Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to thank the Denver Gold Forum for the opportunity to speak here, and thank you all for attending. My thanks to Victor for the past presentation. If what he was talking to you about was a beautiful bottle of Dom Pérignon, we're more lots of slabs of Castlemaine XXXX. We would be Bollinger. No, we're Castlemaine XXXX. The previous presenter talked about 12 grams. We would take two decimal points off that and be very happy.
I will be making forward-looking statements in this presentation, and these are the cautionary notes should you wish to look at them. What's Liberty Gold all about? Liberty Gold is all about developing a premier oxide gold deposit based in the beautiful state of Idaho in the western states of the U.S. The name of the deposit is Black Pine. This is a very large-scale Carlin-style gold system. Oxide gold, so no sulfides, fully oxidized material that is very amenable to heap leaching, specifically run-of-mine heap leaching. Run-of-mine heap leaching, the cost base is generally sub $10 a ton, operating costs, so that we can economically mine and process grades down to and around 0.1 grams per ton. Stark contrast to 12 grams in a stope in the Champagne District.
Proving that I think if you look at those after-tax NPV numbers, and some I'll show you in a minute, you can make money at both ends of the grade spectrum in this business if you have the right deposit, the right metallurgy, and the right scale. I think we've got all of those to demonstrate very adequately what does it look like at the lower end of the grade spectrum. We like the U.S. The U.S. has come a long way in the last few years in terms of facilitating mining, facilitating permitting, and we've benefited from that tremendously. We have pivoted our company from an explorer discoverer to a disciplined developer of a premier gold asset in the U.S., and I'd like to take you through what that looks like.
Here's the team. We brought on Lauren Roberts, in the bottom left-hand corner there, ex-COO of both Kinross and Hecla. He drives our operational oversight at the board level. I took the CEO role in June last year, and we brought on a number of very seasoned professionals into the team, particularly Tyler, Owen, and Richard. These are individuals with 10-15 years' experience in leach operations on the project side and on the metallurgy side, and also on the resource side. We have a very strong in-house technical team to take us through not only the permitting piece, head up by Matt Zeidler, but also the full technical piece through feasibility to a construction decision.
What does the capital structure of the company look like? 524 million shares outstanding. We have a number of warrants due in May this year and April next year. Just under 600 million shares outstanding. Just under $30 million cash in the treasury at the end of the last year. And we have recently announced the sale of our non-core asset, Goldstrike, which was a 1 to 1.5 m illion-ounce gold system in southern Utah. And we see staged payments coming in over the next 18 months, totaling $30 million. That, with a $2.6 million payment closing out the sale of our non-core asset in Turkey three years ago, puts us with a very strong balance sheet. We are now fully funded to go through 2026 and 2027 to take us to a construction decision late 2027.
We have strong analyst support, and I encourage you to follow up with them. In terms of institutions, 40% support. We have some long-term sticky money from institutional support from the VanEck, the Franklins, the Merks, Amati, Konwave, RCF, amongst others. Wheaton Precious Metals also own just under 4%, and they hold the only royalty that we have on Black Pine, which is a half a percent royalty, and we have a 50% buyback right on that. This is a +6 million-ounce gold system in the U.S. with a quarter-point effective royalty on it.
That puts us in a very strong position when we're starting to talk about project finance, streaming, NSR opportunities. Where are we? Right on the southern border of Idaho to Utah. We're about a two-hour drive from Salt Lake, right on the freeway. This is a previously mined site, mined by Pegasus in the 1990s, closed down late 1990s. They produced around just under half a million ounces of gold from the higher-grade pieces of the system sticking out of the ground. It was permitted as a open-pit run-of-mine heap leach operation.
We are re-permitting it as that right now, and so reopening a mine site provides a whole different context when you are permitting in the US as opposed to new disturbance on new land. Feasibility study in progress right now, followed up from a pre-feasibility study in October 2024, and I'll show you those in a moment. Targeting early Q4 2026 for the feasibility study. That then leads us into detail engineering. We've had some significant progress on US permitting. We joined the Fast- 41 Accelerator program.
We were accepted into that in January this year and then renegotiated our timelines, and we now have new timelines for permitting, which got published late March. And we've been able to lock the state into those permitting timelines, so we now have a definitive state and federal permitting schedule supported by Fast- 41 oversight. That's about as de-risked as you can get a permitting schedule in the U.S. right now.
I mentioned the divestment of Golds trike. Total deal was $72 million, $30 million of which payable in the first 18 months. Really puts an underline in terms of our treasury capacity. This is what it looks like. It's a simple project. For those of you who are familiar with leaching will know that from a construction point of view, you clear some land, you put down plastic, build a heap. The processing facility is very simple. It's steel tanks, carbon columns, and a process facility to pour gold doré. Low power consumption, low water consumption per ton. Very simple, very easy, very quick construction. Strong support from Idaho. This is located in a part of the world that there's not a lot going on economically.
You can see from the picture, this is dry, arid terrain. It's the old shoreline of the Great Salt Lake. 10,000 years ago, there were saline solutions just where those plants are right at the bottom of the picture. Not a place you wanted to live, not a place where anyone wanted to live. We don't have cultural artifacts from previous inhabitants of this area. We don't have surface waters, so we have no aquatic species. We don't have waters in our pits, so we have no pit lakes. We have a very nice, very solid, benign environmental situation, and with diligent management, I think we were able to restart this mine in an environmentally responsible way. This is what it looked like 18 months ago. Nice mine life, 17 years.
Just over 2 million ounces produced, but the key thing here is 183,000 ounces a year for the first five years, then with a smaller production tail. The function here is, at this point, we hadn't drilled out enough resource to give us a longer, high production rate. We've now done that. As feasibility comes out, you'll see a significant improvement to that production rate. You could see the capital, $327 million. That's a very reasonable number for a company like us with a $700 million market cap to be able to raise. Payback at the top of the yellow bars, a $2,000 gold was base case for pre-feas.
Three years to pay back, but at $3,000, which is perhaps closer to what we will be using in the next few months as a base case price, sub two-year payback, close to triple-digit IRRs and above $2 billion NPV on the project. This is a significant gold project from a value perspective and shows major leverage to gold price. You can see in the $1,000 increment from $2,000-$3,000 price, you get $1.2 billion of increase in NPV. That's $125 million NPV increment per $100 on the gold price. Massive upside torque. These types of mines are a huge call on the gold price and provide tremendous leverage. I mentioned FAST-41. We were accepted into that, as I said, in January. We have a new permitting timeline, which I will show you in the next slide.
The orange outline in black around where it says Discovery Zone and Range Front, that is our project outline. The blue dots to the center right are the water wells that currently exist and are pumping. We repurpose those wells, take agriculture out of production. The water goes to the mine. We compensate the farmers for loss of revenue. No net draw, no new draw of water on this basin. Hugely important in terms of a net-zero or a net-positive impact on water resources in an area that's extremely arid.
Very happy about our water situation. As I mentioned, the Idaho permitting timeline has now aligned itself with FAST-41, meaning that once we get to the end of the federal process, we have surety that the state process will align at that point in time. This is what it looks like.
On the left-hand side, you can see 2026 Q1, the Notice of Intent. For those of you who know the NEPA process, that is the start of the formal Environmental Impact Statement period. Today, it is a 24-month period in the legislation. Our negotiations with FAST-41 have taken that to 18 months, and we now have a final Record of Decision mandated through the FAST-41 process at January 5, 2029. That's a date that's on the Permitting Council website. It's publicly available to access, and you can see all of the progress through to that point.
That means that we have surety, as far as that process allows, that we can start construction in Q1 2028. Nine-month construction, first gold pour, late December 2028. We are under three years from metal in this mine. This is what it looks like. Very simple site.
In gray, you can see the pits, two large pits, Discovery and Range Front, and some smaller satellite pits. A single heap leach facility, shallow dipping flat zone. From a structural geotechnical point of view, an absolutely ideal site to build a heap. Small process facility at the base, which is the ADR plant, where you process the cyanide solutions, pour the gold doré. Site service is really nothing more than a truck shop, truck maintenance shop, and some offices, and a substation. The yellow power line, which says existing, is already there. It's energized, and we can pull the five megawatts off that line tomorrow should we need it. Very simple, very easy access. Two hours in a car to Salt Lake.
You can arrive at Salt Lake in the morning, go to site, do a tour, get back to Salt Lake, and fly on your way home by tea time. Very, very nice access. The mineral resource upon which the feasibility is being based is this resource. I mentioned just under five million ounces in indicated, 4.88. You can see the average grades here, 0.3, 0.21 for inferred. We're at the other end of the Champagne spectrum, but boy, can you make a lot of money on these if you know how to mine and you have good metallurgy. Underlying it all for what us is high grade, you can see there a gram is high grade for us.
I'm pretty happy to have very discrete, very well-formed, and very well-predicted lenses of this material throughout the ore zone, which gives us a sugar rush on the heap from time to time, which is nice if you're the mine manager at that time. As I mentioned, feasibility study due in October, we have some drilling that we're planning to do, both from a technical point of view, to drill the first two years to measured so that we've de-risked the resource class for that production in the first two years. And then we have in blue these areas of sort of near resource exploration, where we think we've got significant resource growth potential, and we'll be putting drills in the field as of today to look at those. Finally, corporate catalysts, we have a very clear path from today through to the end of feasibility in October this year.
We will be releasing some very interesting metallurgical work in Q2, which we believe will confirm the validity of run-of-mine heap leaching, so no crushing. Permitting milestones, we published the NOI. The next cab off the rank in permitting is public scoping, public engagement, which starts later this week. We have a clear pathway through feasibility, through detailed engineering, to a construction decision late 2027, and metal late 2028. This is happening. Thank you very much. Three minutes. Two minutes.
We have three minutes. Okay, I'm gonna open up questions in the audience for Jon. Okay, Jon, if you don't have any questions, I have two for you.
Excellent.
One is the workforce. Is there any competition in the area for a workforce? Like there's no other mining?
Nope.
No.
There is quite literally not a lot going on directly around that mine site within.
Is it mainly ranching that they have there?
Yeah. Well, not even ranch, irrigated farms and some ranches. The nearest town would be Burley. That's about 40 minutes away. That's 25,000 people, which is where they bused their workforce from for the mine in the 1990s. South, about 40 minutes, Tremonton, about 60,000 people. Pocatello, about 50 minutes, around about 50,000 people. We're already sitting on 200 CVs from people in the area who wanna come back and work. They're currently working in Nevada gold mines and commuting, and they want the mine to start by their hometowns so they can have decent jobs and provide an opportunity for their kids to live in their own communities rather than move away.
In terms of workforce, you're getting like actual miners versus having to train from scratch or any combination?
We've got a mixture of both. We will definitely want to upskill some of the local farmers. I think there's a great opportunity here to provide a career path in the mining industry for a bunch of people. We'll have a cadre of experienced people, but we'll bring in, and we will actively train individuals. We'll set up a training school on site. We'll bring those people on. They'll do their 190 hours training to get licensed on the truck, and then we'll put them into the operation.
Lastly, if I have one moment to put in, what's the leach cycle?
Very favorable. In principle, 90 days. The kinetics of this type of material indicate very strongly that you get 80% of your extractable gold comes out in the first 10 days.
Wow.
You get this big flood of gold and then a longer tail. That allows you to play games with irrigation placing on the pad, to get that first big flush, and then you can move on, and you can pick up that second tail by secondary leaching as it drains through an active lift. Really interesting opportunity to really benefit from that huge gold flood up front.
Perfect. I actually visited that mine when Pegasus had it. A long time ago.
There we go. Good. You're expert. Thank you very much.