This is always a really enjoyable occasion for everybody, and my thanks to the people listening in online. Dan was very kind to indicate to you that there are very few projects in the world that have a tremendous leverage to gold price from a value perspective. I am hoping at the end of this, you will take away what another one looks like. I will be making forward-looking statements. These are the cautionary notes. Please read them at your leisure. We are talking oxide gold in the Great Basin of the U.S., a tremendous tier 1 jurisdiction, extraordinary history of discovery, mining, over millions of ounces of gold over the long term. We have a Carlin-style system on the edge of the basin in southeast Idaho. Idaho is emerging as a tremendous jurisdiction in the U.S.
Very progressive deregulation going on from Governor Little, and huge support now to ease the regulatory piece so that we can permit mines in the U.S. I am reminded, eight years plus to permit a mine in Canada. It seems that the U.S. gets a bit of an unfair rap. You can permit a mine in three years in the U.S. if you do not have any environmental issues. It is a jurisdiction and an administration now that wants to build mines. We came out with our feasibility study for Black Pine Project. You can see the numbers there. This is a significant scale gold development. It is simple, straightforward, open pit, run-of-mine heap leach, and we have a clear pathway through detailed engineering to a construction decision late 2027, construction in 2028, and commercial production 2029. An exciting project that has modest capital to get in.
You can see what it looks like in the lower picture. This is not the Idaho of rivers and moose and trees. This is the Nevada version of Idaho. This is dry, arid terrain. It is the old shoreline of the Great Salt Lake. Low rainfall, no surface waters, and that is critical. No lakes, no streams, no aquatic species, so there is a huge benefit there in terms of a reduced environmental impact. This is a fully oxidized rock column, so we have no acid rock drainage issues, and all of the mining we do will be above the water table. So no pit lakes, no pit depressurization, no pit dewatering. A simple, straightforward project. Water rights are available to us. We have them already in the adjacent basin. And of course, this site was previously producing in the 1990s by a company called Pegasus.
So we are a brownfields restart, which from a point of view of permitting, is a whole different conversation when you talk to the regulators. These are the high-level numbers from the feasibility study. A 16-year mine life, a very attractive, just under 3 million ounces produced from a 4-million-ounce reserve. We crest that 200,000 ounces a year for the first five years, 177 life of mine. So a material producer in this part of the world with very competitive $1,566 per ounce life of mine AISC. So this has strong margins at current gold prices, and as we look to scenario management, which is something I heard at a talk on the first day of the conference, $2,000, $4,000, and $6,000 are the scenarios we want to look at. You could see the two rows at the bottom. That is $2,500 gold, $4,500 gold.
At $6,000 gold, this is a + $6 billion NPV project. A tremendous leverage to the gold price with huge resilience as we go down. This is still a project you would build at $2,000 gold, and it survives down below $1,400. That really is leverage to metal. To get into the project, $411 million, a very reasonable, a very approachable project number from a financing point of view. It's a real sweet spot when you talk to the institutions, the debt folk, equity, and of course, streaming is a great opportunity here. A simple project. Those of you familiar with run-of-mine heap leach, no crushing, no conveying, no stackers, no agglomeration. It's really drill blast, load haul, dump leach gold. That's the process. A single large heap leach that you can see in the center screen in a gently sloping plane of sight.
From a point of view of geotech stability, couldn't really get any better. Again, those of you who are familiar with run-of-mine will know that the range in grain size that you get from a blast has this sort of locking, inherent stability, which really doesn't mean they're eligible for blowouts or for liquefaction in the heap. A very stable and very solid geotechnical heap. Two large pits. You can see the range front pit and the discovery pit. Those will be owner-operator. The smaller pits peripheral to it, M, F, C, D, and E, will be contract mine pits over the life of the mine. We have a large 240-ton fleet, 600-ton diggers, and a contractor comes in with Caterpillar 777s and Caterpillar 992 size equipment, and we run that full life of mine. The site facilities, other than the heap, really are modest.
We have offices, a process facility, which is, of course, the ADR plant, absorption, desorption, recovery, where we take the gold out of the cyanide solution, process that through carbon, and then produce doré on-site. I mentioned water. You could see the blue water wells. That's about 4 km of pipeline from wells in the basin. Those wells are active right now, so they're installed and pumping with power to the site. They're being used for agriculture. We take the agriculture out of production, compensate the farmer for his loss of income, and reroute that water to the site. Why is that important? It's important because no new net water draw on the basin. In this part of the world, in an arid environment, water is an incredible commodity.
You got to protect water, you got to know what you're doing, you need to know the quality, and the extent to which mining companies are able to manage their water resources becomes a huge positive in community's engagement. Last comment here. Power line already there to the front gate. We literally have to buy a transformer, which we've already ordered, and hook it up to the overhead line. That's the extent of our power construction costs. A very simple site. Last comment, I-84 on the right-hand side of the screen, two hours south to Salt Lake City, an hour north to Burley. So, fantastic site access. This is where we've come from the pre-feasibility study two years ago. A 3 million ounce reserve going to a 4 million ounce reserve, and a 5 million ounce resource going to a 6 million ounce resource.
As we touch this with drill programs, we progressively and incrementally grow this resource. I will draw your attention to the Marigold Mine owned by SSR Mining. That mine, similar rock type, similar style of mineralization, similar size of gold system. That mine started in 1989 with a nine-year mine life, has mined every year since, and still has a nine-year mine life. This type of system has extension, it is drill heavy, and it has endurance. What have we been doing this year? We are just about halfway through a 50,000 m drill program. That information will go into a detailed engineering resource update at the beginning of next year. We have targeted in blue that you can see. This is a drill-to-measured program within the first three years of production, so essentially well-covering payback, where we are upgrading from indicated to measured. That de-risks the resource.
It de-risks the ore supply, allows us to do some early short-range planning, and really lets us do metallurgical work so that material on the leach pad, we really know what it is, what grade it is, and what leach characteristics it is. We have ongoing metallurgical programs. We just published the results of a very large bulk sample test where we leached 12-ton samples in 4 ft diameter columns and came up with a recovery result that really validated the bulk of our test work, where we are using smaller crush sizes to predict performance at larger grades, larger particle size. So we went into the field, tested it, and got that result, and we really believe that the metallurgical process here is very well understood, and that we have a very good handle with very high-quality data.
We are moving now into detailed engineering, and we anticipate completion of detailed engineering by the middle of next year. What are the catalysts coming up? I mentioned detailed engineering starting. We have the resource model at the beginning of next year. We are in permitting. We are 2/3 of the way through the U.S. NEPA process, developing the EIS, and the EIS is due for release first half of next year. The permitting is under FAST-41, and I will talk a little bit about that in the moment. I think that engineering work, we will get to fully detail engineered six months ahead of any construction. That puts us in a unique position in terms of understanding what we need to do and where we need to do it. What about labor? Is a question I often get asked. You can see where the mine is.
Tremonton to the south is a 25,000 size population town. Burley is about 10,000, and Pocatello is around about 20,000. This area houses quite a number of operators who work at Nevada Gold Mines and commute to Elko. This is a workforce that is interested in long-term jobs closer to home, and we have had significant interest from that kind of group. We do not consider the recruitment of a workforce to be a significant problem in this area, despite the fact it is relatively low population. Timeframe for the project. Engineering, I mentioned feasibility completed in Q3. Detail engineering will go through until Q3 2027. At that point, we will be 100% complete with all drawings issued for construction.
We are contemplating what would an early works program look like that could kick off in the second half of 2027 and perhaps into 2028 to allow us to get on site ahead of permits and full permit approval, which you could see there under the current schedule is Q1 2028. We anticipate a one-season build. That's a pretty aggressive schedule, but we've done quite a bit of work on the schedule to de-risk that. Today, we are anticipating first gold pour late 2028, commercial production going into 2029. The FAST-41 piece has been a real bonus for us. I think we got involved in FAST-41 in January.
We had a new schedule released on the U.S. Permitting Council website in March, and we've had a tremendous interaction with the FAST-41 team in terms of their oversight and guidance, not only to us as a proponent, but also to the local federal agencies. Uniquely in the industry, in fact, in the U.S., Black Pine was the first project to have the state agencies align their timetable with the federal agencies. The two key permits from the state, the cyanidation permit and the air quality permit, we have commitment from the state that they will be completed as the final record of decision is issued, currently scheduled for Q1 2027. That's a remarkable situation, and we have a real opportunity here to do a textbook permitting process from a simple project through the NEPA process. What's the company looking like right now?
Well, we've got a strong balance sheet, $36 million U.S. on the balance sheet at the last reporting, with $34 million coming in over the next 14 months. That comes from a strong push to divest of non-core assets. We sold our Goldstrike operation in Utah. We sold some ground around a critical metals play that we'd pegged. We have some warrants that are due in April next year. We are fully funded on our balance sheet to get through this year and next year and get to an, in principle, final investment decision on this by late 2027, early 2028. Centerra came into the stock in September last year and have been very supportive in a quiet way, which is nice. We have tremendous long-term support from some of the more significant mining institutions, VanEck, Franklin, RCF, Amati, Konwave, Commodity Capital, Ixios, Aegis, amongst others.
Of course, Wheaton Precious Metals are here. They hold the only royalty there is on Black Pine at 0.5% , and we have a 50% buyback right on that. All of the financial modeling is done with a quarter point royalty. I wouldn't say it's unique, but there aren't many mines in the U.S. that have that minimum level of encumbrance, and that's a real opportunity for us as we look to project finance this over the next six to nine months. I think this is a compelling U.S. gold development story. It is a simple story. It's an asset that has scale and quality. 4 million ounce reserve and cresting 200,000 ounce a year in production makes it meaningful over that 16-year life. We love run-of-mine heap leaches. They're easy to manage. To do them well, you have to be a good miner.
You have to know how to run a large open pit efficiently, and we have a tremendous team doing that. The $411 to build it, we believe is well within our capacity to build it, and we are a team focused going through development to take this through construction into production. Thank you very much for listening. I'll take any questions.
Thanks, Jon. Any questions from the audience? Just maybe a quick one from me, Jon. Again, feasibility looks fantastic. Lots of upside, in terms of the gold price as well. You talked a little bit about the 50,000 m drill program.
Yep.
Is that mostly infill to kind of increase or improve the confidence level, or is there potential to improve the reserve as well?
Yeah. Thanks very much, [Aves]. So there were three key focuses on that program. The first was that drill to measured, so that's a straight resource conversion up, upgrade to measured, and that's a risk piece in those early years. Secondly, we had compliance drilling around areas of permanent infrastructure, condemnation drilling, as you might call it. We tend not to use that word these days. So under the heap, under the rock storage facility, and a little bit of exploration sort of peripheral to that. I don't think that's going to show a lot of resource growth, but we also looked around the margins of the resource shells, and you always have a bit of drilling geometry where it's not well drilled out, or you have some grade that's poking through the shell because you didn't quite chase it.
We've done that drilling, and we expect to see some modest resource growth from that piece and obviously some upgrading in quality with that conversion to measured. We'll have a measured resource, which ultimately will create a proven reserve, and we'll be mining out of proven reserves for the first three years, which I think is a strong position to be in.
Fantastic. I don't think there's any questions. Maybe one more from my side. In terms of permitting, you're fairly confident in terms of the permitting process. Is there continuous discussions that you're having right now that gives you that confidence? Is it just a process that kind of takes you to that-
Yeah
final timeline?
Excellent question, [Aves]. I think a couple of things here. First of all, yes, there is absolutely continuous discussion. There are biweekly meetings of the entire permitting team, so that will be the FAST-41 guys, the two federal agencies, the state agency, and us as a proponent. There is a work schedule that's discussed, and as issues arise, as they always do in a permitting situation, albeit land, albeit baseline, that team discusses it and makes a decision about, are resources necessary? Is there any work needed? So it's a hugely collegiate, collaborative process, and that's overseen by the FAST-41 team as a sort of an expediter or a facilitator, if you like, to that discussion. We've been really, really happy with that.
The other piece is that the FAST-41 team, the last two projects that got permit approvals in the U.S., Hermosa from South32 and South Railroad from Equinox Gold, they either got that permit dead on the permit approval date that was set prior through the FAST-41 process, or they came in early. The FAST-41 team now have a track record of delivering on, or having the agencies deliver on that commitment. That gives us, I think, tremendous confidence that the FAST-41 team will help us manage that process to get to a defined outcome from a timeframe point of view.
Good stuff. We are out of time. Jon, that's a great update. Thank you very much.