. That's the high-grade core of this thing which is driving the economics.
Where we came from, we came from 4 million ounces just over for the PFS, which drove the numbers I showed you, just under 5 for fees. We're anticipating that we will actually, remarkably in the industry, produce a feasibility study that is in many respects better than the pre-feasibility study. That is not common amongst my peers. The reserve will grow. We're not sure where it's gonna go yet. We're right in the middle of mine planning. Given our at least 700 increase in indicated, we're confident that we're about to grow the reserve and grow life. Company's been disciplined in drilling out this resource. You can see progressive incremental growth in the resource since 2021. This thing is large. I'll point you to a beautiful analog, the Marigold Mine, owned by SSR Mining.
That started in 1989 with a 9-year mine life. It's produced every year since, over 30 years, and still has a 9-year mine life. This is that style of deposit, incremental growth. Incremental drilling will show incremental growth. Here's where it's gonna come from. The areas in blue are our target growth areas. You can see surrounding the high colors, that's where we have mineralization right now, and we see great upside opportunity at this asset for resource growth and ultimately long mine life. Permitting in parallel with our engineering track, which is the top bar. You can see we're targeting a feasibility study in October. That then goes straight into detail engineering. We anticipate having detail engineering entirely complete before we start construction. That is a hugely de-risked project.
Not only is it a simple project, but we'll have all the engineering done, so we will be able to go in and very likely self-perform this project. Construction's in 2028, and first gold, December 2028. We have a parallel permitting stream. Our notice of intent, which is the document in the U.S. that triggers NEPA and triggers the EIS, that's in Washington right now under signature, and we are targeting our final EIS at the end of 2027. That puts the point where we get a draft record of decision in parallel with finishing detail engineering. Final record Q1 2028, construction begins. Importantly, we applied for the FAST-41 process, and those of you who may have heard of that is a permit accelerator in the U.S. We got accepted in January.
We're in the process now of schedule renegotiation. We will issue an update to this schedule at the end of March. Once that is complete, that is a definitive locked-in U.S. federal permitting process, which is critical path to construction. At that point, we believe we have entirely de-risked as much as is possible the federal permitting process, which de-risks the project and really puts us, from an execution point of view, in a very strong position. In summary, 2026 is gonna be a very important year for this company. We're going to finalize our permitting and thus construction and production schedule. We're going to publish our feasibility study in October this year, and we're gonna move into detail engineering while we are completing all of the environmental impact documents and public engagement.
An exciting time for Liberty, and I think you're going to see us going from our 0.2 PNAV ratio. That's going to be recognized as significantly undervalued, and I think we're a tremendous investment opportunity. Thank you very much.