Everybody who's here in person, thanks. Everybody who's on the webcast, we're really happy to have you all here. We're putting together the presentation over the last week or so, and I think some of you probably have seen the presentation because it's on our website now. I think it's going to be a really, really interesting session. Just want to draw your eyes to the cautionary statement. There's obviously going to be some forward-looking information in this presentation. When you get the chance, please take the moment to actually go through this. It's on our website. Three of us are going to be presenting today from NGEx . Our CEO, Wojtek Wodzicki, is going to be making the introductory statements and walking you through a slightly bigger picture view of kind of how we look at the Vicuña District and how Lunahuasi fits into that.
Bob is then going to take us through an exploration overview, also focused mostly on Lunahuasi . We're really going to kind of jump deeper into the geology than what we've been able to do in the past. I'm going to finish off just going through a bit of an overview of the royalty spin-out and giving everybody a bit of an update on that. We also have Neil O’Brien, who sits on our board here today, and he's going to say a few things at the very end before we conclude. Just a couple of kind of key points. This is not a corporate presentation. We're going to, as I said, dig quite a bit deeper into some of the geology. Be ready for that. Part of the reason we wanted to do this is because you've seen all of our press releases.
It's really difficult to add to the amount of detail that we want to be adding to those press releases. This is a forum in which we're able to kind of bring things together and bridge those gaps. Over the last few years, and particularly the phase III program, a huge amount of work has gone into interpreting the results that we're achieving. Our geological model is getting more and more sophisticated as we progress. Hopefully, you'll be able to see that as we go through the presentation. The presentation is mostly focused on Lunahuasi , but please don't forget about Los Helados. Los Helados has a huge amount of strategic value in our portfolio, as many of you are aware. The presentation should take around two hours. We do ask for everybody to hold their questions until the end.
If you have any questions, jot them down, and then we'll open up for questions at the end of the entire presentation. For everybody on the webcast, you can ask questions through the Messenger tab. Please feel free to ask questions as well, and those questions will be asked during the Q&A session. For anybody who wants to follow the presentation or get the slides, those slides have been loaded onto our website, so you can find them on there. Without further ado, our CEO, Wojtek.
Thanks, everyone. Thanks to those of you that are here in person. We were a little bit worried we might be talking to an empty room earlier this morning. Before I start, just one thing that I was looking at this presentation last night, and one of the things I thought about was that Finlay's hair should probably be a little bit worried about him working for NGEx . I just looked at Bob and I, and it definitely hasn't been good for our hairlines. The Vicuña District, as most of you know, has been one of the best examples of value creation through exploration in the industry.
The upcoming spin-out of our Lunahuasi and the upcoming spin-out of our royalty company are really just the latest steps on what's been a pretty amazing journey for us as a management team and hopefully for you as our investors. The Vicuña is a major new copper, gold, silver district. It's in the heart of the world's greatest copper belt. A few years ago, this was really just a pure exploration play. What's really changed over the last few years is that it's five deposits today. It's still growing. The big difference is that it's all now moving towards development. Lundin Mining operates the Caserones mine in the north end of the district on the Chilean side of the border. On the Argentina side, BHP and Lundin Mining acquired the Filo del Sol project and the Josemaria projects earlier this year. They're moving those along towards development.
More regionally, Lundin Mining owns a port and a desal plant on the Chilean coast that could have a role to play at some point in the development of the district. Right in the middle of it all, NGEx holds a big resource at Los Helados and what we think is shaping up to be the best deposit yet at Lunahuasi . What I want to do today is to start with an overview of our goals and objectives for the company. I'll try and put Lunahuasi into a broader geological context, both in the Vicuña District, but also more broadly in comparison to other copper-gold districts and copper-gold deposits. Bob's going to provide an in-depth interview of the geology of Lunahuasi , as Finlay said.
We're going to go into some detail to outline the phase IV drill program at Lunahuasi , which is going to start in the next couple of weeks. Finlay will give you an update on how things are going with our royalty spin-out, which is an exciting new initiative. Right at the end, I'll wrap up with just sort of a summary of our long-term vision, kind of how we're seeing the development of the company going forward. To start, NGEx has been an incredible success story. The stock's up 4,000%, which is kind of a crazy number in the last five years. We're continuing to hit record highs. The crazy thing is that copper market boom that everyone's been talking about for years is probably still in front of us.
Maybe we're just seeing the first leg in that with some of the news of accidents at some of the world's big operations. A lot of our outperformance has come against a flat copper price. We haven't seen that commodity fuel to the fire yet for NGEx . The biggest question that we get as a management team is how do we continue to build on the success that we've had? I think the answer is really to stay focused on what got us here and probably most importantly, stay hungry, which means keeping that small team approach that's worked so well for us. We're really the exact same number of full-time people working for NGEx that we were almost 20 years ago at the very beginning. It's always been around 35- 40 people. We've probably crept up closer to 40.
Our head office management team has always been five people. Now it's about seven. I think staying lean, being able to make decisions quickly has been a key part of our success and really working as a tight-knit team. We need to keep doing that. We need to stay hungry and not let past success go to our heads and have it have us take our eye off the ball. Stay focused. Focus on grade and growth. Luckily, we've got one of the highest-grade new discoveries in the world at Lunahuasi . As you'll see today, there's still a lot of room for us to grow that deposit. I think that part of the vision and the strategy we're going to be able to achieve. Third, and I think this is really important, we want to set ourselves up to build a pathway to eventual production.
We're really focused right now as a team on moving Lunahuasi forward as a standalone development project and really trying to do what we can to cut the timelines to production. Finally, I think we really want to stay entrepreneurial. This has been a business story, a story of smart management of assets just as much as it's been a story of science and successful exploration. The royalty spin-out is just a really good recent example of us continuing to think about how to extract maximum value out of our portfolio. I look for us to keep doing what's worked for us in the past. About four years ago, Neil O’Brien and I made the case for the Vicuña District being a giant metal district that deserved a place among the world's great copper districts.
I think that message has resonated, and people are starting to accept that we're really on to something very significant here. We talked about these giant metal districts, the giant deposits that are in them, being geological freaks of nature in terms of size and grade. We also talked about the tendency of these giant metal districts to continue to deliver a steady stream of discoveries and maybe more importantly, positive surprises. We really tried to emphasize the exploration upside in the district. Two years later, in 2023, we went out for what we called Vicuña 2.0. We updated the presentation because a lot of the things that we talked about in the first go-round had come true. At the time, we talked quite a bit about Filo and how it was going to get a lot bigger. It did get a lot bigger.
Maybe most importantly for NGEx , we made that discovery at Lunahuasi . What was significant about that is it was the definition of a positive surprise. It was an order of magnitude higher grade than any of the other deposits. That's something that Bob is going to talk about later. We kind of, I guess, called our shot in that Vicuña 2.0. It wasn't just luck that we were able to achieve that. I think over time, as we've learned about the district, we've gotten better and better at predictive discovery. Bob's going to talk about that and specifically how it relates to our work at Lunahuasi . We also highlighted the importance of seeing evidence for very large-scale alteration systems. We definitely see that at Lunahuasi.
We talked about the tendency of world-class districts to include clusters of deposits and really emphasize the importance of major regional scale structures. Finally, you know, and this is definitely a characteristic of all of the great deposits and the great districts, they tend to be statistical outliers, not just in terms of tons, but also and maybe more importantly, grade. We certainly see that at Lunahuasi . In that Vicuña 2.0 presentation, we also talked about how rare these giant metal districts were and how, you know, that for a company like ours ultimately translates into shareholder value. We've definitely seen that over the last couple of years. We also talked about how many things have to go just right. You know, it's really a Goldilocks sort of situation in order to form one of these giant deposits. You've got to have the right rocks.
You have to have major structures that channel mineralization into one focused area. You typically want to see multiple events. That's what allows this clustering and the formation of several deposits in a district. That clustering can also be one of the things that increases grades. You know, finally, and this is important in the Lunahuasi story, we talked about the importance of erosion and preservation of the mineralization that you form. You know, we really see a lot of these things, the right rocks, the major structures, the multiple overprinting events, and then the important role that erosion and preservation can play at Lunahuasi.
If it takes a lot of things to go right just to form kind of a regular deposit, to form something like Lunahuasi with these kind of outlier grades that we've seen, you got to turn everything up to 11, you know, just to use the, for those of you that know the Spinal Tap movie. This is kind of what the Vicuña District looks like right now. Lunahuasi , I think, illustrates a lot of the characteristics that we talked about in those Vicuña presentations. It lies within a major structural corridor that runs all the way from Filo through Los Helados, and we lose it somewhere up near Caserones. We see multiple mineralizing events. I think importantly, as you'll see, the whole system is fairly intact, preserving even the really high-level mineralization that a lot of times is completely eroded away.
At the same time, Lunahuasi has eroded just enough that it allows us access to the deeper parts of the system. Been there. We've got this big slope. When you pull up to Lunahuasi , we see the very top of the system. Nature has eroded around 750 m of the steep slope away from us, and we're able to set up and drill into the deeper part of the system. It's kind of one of those Goldilocks situations where I think everything is just right. Lunahuasi , as I mentioned earlier, is also a good illustration of that clustering effect that we described at several different scales. It's the fifth major discovery within the Vicuña cluster. The deposit itself also consists of at least four different styles of overlapping, overprinting mineralization. First, we see the high sulfidation copper-gold-silver lode veins. That was part of the original discovery.
We've since discovered stockwork, porphyry-style mineralization, intermediate sulfidation gold veins, and then kind of a hybrid type of mineralization, which is those high sulfidation veins overprinting porphyry-style mineralization. The important thing at Lunahuasi is that it's an outlier in terms of grades for each of these styles of mineralization. Each one is unusually high grade. It's really the overlap of these four styles of mineralization in the same volume of rock that comes together to make Lunahuasi unique and unusually rich. As Finlay promised, we're going to talk a little bit more about geology in this presentation than we typically do in our corporate presentations. This slide shows a textbook example of a porphyry copper system with the different types of mineralization that could theoretically develop around it.
As Bob will show later, it's remarkable how close to the textbook model Lunahuasi has turned out to be. We get a lot of questions from investors about what we mean when we talk about a porphyry copper deposit. A lot of people know the word, but I think a lot of people are a bit fuzzy about what it means. It's definitely a good thing to see porphyry-style mineralization. For example, when we announced that we had hit porphyry mineralization, which I guess we always knew was there, but we had a drill hole that showed that, our share price went up by around 20%. It's clearly important. I thought it'd be worth spending just a few minutes because we've got a bit more time today on the science behind porphyry copper mineralization.
This will be old news to the geologists in the audience, but it might be interesting to some of the less specialized people on the call. Porphyry copper deposits are generated and are associated with large amounts of molten rock. That's what's called a porphyry intrusion. It's generated at depth in the Earth's crust, and it carries large amounts of hydrothermal fluid, which is what carries the metals. Think about a blob rising in one of those lava lamps that you might have had in your bedroom as a kid. As this blob of hot rock rises through the Earth's crust, it releases the fluids that carry the metals into the surrounding rocks. These hydrothermal fluids are channeled along fractures or structures that form around the periphery of the intrusion. The fracturing is more intense, closer to the center, and that forms porphyry-style stockwork and disseminated mineralization.
It kind of forms a shell around that porphyritic intrusion. The grade within that porphyry shell is typically homogeneous. It's what allows that style of mineralization to typically be drilled out on pretty wide spacing. It's typically fairly low grade, somewhere between 0.3% and 1% copper. This makes porphyry-style mineralization, porphyry deposits amenable to large-scale bulk mining. These are the huge open pits that you see throughout the Chilean and Southern Peruvian Andes. Most of the world's copper production comes from this style of mineralization. In some systems, much higher grade veins that follow zones of weakness are the structures that geologists are always talking about. These are found radiating outward from that porphyry center. This is the style of mineralization that we first hit at Lunahuasi. It accounts for some of the highest grades that we've hit, including that discovery hole of 60 m of 7.5% copper equivalent.
Further out from the center, and often later in the life of the system, you sometimes get high-grade gold-dominant veins, which can cross-cut those early copper-dominant veins. We started to see that at Lunahuasi, particularly this year. That accounts for some of the super high-grade gold intercepts that we have, including 62 m of almost 24 g that we announced earlier this year. That style of mineralization is called intermediate sulfidation mineralization. It forms some of the great gold deposits in the world, including Fruta del Norte, which Lundin Gold owns in Ecuador. So far at Lunahuasi , we've hit four of the possible styles of mineralization that occur around porphyry systems. You can see that on this diagram. We think we still have the potential to find a couple of other types, including the kind of breccia-hosted mineralization and stratigraphically hosted mineralization that we had at Filo.
Bob is going to talk about that potential later today. Many large porphyry-related systems have some of the styles of mineralization we see at Lunahuasi , but usually one predominates and the others are just less developed. They're kind of weak. What's unusual about Lunahuasi is that they all seem to be pretty well developed, and they're definitely not weak. A lot of times, those different types of mineralization are spread out over very large different distances. Oftentimes, the veins are several kilometers away from the main porphyry center. What makes Lunahuasi unusual is that the different types of mineralization all overlap each other, overprint each other, and kind of mineralize the same volume of rock. As I said earlier, each one looks like it's an outlier, a high-grade outlier in terms of grade. We often get asked what deposits Lunahuasi is most similar to.
People naturally want to know comparables. As I said earlier, every giant mineral system is unique, but there are definitely some common themes. In the next few slides, we're going to go through some well-known systems that share some characteristics with what we see at Lunahuasi . We're going to compare the styles of mineralization present, kind of ticking off the list of things that we saw on that ideal model. We'll look at the scale of the system, give you some kind of sense for how big these things are, what sort of scale you need to be looking at them in. We'll take a look at what sort of grades some of these systems generate. The idea is to give you a sense for what a world-class system looks like. What kind of mineralization can you expect? How big can they get?
What are the dimensions of a really good one? What's a grade that you should get excited about? We'll try and tie that all back into what we've seen at Lunahuasi . We're going to look at systems where the mineralization is spread out over a really large area where there's kind of bits and pieces everywhere. We'll look at a couple of other ones that are more similar to what we see at Lunahuasi , where these multiple events overprint each other. What's important for us when we start thinking about what a mine might look like is that those phenomena concentrate large amounts of metal in a small volume of rock, which is exactly what you want. We are going to start by looking at (Inaudible) . It's a huge porphyry copper system in Northern Chile.
It's got porphyry-style mineralization at the center, surrounded by that halo of high and intermediate sulfidation mineralization that extends up to 5 km or 6 km away from that central porphyry. This is pretty common in a lot of systems. You get the porphyry stockwork mineralization at the center and then this distal halo of vein mineralization. It's kind of spread out over a very large area. Maybe one of the classic examples of the style of mineralization that we're talking about is Butte, Montana. It's one of the largest and most important historical copper deposits in North America. It's a classic example of a high sulfidation load vein swarm surrounding a porphyry copper system at depth. It's hugely important in the development of economic geology. This is where some of the classic descriptions of porphyry systems were put together in the early part of the last century.
It's famously described as the richest hill on Earth. The deposit, the vein swarm, was often described by the miners as a mile wide, a mile long, and a mile deep. Take a look at those tons and grades. Think about those dimensions, and keep the dimensions in the section in mind when Bob walks you through Lunahuasi. Fruta del Norte is probably the best gold mine in the world right now. It's actually another good example of porphyry-related mineralization. I don't know if a lot of people think about it that way. The main deposit is a swarm of intermediate and low sulfidation veins, so some of that distal stuff that you see in some systems. Those are concentrated along a major regional structure.
The most recent resource estimate, just to give you a sense of scale, at FDN was around 30 million tons at about 7 g of gold per ton. Fruta del Norte shows that you can fit a lot of metal into a relatively small area. Again, keep those dimensions in mind when Bob talks about some of the stuff that we've hit at Lunahuasi . Interestingly, Lundin Gold has recently found porphyry copper mineralization adjacent to the original deposit. You know, it really shows again that pattern that we saw in the idealized model with the vein mineralization surrounding a porphyry center. You can see that in the geophysical section at the bottom. In a lot of ways, exploration at FDN has been the mirror image of what we've done at Lunahuasi . They found the gold mineralization first. Now they're starting to hit copper.
At Lunahuasi , it's been the other way around. We found the copper first, and now we're starting to see FDN-type intermediate sulfidation gold veins. For the few of you that were old enough to have been thinking about gold mining in the 1990s, El Indio was a legendarily high-grade deposit. It's actually the discovery that eventually led to Pascua- Lama and Veladero, a couple of the largest gold deposits in South America. Remember how at (Inaudible) and at FDN, the vein mineralization was spread out over a large area and quite separate from other types of mineralization, quite separate from the porphyry center. At El Indio, what we see is high sulfidation copper veins, similar to those early discovery holes at Lunahuasi , cross-cut by later intermediate sulfidation, very high-grade gold veins, all in a small concentrated area.
That whole deposit fit into an area that's 500 m by 150 m by 300 m depth. A real postage stamp that had millions of ounces concentrated in it. It's a really good example of how much metal can be squeezed into a small area when the conditions are right. Think about that, and think about those dimensions when Bob talks about some of the closer space drilling that we're planning at Lunahuasi to define the gold mineralization. I'd say El Indio is probably the closest analog to the style of vein mineralization that we see at Lunahuasi . It's only 150 km to the South, similar geological environment. What's missing at El Indio that we do see at Lunahuasi is that porphyry-style mineralization, but the vein part of the system is very similar.
Finally, I want to talk about a system where a lot of these things came together. Chuquicamata is a spectacular example of multiple mineralizing events channeled into a major structural zone. That deposit, one of the largest copper deposits in the world, is a complicated swarm of massive sulfide mineralization, overprinting porphyry copper mineralization within a major, major regional structural zone that is at least 1 km , 1.5 km wide and extends 3 km i n the deposit area. It's part of a much broader zone that's probably 15 km or 20 km long. Think about that major Filo to Los Helados structural zone that runs right through Lunahuasi and is important in controlling the mineralization at Lunahuasi . Remember this image when Bob describes some of the overprinting porphyry and high sulfidation mineralization in holes 27 and 28 at Lunahuasi.
What's missing at Chuqu is that intermediate sulfidation gold veining that we see at Lunahuasi . It's a great example of the good things that can happen when you get these multiple overprinting events, especially when you're inside a major structural zone. Finally, just to reiterate one of the main points of this presentation, what makes Lunahuasi u nique is the occurrence of multiple styles of mineralization, all cross-cutting and overprinting each other within the same volume of rock, and also the unusually high grades that we see associated with each style of mineralization that we see at Lunahuasi . I think we're starting to get the sense that it's truly an outlier and a really good example of those positive surprises that Neil and I talked about in those Vicuña presentations.
It's kind of what you get once you get into the right area and you start exploring one of these giant metal districts. I don't think we're anywhere close to being done. Now I'm going to turn things over to Bob, and he's going to take you through some of the more detailed geology, specifically at Lunahuasi.
OK, thanks, Wojtek. Can you hear me OK? It's good. All right. Super excited to be here this morning talking about one of my favorite subjects, Lunahuasi . These guys don't let me out into the wild that often to get in front of people and talk. It's a great opportunity. What I really want to do here is provide some background and context. We are starting to drill in a couple of weeks, as Wojtek mentioned. We'll have a lot of news releases coming out over the next few months. Hopefully, the context that we can provide this morning will help you understand those news releases a little bit better and be able to interpret what's important about them. Quick geology lesson. You've already heard quite a bit of geology. I think the classroom setting this morning is appropriate. You've seen this before.
I think one of the key messages here is that as geologists, we really like models and analogs like this because it allows us to understand where we are within a system. We can look for trends, and zonation helps us to predict where we can find and understand what we're looking at in the road. A good example is this one. It's the same image, but it's showing alteration instead. The red lines that you can see there represent the original veins that we discovered at Lunahuasi. We immediately recognize that it's a high sulfidation epithermal system. Knowing the regional setting also helps with that. One of the key observations here is that those veins were hosted in propylitic alteration. That's the alteration that occurs lateral to the porphyry copper deposits.
It's different than Filo, for example, which by the alteration in that, you can tell that it's vertically above the porphyry copper deposit. What we're seeing is, it allowed us to understand that we're off on the side of the deposit, which helped us vector into where we should find the porphyry. It also, importantly, as I'll show later, indicates that we've still got that area where you would typically find this kind of deposit at Lunahuasi , which is unexplored. We haven't drilled that particular part of the project yet. This is an attempt to kind of show where the topography has eroded away. As Wojtek mentioned, it's kind of a Goldilocks situation. We've got a lot of what we think is the main part of the deposit preserved under the plateau.
The erosion has helped us get down to 700 m below surface to call our drill holes, which saves us a lot of drilling. That blue line there is just a representation of hole 27 as an example, which goes through the high sulfidation veins peripheral to the main part of the system and gets in at the bottom to the porphyry. One of the things to note is that it doesn't go through the porphyry. We think that we just got into it and drilled towards the center. As I'll show a bit later on, that's proof of concept. I think there's a lot more to discovery out in that part of the property. I just wanted to go through quickly a discovery history. One of the main things to keep in mind about Lunahuasi is it is a very new discovery.
Our news release announcing the discovery was April of 2023. Two and a half years ago, we didn't have any idea that this deposit existed. To go from where we were then, brand new discovery, to grow our geological knowledge to where we are now is a lot of work. I think a lot of people sometimes expected us to know more about this deposit early on than we actually did. It's taken us some time to understand what's going on. I think we're at the point now where we've got a pretty good idea of what we're looking at. A couple of key points that every hole that we've drilled into this area has a significant drill intersection in it. We don't have any holes that are barren within this zone. It's open in all directions. Going back to that model, we understand why it's open.
We think we've got a lot of other components of this system to discover yet. We've had, you know, one of Neil's things is a continuous process of major discoveries. You keep finding more. It's the gift that keeps on giving. We've got a really good track record here of expecting to find something, going to look for it, and sure enough, there it is, which we're kind of calling predictive discovery. I think it's an interesting part of the story. I just wanted to step back a little bit and go through some of the key drill holes as we drilled through this. It's always a super interesting experience. You start off with one drill hole. You don't know what else is out there, and you get surprises along the way.
That whole process of discovery is really what gets us up in the morning and keeps us coming to work. It's a lot of fun. It's basically treasure hunting. This is just a plan map showing the drill results currently. The colors there represent the news release intersections. One of the things that we've done recently, it should be on the website within the next week or so, is put this database up there. You'll have access to the collar notations, the downhole surveys, and the news release intersections to be able to bring into your favorite software and have a more detailed look at things. I've just circled our main three zones that we've called there.
We finally got to the point where we had enough drill holes into some of these zones that we saw them as geometrically contiguous zones of mineralization and had the confidence to start describing them as such. I'll just go through some of the key drill holes on this map. The first one obviously was hole number two, the second hole that we drilled into the project. The first one was up on the plateau. You can see on the top left corner of the image here. As Wojtek mentioned, that was 60 m at 7.5% copper equivalent. Talking about the excitement of discovery, that was a pretty exciting thing to discover in contact with the geologist on site. You kind of get an update from each day's drilling. All of a sudden, we're into this massive high-grade sulfide in the first hole into the project.
We very quickly knew that we were onto something pretty special here. That identified the deposit. We understood the style of mineralization, which is what we expected to find in that area. The hole, we had that intersection there, but it really was mineralized and altered over its entire 714 m length. We immediately knew this is a big system, which matches what we saw with the alteration zone. It's a huge alteration zone. It's unusually high grade. We had samples in there up to almost 20% copper, which, you know, there's not a lot of deposits in the world that you can drill 20% copper. We pretty quickly knew that we were into something that was very large and had the potential of very high-grade mineralization. It's quite unique.
Followed that up shortly afterwards with hole seven, 20 m at 10% equivalent, including 6.3 g of gold and one sample that was 35 g/t gold. It was sort of the first hole where we really saw these very high-grade gold results in here. It also indicated that we had separate zones. I mean, it was in a location that wasn't down dip or up dip or along strike of the first hole. We knew immediately that we're looking at two zones of this mineralization, two mineralized structures. Hole 14 was quite close to hole seven, 23 m at 23% copper equivalent. These are not numbers that you typically see at any deposit in the world. It's a very thick intersection of really high-grade massive sulfide mineralization, which told us that this is a really, really strong system.
It's capable of some amazing grades. Hole 28 was drilled in January at the beginning of this year, probably the best hole into the deposit so far, the discovery hole in the Saturn zone. It's several hundred meters south of hole two and 14 and seven. It was a big step out from where we drilled in the past. You know, understanding that this is a very large system. You can see the intersections there, 51 m at almost 14% copper equivalent. That's not something that you see commonly anywhere, any copper deposit in the world. These are very exceptional intersections here. In addition to that one, which is the Saturn zone, we had two more. I'm going to go through this hole in more detail a bit later in the presentation. We had three really big intersections over 800 m of drill hole.
This is telling us again that this is a really, really big system, which again is not a surprise when you look regionally. Just to the south of us is Filo del Sol, which has grown to 7 billion tons. This is definitely an area where you expect to see these kinds of large deposits. Hole 27 was the porphyry discovery. When you composite that entire hole, it's 1.6 km. That's some pretty interesting grades there. It includes 740 m of porphyry mineralization. I just wanted to take a minute to describe the difference between those. We talk about the high sulfidation disseminated mineralization and the porphyry disseminated and stockwork mineralization. The difference is basically in alteration. The high sulfidation mineralization is typically higher temperature. You get more clay alteration, advanced argillic type alteration, whereas the porphyry is potassic.
It's a very distinct alteration type that you see in the middle of these systems. The mineralogy is the other difference. The copper minerals in the high sulfidation part are enargite and chalcocite with some bornite, a very sharp change into the porphyry mineralization, which is chalcopyrite and bornite. The copper mineralization is quite different between those two styles of mineralization, and that's kind of how we discriminate them. Hole 43 was one we drilled towards the end of the program last year, the Northernmost hole that we drilled that's on the edge of our current drill pattern. We hit almost 50 m of almost 10% copper equivalent in that hole. We're not sure if it's the Northern extension of one of the zones that we've got, Mars or Jupiter, here yet. We need to do some more drilling in between to see if we can tie those together.
Just a really, really clear example of how this system is completely open. I mean, that's not the kind of hole you get on the edge of the mineralized system. We think that we've got a lot of room to expand this as we continue to drill. Finally, hole 46, which was the second to last hole we drilled last year, the story there was the very, very high-grade gold mineralization, 1.5 m of 500 g/t . Not just the grades, we'd seen + 100 g/t before, but it's the style of that mineralization. It's basically quite obvious, visible gold in quartz veins, which is something different than the sort of high-grade gold that we get in some of the massive sulfide mineralizations. That's a quick history of some of the exciting holes that we've drilled along the way.
The idea, kind of the theme here, is predictive discovery. We're working with a well-understood geological model. We've got a really experienced team of geologists down there. Most of us have worked in this district for several years, probably more years than I want to admit. Our geologists have worked on Los Helados. They've worked on Josemaria . They've worked on Filo. We have one geologist who spent a lot of time at El Indio, so he's very familiar with that deposit. We've got a really good team down there who understands Andean porphyry, high sulfidation deposits in general, and these deposits in the Vicuña District specifically. Just kind of a chart showing our track record from the initial discovery to defining multiple high-grade zones, predicting the porphyry and finding it, predicting the Bonanza-grade gold and finding it.
That idea that we're still missing some parts of this system, and we think we know where to find them, I'll finish up with that. This is an example. For those of you who were at PDAC last year, you might have come by our core shack and seen this map on the wall. It was put together by Humberto Brockway , one of our consulting geologists, the guy who worked at El Indio previously, also spent a lot of time at El Pachón, very experienced Andean geologist. Looking at the geological information we had at that time, the alteration, vectoring, the zoning that we had, some of the veins that we had in some of the holes, we predicted there should be a porphyry deposit sitting off to the West. We drew that little circle on the map and said, here's where our target is.
This is after the phase III drilling, once we tested that target. The colors here are showing an assay technique that we use called sequential copper analysis. They take the sample, and they first use acid to dissolve the copper that's acid soluble. Then they use cyanide to dissolve the copper that's cyanide soluble. You have the residual and that left over. What that does is it gives you a bit of a proxy for the mineralogy. The acid solubility will get any oxide copper minerals out of it. The cyanide soluble part is the high sulfidation mineral, is essentially the enargite and chalcocite. What's left over is the chalcopyrite and bornite, which are not soluble. The red colors are, think of them as high sulfidation mineralization. The blue colored holes, you can think of those as the porphyry-style mineralization.
A couple of things to note are, Humberto did an amazing job of predicting where this deposit was going to be. I think he was a little conservative in drawing that circle. If you look to the North, you see a lot of those other long holes ended in porphyry copper-style mineralization. I think ultimately this little circle is going to grow to an oval that goes from the bottom of that figure to the top. This is probably a very large deposit. No surprise, right? We're adjacent to some other very large deposits in this system. Same thing, distant section. I really like these images because they're a great example of how our geological team put together some ideas to test and were very successful in testing them.
This is the PDAC section that shows the holes that we drilled up until then, the idea of where the porphyry should be. Lo and behold, hole 27 and 20 there, which tagged it. Those holes don't go through the entire deposit. If you look at the little dashed line, that's going to extend to the left out to the edge of the figure. The other thing on this is it shows an area that we kind of call the wedge. With the topography that we've got going up to the plateau, you can see the area where we've drilled all of our vein mineralization. All of that is open up dip as well as down dip. It's a bit unusual that you've got all this drilling and you have a volume above your drill holes that's open to expansion.
It's largely because we're limited to drilling angles less than 45 degrees. One of the things we've done this year is we've got a couple of underground rigs on site. We'll be able to set those up on surface and drill horizontal holes and even up holes if we want to, to start to test that volume of rock that sits above our mineralized veins. Bonanza gold, this is something that we've been looking for in this deposit. It's a common component of many of these high sulfidation deposits, as Wojtek described, the El Indio deposit being the best example. It had a 3,600 vein there, which was named after the first sample taken out of that vein, which was 3,600 g/t . They took $1.2 million ounces of gold out of 190,000 tons of ore, which is an extremely small volume.
That averages out to 196 g/t . We certainly see those kinds of grades reasonably commonly at Lunahuasi . Another example is the Solares Norte deposit, which is Gold Fields up to the North of where we are. Other deposits in the same geological setting in the same region, you start to see this. I spent a lot of time, we have some very high quality core photos, going through those in detail, trying to see some of this visible gold mineralization. When our geologists started to see this stuff in core, we got very excited. I'm not going to go through this one in detail. You can look at it in the presentation on the website. I just wanted to break down some of the assay composites that we've got here into the individual samles.
You know, when you see things like 500 g/t , you know, if you took that interval and spread it out over 500 m, you could get 1 g/t over 500 m, which is not what we're doing here, obviously. There's a lot of other high-grade samples within each one of those intervals. These are going to turn out to be very, very wide, very high-grade gold zones. The other thing to look at here is the silver and copper grades there. You see a lot of variation in the ratios between gold and silver and gold and copper within these individual intersections. Phase III was a huge step forward for us in the drilling, but also in our interpretation and understanding of the deposit. You know, we continue. We've got 40-some-odd thousand meters of drilling into the deposit now.
We still have a huge amount of upside. It's open in all directions, like we mentioned. Just drawing a box here, 1,200 m by 1,200 m. That's probably conservative. I mean, that goes right to the edge of our drill intersections. It probably doesn't push out far enough to the West into the porphyry. You know, we've got an overall mineralized system here that's going to be kilometer scale in all directions. 10 km to the North, you can see that little arrow there is our Los Helados deposit. We control all the ground in between, which is a really interesting, you know, longer-term exploration is to explore that structure. It's on the same structural trend joining Lunahuasi to Los Helados. It gives us a very good longer-term exploration project to start to understand that.
This is something more, I'll just see if we can actually play this, that we've been working on to get people a three-dimensional representation and a model of what we're drilling. This is something that will be posted on the website within the next couple of weeks. You should be able to have a link to it. Rotate it around yourself, turn off and on the various intersections just to try to help people understand the geometry of what we've drilled here. You know, you can see that wedge idea above the drill holes that we've completed. Lots of exploration potential up in that area. Once this gets on the website, you know, feel free to go and have a look at it and rotate it around and get a closer look at what we've been drilling.
One of the big things we've been working on in the off-season, and it's nice to have a drill season and an off-season because during the drilling season, everybody who has hair is straight back with their hair trying to keep up with the drilling and get everything organized. Then you've got a few months in the off-season to do some thinking time and relog the core, sit down, and really understand what we're looking at. We use some really good consultants in our work as well. We've got a guy named Dave Reese, who's a world structural expert. Once we understood that Lunahuasi is largely a structurally controlled deposit, which is different than a lot of the other deposits that we see in the Vicuña District, we knew we needed to get some help down there and help us understand what we're looking at here.
What we realized is it's a series of high sulfidation veins controlled by a brittle fault system. Brittle fault systems control a lot of different kinds of ore bodies in the world. Neil will be familiar with Irish-type deposits, which are a completely different mode of formation and mineralization, but they're controlled by brittle fault systems. A lot of orogenic gold deposits, like you'll see in Timmins or Val-d'Or, places like that, are also brittle fault systems. Again, different form, origin, and mineralization, but the brittle fault system controls the geometry of those deposits. That's what we kind of came to the realization that we're looking at the same thing here. It's a very well-understood setting. These kinds of deposits and these structural settings have been studied around the world. They can be fairly complex, but they're predictable.
Once you understand the main structural directions you're dealing with, it allows you to predict where your ore chutes are going to be, where your main trends are, and helps you understand the geometry of the deposit. You get different geometries in different parts. This diagram here, you can imagine it as a plan view or a section. It just shows some of the different things that you can get. There's narrow faults. Basically, where those faults are either offset or have a bend in them, they then move and open up an area of a dilational area, which allows fluid to flow through that. That's where your minerals get deposited. They're often linked by extensional veins, where you get narrow veins that may be at a different orientation than your main faults. You can get some complex geometries.
You need to probably drill at different azimuths and different directions in different parts of the deposit. Once you understand where you are in the setting, it allows you to predict where to go and to understand the geometry. We think we're getting pretty close to that. The keys then are going to be ore chute geometries. These typically may have a direction in one dimension of 200 m or 300 m, but they could have a plunge direction that would be several hundred meters. Once you key into those directions, you can drill them off quite effectively. They usually have really good continuity within those ore chutes. This is all related to the copper-gold porphyry, which means there should be a link. It should be directly connected at some point, which gives us another good exploration target.
Understanding within this whole system helps us figure out where the extensions are going to be and where we can find other deposits here. One of the key things relating to the next slide is these things are fractal. The geometries and textures that you see at drill core scale will be repeated at deposit scale. This is an attempt to illustrate that. These are individual drill core photos that we've got with a little diagram there showing, hopefully showing what's in the drill core. The one second from the left is probably the clearest. You've got two faults coming along, and then you've got a zone in between where those faults have moved. They've opened up that zone, and that gets filled with mineralized fluids that turns into your ore body.
Here, it's on a drill core scale, but you can imagine that same thing happening where that section in the middle is over a couple of hundred meters on strike length and then maybe several hundred meters on the plunge direction. I'm not going to go through this in detail, but it illustrates the process that we've gone through during the off-season. It's understanding what kind of deposit that we're looking at, putting together some conceptual models and 3D models of how this might fit together. A lot of surface mapping to help us understand what the main structural directions are. We do a lot of oriented core, which is where you measure these features in the drill core. You combine it with the orientation of the drill hole, and then you know which orientation the strike and dip of the structures that you drilled through.
You can plot those up on stereo nets. Second from the left, there is sort of a plan view with the interpretation of our different zones. All of those orientations are consistent with the oriented core data that we collected in them. The last component is to convert those into three-dimensional models. You then can model that helps you change your drilling from kind of filling in gaps in the drill program to being very target-focused. You're now drilling each hole to test a specific idea. You confirm or deny the idea, and that helps you to refine the deposit model. That's the basis for an eventual resource estimate. You need to build out those 3D models, fill them in with grades, and come up eventually with some tons and grade. An interesting confirmation here, we did all that work from drill hole data.
We also did some surface mapping at the same time. What you see, which is tempting to show on the map there, the red lines are structures that are mapped on surface. They line up very well with the zones that we've interpreted from drill core. The joining together of those two separate databases is good confirmation that we're on the right trend. You know what we see here is you can see the cliffs there. All of the drilling is clustered in the middle. Those are gold grades on there. You can sort of make out the three main zones: Saturn, Mars, and Jupiter. I just wanted to point out that we're naming zones after celestial bodies, not just planets. We think we've got enough names left for all the zones that we're going to find. We're not limited to nine or 10 or whatever it is these days.
The blue line is probably the main controlling fault. We're in an area similar to what you saw in those drill core photos where that main fault has been offset or has a bend in it and creates a very large dilation zone, which is where the, you know, creates the fracturing and the structural setting that allows the fluids to come into there and deposit the mineralization in the Lunahuasi deposit. It's a nice example of that fractal idea where the things that you've seen in drill core, you can also see in the kilometer scale in the deposit model. I'll talk a bit later, but outside of those three main zones, we have a lot of other very high-grade, very wide mineralized intersections.
Towards the bottom of the holes where our drill density isn't as much, we know are going to turn into geometrically consistent zones with more drilling. You can see some of those here. This overall structural model is going to help us join those up and understand what the geometries of them are. It also helps us to look for targets. As you get out of that main dilation zone into the structures, the mineralization tends to get focused. We may find as we get into those areas, we've got some narrower but very high-grade mineralization along those controlling structures. The next section is talking a bit about grade distribution and drill hole compositing. When we put out the news releases, they're typically very long tables with a whole bunch of numbers in them, which are the drill hole composites.
I wanted to go through that a little bit to give you guys some context for looking at the upcoming news releases, how to think about those. In a lot of deposits, it's not as complicated as it is at Lunahuasi , Los Helados as an example. You've got a big zone of pretty homogeneous mineralization. You get into it at one part. Sometimes you get out of it in another part. Most of our holes end in mineralization, but it's pretty homogeneous. You come up with one large drill hole composite, and there's not a lot of variability in the grade within it to look at it in different ways. Lunahuasi is very different. It's actually several deposits in one.
We've got potentially economic grades that vary over two orders of magnitude, from 0.5% copper or copper equivalent to 50% copper equivalent, which provides a lot of optionality when you start to think about what this is going to look like as a mine. It is a lot more complex than something like Los Helados or Filo or Josemari a, where you're just dealing with a very large zone of homogeneous grade. The composites are really important because they help to communicate the grade distribution, which really is a proxy for what the ore body is going to look like. How is this going to turn into a mine eventually? Is it going to be a small high-grade mine? Is it going to be a very large bulk scale mine? Could it be both? Could you do that sequentially?
Is it something in between where you're looking at 60 m or 70 m of moderate grade? When you look through these drill hole composites, what I try to do is put everything in there. You could just have, OK, start to finish the whole mineralized zone, but then you miss a lot of these higher grade intervals in between. Those high-grade intervals are really important because they're unique at Lunahuasi . They're telling you something about some of the different options you may have as you turn this into a mining operation. This is hole 28, which is a good example of that. It's probably the best hole that we've drilled here. The table that you see there is the table that came out of the news release. That's how I broke down the composites. It's a bit of a forest of numbers.
There's a lot of stuff going on in there. The key thing out of that is, I think, those three main high-grade zones that you see there. The top one is the Saturn zone. Kind of as an aside, it's 200 m of 5% copper equivalent. Those are not numbers that you typically see in copper deposits anywhere in the world. It just, again, reinforces the idea of how unique Lunahuasi is. Below that, there's two other very significant 50 m intersections that are not one of the named zones. I'll talk about that a bit later. That's an example of some of these other isolated drill intersections that we have that are going to turn into zones with more drilling. That's some of the drilling that we're going to start doing here this season. Another way to look at it, though, is if you look at the intervening mineralization.
If you go from kind of the top of the mineralization to the bottom here, you can get an intersection that's just over 1,000 m at just over 2% copper equivalent. The important thing in looking at that is what's the grade of the mineralization between the high-grade zones? If it's zero, if there's no grade in that at all, then this is a bit deceptive to kind of composite things this way because it's unlikely that you're going to actually mine it this way. In our case, if you look at that intervening grade, you can see it's 0.5%, 0.7%, and 1% over several hundred meters. It gives you that idea that you've potentially got 1 km intersection here that potentially could be bulk mined in some kind of a large-scale mining operation.
Part of the challenge of Lunahuasi , as we move from exploration into starting to think about engineering studies, is going to be to go through multiple different scenarios and try to figure out which is the best way to convert this very interesting deposit into a producing mine. You can also go the other way. If you start looking at breaking those intervals down into the smaller but higher grade zones, you can pull out some very, very high-grade material in here with widths that are still pretty typical of an underground mining operation. My screen here is pretty small, but the Saturn won 51 m of 14%. That's a really uncommon number. It shows you the magnitude of that Saturn zone and the strength of the mineralization within it. There are other intersections in there, around 10 m at 10% or better copper equivalent.
If you think about that in terms of a large-scale underground mine, it's very different than what you might look at with the 1,000 m intersection. There are a bunch of different options as we move this forward into engineering studies. What I try to do with the news releases, it's a lot of numbers. If you look at those numbers, it's trying to break those down so that you can see the overall number, the large-scale zone, if you want to look at it at several hundred meters to 1 km intersection, but also pull out those narrower, but not narrow, but very high-grade intersections within that. This is another way to look at it. The bars on here, the blue bars, there's a bar for each drill hole, and it shows the length of the intersection.
These are the intersections composited over the entire mineralized zone in the drill hole. The red dots are the grade of that composited intersection. Anything above that red line is greater than 1% copper. Anything above the blue line is greater than 500 m length. Out of the 43 holes we've drilled, 26 of them have intersections greater than 1% copper. That's the overall bulked-out intersection. They all have intersections greater than 1% copper at narrow values. When you look at compositing the whole mineralized zone, 26 of the 43 are greater than 1%. 19 of those are over 500 m. This chart is a bit misrepresentative because all of these holes end in mineralization. You're not seeing the full width of the mineralized intersection. The ones that are off on the left of the chart, the smaller intersections, were ended in mineralization.
If we kept those going, you would have had a longer intersection at higher grade. None of these represent the full width of the zone. It does give you kind of a sense of, if you start to look at the overall size and grade of the Lunahuasi envelope, if you want to call it that, you know, there's a lot of holes that are better than 500 m, up to 1 km at between 1%- 2% copper equivalent.
With Wojtek mentioned we're going to start drilling here in a couple of weeks, what's coming up? Similar to what we did last year, I guess we're kind of describing the holes as sort of three groups. There's short-range, mid-range, and long-range holes. Resource definition holes are the short-range ones. Thank you. These holes will be designed to specifically drill into the Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter zones. They're going to infill some of the areas, but also extend those. All of those zones remain open to expansion, so we want to keep trying to expand them and see how big we can make them. Those are going to form, you know, eventually the basis for an initial resource estimate that we will put out at some point in the future.
The step-out holes are more stepping outside of those three main zones, looking at the other compelling intersections that we have peripheral to them and trying to expand and understand those zones, as well as look for new zones. We've got several areas where there's 300 m gaps between drill holes that could host mineralization that we don't know about yet. The exploration holes, a couple of holes to look for some of these components of the system that we think are there, we think we know where they are, but we just need to prove them. The short-range resource definition drilling, as I said, is in Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, looking to start building the data that will allow us to ultimately put these into a resource classification. Similar to a lot of other things at Lunahuasi , the resource estimation is not going to be straightforward.
It's not the kind of deposit where you're going to drill the whole thing out, produce a resource estimate that represents the entire deposit, and be done with it. It's very much going to have to be a staged process. Different from some of the deposits like Los Helados or Filo, which are big, homogeneous deposits, it's not just a geostatistical exercise. With those deposits, you take the data that you've got, you build out your block model, you do some analysis that's going to tell you you need to have this kind of drill spacing to get whatever confidence level you want in the classification, and away you go. Lunahuasi is very much, at least at the higher grade part of it, going to be controlled by the geometry. Understanding those geometries and building out those grade shells is a critical component of the resource estimate.
It's just another way to kind of show that. It's the map on the left. That blue box with the black line is a vertical longitudinal section along the Saturn and Mars zones, which is what you see on the right-hand side of the image. The black dots are the existing drill holes, and the green dots are, you know, conceptually where we're going to drill those resource definition holes. You can see some of them are infilling large gaps between drill holes, but most of them are stepping out on where we have drilled mineralization, and we think that we can start to expand those zones quite dramatically through that drilling. The mid-range step-out drilling, you know, you can see our circled main zones there, and those drill intersections that you see are outside of that. Those are intersections that we've drilled that are not in the main zones.
I won't read the numbers off, but you can see some pretty interesting numbers in there as well. With the drill hole spacing, you can see the 300 m scale bar there. There's lots of space, particularly to the South in between those holes, to drill more of those zones. With some step-out on those zones, combined with our understanding of the geometry and the deposit model here, we should be able to turn those into other zones named after various other objects. The long-range exploration drilling, this part I really like. This is just a little model that tries to illustrate that wedge idea. If it's a bit difficult to see, you can see all of our drilling there. The topography in that zone that's above our drilling below the topography is essentially where we want to test. Why do we like that area? You can see it here again.
This gets back to the images of the porphyry copper model. We kind of know where we are within it and looking for parts that we expect to see, but we haven't found yet. This is that model overlaid. Wojtek mentioned that Lunahuasi fits it quite well, and this is a good example of that. You can see a hole 27 coming down into the porphyry. We've got all our veins peripheral to that. We know they're peripheral because of the alteration that we see there. What it leaves, where you'd normally expect to see this kind of mineralization, is at the apex of the porphyry. The porphyry intrusive comes up. It's got a peak to it that concentrates most of the fluid flow, pressure is released, and you build this high sulfidation deposit above it. A really good example of that is Filo del Sol.
This is a Filo section off their website, superimposed on our drill pattern through the Aurora zone. What we see in our drilling, hole 27 is into the porphyry at the bottom. We've got about 1.8 km between there and the surface. What you see at surface is advanced argillic alteration with steam-heated alteration and massive vuggy silica, which is what you see at surface above Aurora, what you'd expect to see in this system. You have this whole area where you'd typically expect to find this Filo-style breccia or a number of different kinds of very high-grade deposits associated with the top of a porphyry deposit in an area that we've not drilled yet. This is a super exciting target, and I'm really excited to get in there and put a hole into it. It's also reinforced by our geophysics data.
This is an MT survey, Magnetotellurics , that we completed last year. The gap in the middle is because we weren't able to set the equipment up on those cliffs above Lunahuasi . It's showing conductivity of the bedrock. You can see all of the area that we drilled is in those purple colors, very low resistivity rock, high conductivity. You can see that the target area where we want to test is characterized by that same high conductivity again, which is exactly what you see at Filo. To me, it's really compelling evidence that we're on the right track. Based on our understanding of the geological model, we expect to find something there, which is supported by geophysical data. This is going to be an interesting target.
The other thing it shows, looking below Lunahuasi , that idea that we've had that we've drilled a small part of this overall system, again, is reinforced by the geophysics. Our 1,200 m by 1,200 m by 1 km block, it's open in all directions. We're going to increase the size of that block pretty dramatically as we continue to step out and drill. This is going to turn out to be an extremely large, I don't know, it's globally unique. I think this is going to turn into a legendary deposit that people are going to be talking about 100 years from now. It's pretty special. I hope that gives you an idea of what we're going to be doing in the upcoming season when you get the news releases with those tables of numbers. Hopefully, it helps you interpret those a little bit better.
With that, I'll turn it over to Finlay to talk about our royalty spin-out.
Thanks, Bob. Before we open up for questions, we thought that we should spend a little bit of time just going over the royalty spin-out or our most recent news. Before I jump into it, one of the things that us as a management team, and I think NGEx have a great track record of, is obviously creating value for shareholders, but also doing so in a creative way. NGEx has gone through a number of spin-outs during its history, and as a result, created a huge amount of value for shareholders. The royalty spin-out and its eventual listing will be another step in that journey. We're constantly looking at different ways outside of obviously our drill results.
Those drill results will remain the main driver of our value proposition for the time being here and all of the strategic value that goes on around that or that's linked to that. We're looking at different ways in which we can potentially create value outside of that, and this royalty spin-out is one of those ways. On the 22nd of July, we announced that we would be spinning out these royalties. We'll be spinning out royalties on both Lunahuasi and Los Helados. There will be a 1% royalty on Lunahuasi and a 2% royalty on Los Helados. We do have a partner at Los Helados, so 1.38% will be going to NGEx shareholders. The terms of the arrangement are that for every four shares of NGEx , as of the record date, shareholders will receive one share of LunR Royalties .
Those two royalties on Los Helados and Lunahuasi in that vehicle will eventually be listed on the TSXV. There will be a dedicated management team put in place in order to grow and diversify that royalty company. That was a really important point that we wanted to make sure, you know, we're building the right management team and we're building a dedicated management team because it's going to be a lot of work. Ultimately, we want to grow LunR Royalties into a diversified vehicle that can compete against some of the bigger names in the space. An important point is that this is going to be different to some of the other royalty spin-outs that we've seen in the space over the last couple of years. We don't intend just to hold these two royalties and potentially at some point, you know, sell the vehicle.
What we're looking at is to diversify and grow through opportunistic M&A and, like I said, take on some of the bigger players. I think from an NGEx shareholder perspective, this is a really exciting opportunity because at the end of the day, these shareholders are getting seed shares in what could be a vehicle that ultimately grows significantly in value and provides those shareholders with an alternate way to generate upside value. Just on the right side of the screen there, you know, an overview of what that royalty spin-out process looks like and what the structure will be. One really important point is that NGEx will be retaining a 19.9% interest in LunR Royalties . There are two reasons for that ultimately. The first reason is long-term exposure to both of our assets.
You know, there are many opportunities or options for eventual development at Lunahuasi and at Los Helados. That provides long-term exposure for NGEx shareholders to those assets. Perhaps more importantly, it also provides a potential future source of funding for the development of Lunahuasi . As many of you who've heard us speak before, and we haven't been speaking about it too much in this presentation, one of the options and potentially the highest value pathway for Lunahuasi is actually developing it as a standalone operation. That 19.9% interest could help in being monetized at some point and allowing us to fund a portion of the development of Lunahuasi . Why do companies ultimately, what's the rationale for spinning out these royalties?
At the basis of it, the rationale is because you're able to ultimately attain higher multiples from spinning out these royalties, or royalties are able to attain higher multiples than, you know, an exploration company like NGEx. That ultimately is where we've seen things like Great Bear, things like Vizsla Royalties, who have done a fantastic job being able to attain these higher multiples. These royalties are also leveraged to exploration and metal price upside, and they're also lower risk. As I mentioned already, LunR Royalties want to go one step further and ultimately grow and diversify through opportunistic M&A. We think that we're well placed in the space to be slightly different to some of these other players. We have an ability to generate our own royalties, which I think is incredibly important.
The Lundin Group network is behind us and will drive initial deal flow in what we're trying to do. Ultimately, our aim is to fill, at the beginning, the gap that we see in this intermediate royalty space and grow and diversify and hopefully, at some point in time, take on some of the bigger players. Just quickly, a timeline of events when it comes to the royalty spin-out. We announced the news on July 22 and published our management information circular in the middle of August. The special meeting of shareholders to approve the arrangement was on September 12, and that was approved. On September 18, our latest news release announced that the court had approved the arrangement. One of the questions that we've been receiving consistently every day, pretty much since we announced the news, is when the expected record date is going to be. Don't worry, everybody.
We're going to press release it. We're not going to blindside you. Once that record date has been decided on, we will be press releasing it, and that will likely be at some point in Q4, sometime in October, most likely. Completion of the arrangement will then occur in Q4 of this year, and the hope is that we'll list the shares of LunR Royalties by the end of 2025. Those will be tradable at that point. I'm going to pass over quickly to Wojtek to provide some concluding remarks, and then we'll open up for questions.
Thanks, Finlay. We've gone through a lot of material today, so I thought I would just kind of wrap things up. What I want to talk about now is, I guess, kind of the big picture. This is definitely the definition of forward-looking information here, so take it that way. You know, really what we're trying to communicate here is give you a snapshot of how we're thinking about the company, kind of how we're trying to plan for how we take NGEx to the next level, kind of what the next steps are here. Take it with that sort of caveat. We're not making promises here that we're going to be able to achieve every single one of these steps, but just to give you a sense for how internally we're thinking about, you know, a long-term plan to move Lunahuasi in particular ahead.
You know, what we're trying to put together here, and we're going to be putting details on this, is a comprehensive plan, not just to explore the deposit, but also start to think ahead about how you might finance a standalone development project. Somewhere down the road, what we're seeing is potentially the highest value path for NGEx is to do a standalone development of what we hope will be, you know, a new high-grade copper-gold mine. Lots of steps and lots of execution from here to there. In the short term, as Bob, I think, explained really well, what's going to drive the share price is those drilling programs. That's step one, expand Lunahuasi through the exploration drilling that we just talked about today. We're also starting to think ahead to what we're going to need to do full infill resource drilling.
We think that's going to be a lot more efficient, just given the topography that we have from underground. We're in the beginning stages of permitting an underground adit, an exploration adit that'll go into that slope and give us underground access to be much more efficient at resource definition drilling. We've just started to put, well, we've put together all of the information. We're getting ready to submit our permits, and then we'll see where that goes. That's definitely part of the plan is to get underground at Lunahuasi . We're also looking into applying for RIGI, which is the large investment incentive regime that Argentina has put into place. There's a pretty tight deadline for that of July 2026. You know, given kind of the stage of exploration we're at at Lunahuasi , this is going to be a stretch.
We think that the benefits of qualifying for RIGI are big enough that it's worth a try. We can't promise that we're going to get there. It's a huge amount of work that we've got to do over the next nine months or so. If we were able to do it, it would be an enormous benefit for the project. We'll kind of keep you posted on how it's going. We definitely think it's worth a try, and it would be great if we could do that. I mean, Finlay touched on how we're starting to think about a longer-term financing strategy. If we were able to do all of this stuff and we saw a clear pathway to building a standalone operation at Lunahuasi , the next question that you always get is, okay, where's the money going to come from?
Our stake in the royalty company, assuming the royalty company does as well as we hope it will, will be one potential source of funding. Don't forget that we have another significant project in Los Helados. There's potentially an opportunity at some point to monetize that. In the ideal scenario here, we do all of the definition work, we do the engineering, we get ready to develop a project, and then we've got a couple of assets in the company already that could potentially be monetized to help us finance development. Really kind of the big prize here, as we see it, is to really take a good look at whether we've got an opportunity to follow the Lundin Gold template. Lundin Gold, 10 years ago, was a small, small company that bought an exciting but challenging gold deposit in Ecuador.
They were able to build it, finance it, build it, and build it into an extremely successful operation today. The template is there. It's something that was done by a Lundin company, kind of starting from scratch. Really, the approach that they took there was to build a starter operation that's expanded over time. We've got a lot of work to do before we know whether that's what we've got at Lunahuasi . You've got to start thinking about this stuff early. That's kind of how we're looking at long-term potential development of Lunahuasi. I think M&A is something that's always out there. If you look at that map of the Vicuña District, we've obviously got big neighbors. I think everyone in the market is aware of potential synergies and how close some of our much larger neighbors are there. That's always something that's out there.
I guess the way that we look at it is M&A is not really a business plan. It's just something that happens. We're really focused on this standalone development scenario. Anything else that happens is something that we'll deal with if and when it happens. Hopefully, the presentation's been useful today. Obviously, it's going to be available on our website. There's a lot of detail here. Definitely encourage people to look through some of those slides, especially some of Bob's slides. There's a lot of really useful information there that you maybe don't pick up just in a quick view on the screen. I think with that, we're happy to take questions. I guess the structure will be, I'll handle the questions that I can and then ask Bob and Finlay to ask any questions if they can contribute.
Maybe before we do that, I don't know, Neil, if there's anything that you want to add. I mean, we did those Vicuña presentations together. You've got sort of a little bit of a semi-outside perspective on what we've talked about.
I thought it was interesting going back. Your slides started off with the Vicuña and then Vicuña 2.0 that Wojtek and I gave a few years ago. This is kind of checking in on that in some respects, if you will. I was thinking back on when we were putting those things together and where we were at the time of the development of individual projects and then recognizing this new metal district that pretty obviously now is going to become a giant mining district. I think there was a slide that we had in our second one that I always, it's just kind of a philosophy, if you will. It's something that I heard Lucas talk about in one way or another, which was one of the reasons that I joined Lundin because he had a perspective that I never heard from in the senior companies before.
That was a big reason why I came. It has to do with recognizing giant mineral systems if you're a geologist. Everybody wants a giant mining district. Of course they do, or a piece of one, right? Giant mining districts are based around giant metal deposits, of course, right? Giant metal deposits, right? Basically, are giant mineral systems that have a hell of a lot of concentrated metal in it. Not all giant mineral districts become giant metal deposits, which then, of course, become giant mining districts. Here's an important part that Lucas, and I think it's throughout the nature of people who work for the Lundin Group, you will never be part of a giant mining district if you don't start and concentrate and spend your time and money and the right people looking at giant mineral systems.
I guarantee you, go out and look at all the exploration companies that are out there, and the vast majority of them are not exploring giant mineral systems. I don't get why they're not. That's the one thing. It's very simple. It seems obvious. It seems a truism. That goes to the 20-year history of Vicuña here and why you hang into places because there's something special that the geologists are seeing. When we were putting this together, the original one, we were trying to say, okay, I mean, that's a great message, but who is going to believe this? It's really still fairly early on, right? The first one, sure, there was a really great hole that was drilled in Filo and into the Aurora Breccia zone, etc., right?
It's still fairly early days, and we're trying to not sound like we're looking in our crystal balls and just saying what we think could be there, although we weren't. We tried to come up with ways of sharing the vision as geologists do with any investors. We came up with a few, I think, very useful short takeaway phrases. There are things that we still use, like if you look at this, giant systems, when you explore them, can characteristically reveal more good surprises than bad. Geologists know that, exploration geologists know that. When you're an exploration geologist and you're responsible for a drill program and you see the results come in, you kind of know it's like, well, I was hoping to see this. Did we improve the program or not? That's what's typical.
In a giant mineral system that has a lot of metal in it, it's not just did we improve it, was there a surprise in there that took us to the next level, right? If there wasn't, you're probably dealing with a weak mineral system. There's one thing that is the most honest thing in our business, it's the rocks, but you have to listen to them and then make decisions on them, right? That's really what we were trying to do here, knowing that, look, this is going to be a journey. This isn't going away. We're going to check back in. We wanted people out there who weren't technical to say, okay, so how did they do? What was the scorecard? Were there any surprises out there? Another one that we threw out there was expect the unexpected. Giant systems always do this.
They throw because they break all the rules, right? They make up their own rulebook. As Wojtek said earlier on, with El Indio, it's nature trying to stuff as much metal in as it possibly can in a volume of rock. It does some really, really crazy things if you're a geologist, right? It's the unusual stuff. They're freaks of nature. Expect the unexpected. Look at what we got at Lunahuasi now, right? You've got a Chuquicamata, right, sitting next to an Escondida with Fruta del Norte dropped in on top of it. It's really trying to do a whole bunch of stuff in one space. That is what you have to be looking for, those two things. Good surprises, more than bad surprises, right? Expect the unexpected. I think that is a theme that has worked out here very well. Now, are there more to come?
I think Bob's done a really great job of showing that we're just really in the beginning stages of exploring what is an enormous volume of rock here, which is one part of an extraordinary camp. In 100 years from now, absolutely, people are going to be talking about this, right? That's my perspective. I'm just as excited as I was a few years back on this. Thanks very much for your time.
Thanks, Neil. All right. I'm going to ask the guys to come back up here, and we'll take any questions if you have any.
Fahad from Jefferies. You talked a lot about the four styles of mineralization. At the same time, you mentioned early in your presentation that the porphyry element or system maybe resulted in the most positive share price reaction. Maybe talk philosophically about phase four and why. It sounds like it's a balanced approach trying to explore all types of mineralization. Why not focus more on the porphyry? Thanks.
That's a good question. I guess the way that we think about it, we have to do a little bit of everything here, but I guess the way that we think about it is if you think about, I don't know, mining 101 would be focused on the highest grade first. You always want to, if you're thinking about an eventual development, you're always going to focus on that highest grade material first. If you kind of look at the hierarchy of grades at Lunahuasi , we're fortunate enough that we've got some, you know, the vein system, both the high sulfidation copper-gold-silver veins and the intermediate sulfidation gold veins. Those are really high-grade materials. You're going to want to focus on those first. The porphyry, and I think the reason that people were excited about it, that porphyry-style mineralization gives you scale, it gives you volume.
I think it's inevitably material that's going to be pushed towards the back of any kind of eventual mine plan. Just on a pure NPV basis, if you want to think about it that way, you want to focus on the highest grade material first. I think it's valuable to understand the full scale of the system, and it's definitely part of what we want to do. The way this is going to go, we're always going to start with the high grade first. We've got, I guess, a first-world problem that we've got a bunch of different styles of mineralization to focus on here, and we need to do a little bit of everything, but focus on the stuff that's most likely to be at the front end of any kind of development. Stefan?
Yeah, thanks, Stefan from Cormark. Just a quick question on the target that Bob showed, the Aurora zone analog above, directly above Lunahuasi porphyry. Presumably, that would have to be drilled from underground, just given the topography in the area. Extrapolating from that, is that something that probably wouldn't get drilled until the season after the one that we're about to enter?
No, that's something that we're planning on drilling this year from the top of the plateau.
Okay.
Yeah. If you look at the details of some of the earlier drilling that we've done and kind of the detailed shape of that empty anomaly, it looks like it's got kind of a dome shape. It's not something that we want to leave for the distant future. We are actually going to try and drill that this year.
Okay, great. Maybe just one more, you had the slide there about your longer-term vision.
Yeah.
When you think towards a made-in resource estimate on this, obviously, there's a bit of optionality to look at it with sort of big bulk scale mining glasses on versus very high-grade selective mining. Those two differences imply very different mining shapes and economics and mining methods and whatnot. How do you sort of, you know, and it's probably something that a simple cutoff grade sensitivity won't really capture, right? How do you think about scale when you're looking towards a made-in resource estimate?
Yeah, I mean, I'd say that's our main challenge in thinking about the resource. I don't know, do you want to take that question, Bob?
Yeah, as Wojtek said, we've spent a lot of time thinking about that because it's not clear what's the best way to go. In terms of timing, I think, you know, looking at that smaller scale one is something we can take off as a bite-sized chunk. Trying to drill out the overall part of the deposit is years' worth of work. I think we would look at definitely a staged approach and looking at that closer part in between as a start.
Okay, great. Thanks.
I mean, the other thing we thought about in terms of how to communicate that is using something like an exploration target, right? This is conceptual. One of the things we've been thinking about is if we get to the stage where we have, say, an inferred resource on that smaller part, we probably have enough drilling to put an exploration target on the bigger part and try to release something that's, you know, an inferred resource on part of it, but then also give people an idea of what the bigger picture is to using an exploration target approach, something we'd look at.
Commodities have been suppressed for quite a few years now. Since your discovery of the gold, your share price has shot up from $13 to current $25. A lot of new retail investors have no idea what to expect from royalties. Do royalties still get paid out in physical? Are you looking at physical gold payments or has it modernized to cash payments? What is your formula based on your future royalty?
Yeah, royalties are typically paid in cash. I mean, the formula is...
Say silver, say gold hits $5,000 an ounce.
Yeah.
You have 10,000 shares of royalties. What sort of payment can somebody expect based on your formula calculation?
Yeah, I mean, that's pretty difficult to say because it depends on, I mean, basically the royalty is a top line number that depends on, it's taken off the top, right? It's basically taken off revenue with a few discounts. You really can't estimate what a payment would be until you know what the production rate is, how many pounds of copper, ounces of gold, ounces of silver you're producing. Until you have a production plan, a mine plan, and a production plan, there's really no way of estimating that.
There's a lot of chaos in the marketplace. It was mentioned earlier that Great Bear Royalties was one that you're following. Vizsla is a pattern that you're following. That's what I meant by an example of so few royalties in the world that are available to retail shareholders. If you go into the chat wars when Great Bear Royalties was announced, there was mass confusion. Nobody knows how many shares they should be buying, what sort of income they could possibly be expecting. I was hoping you could clarify that.
Do you want to, yeah?
Yeah, just to clear up a misunderstanding, those royalties will get paid into the royalty company, and as a shareholder, you will receive the benefit of ultimately a greater valuation of that royalty company. That royalty company may choose at some point to pay dividends to shareholders through the cash that they're getting from those royalties, but you as a shareholder won't be actually receiving direct payments because these royalties have been spun out. Think about it in the way that if a mine generates $100 in sales, then a percentage of that will be taken off. That's the royalty payment, and that will go directly into LunR Royalties , and LunR Royalties will ultimately grow as a result of that.
The hope is that those cash flows that LunR Royalties is making from these two royalties, for example, will then enable the company to at some point be able to accretively do M&A and other such things. That's a simplistic way of thinking about it, but you as a shareholder won't actually be receiving direct payments as a result of those royalties. Those royalty payments will go straight into the company and then ultimately be recycled in a way to generate value. Does that make sense?
Yeah, sorry. I guess I didn't understand your original question.
Is it a 2% or 3% royalty that will be paid to Luna?
It's two different royalties. It's a 1.38% royalty on Los Helados and a 1% royalty on Lunahuasi.
Okay, thank you.
Thanks, Luke at CIBC. On the long-term slide, you mentioned putting together a RIGI application. What sort of details would go into that application? Would there be, you know, network, geotech, project scale, initial CapEx, and do you expect to kind of update the market on any of that application along the way?
Yeah, I mean, I guess to be clear, what we're doing right now is we're analyzing whether we can, I mean, we're trying to figure all of that out, like what exactly do we need to present. Our understanding is that, you know, what it's, I mean, basically what you need to do is demonstrate that you've got a project that is of national interest to Argentina that's going to be big enough, that's going to generate enough revenue to be significant. That's evaluated, and then a select number of projects that meet the criteria for a project of national interest receive this series of fiscal benefits. I guess that's what we're trying to figure out is exactly what we need to present, but it's going to be a document that would be similar to a scoping study, you know, something like that is our understanding.
Of course, if that information is submitted and it becomes public, we're going to have to back that up with a technical report. This is all the stuff that we need to figure out, and the key thing is going to be once we know what we've got to do, we're going to have to assess whether we can get it done by the deadline in July. We're kind of in the information gathering stage at this point, and then we'll see.
Okay, thanks. Based on your kind of discussions with the government there, do you expect them to execute the one-year extension on that application period, or do you have any?
Our assumption is that the deadline is the deadline, and that deadline is July 2026. We're going to be aiming to submit whatever we can by that deadline and not assuming that it's going to be extended.
Okay, thanks.
Any other questions? We have a few questions on, sorry.
Hi, Rabi from National Bank. I guess hole 19 was drilled from the top of the plateau. I'm just wondering what you learned from that hole and how that is going to inform the drilling from the top of the plateau this year.
Yeah, you want to talk about that?
Yeah, that was one of the key holes for evidence for the location of the porphyry deposit. What we saw in that hole is de-veined, so distal porphyry veining that you'd expect to see on the periphery of the porphyry system, which again led us to kind of vectorize that something should be good down into the west, which is where we wanted to be looking. From a geology point of view, it was evidence to support our thesis that there was a porphyry deposit there and where it was located. From a technical point of view, we learned that we can drill from the top of the plateau. We want to do it in the heart of the summer season, and there's no particular technical challenges about it.
Getting back to Stefan's question, to test that Filo kind of target is just to set up on the plateau kind of right above it. It's a big target. We don't need to be pinpoint drilling and just try to do a vertical or a steeply angled hole right down the middle. We know that it's possible to do. Now with that, hole 19 was important kind of vectorizing towards them.
Yeah, I think in terms of what we hit in that hole, it's consistent with kind of exactly what the section shows, kind of skimming across the upper margins of a system.
Thanks.
We have a few questions from the viewers online. I'll just go through some of these. Guys, the center of the Lunahuasi system seems to be coming very close to the company's property border. Please comment on why this is not expected to be a significant limiting factor on potential size of the opportunity.
Yeah, the property border, it's important to note that it's transboundary. It continues into Chile. If you go across the border into Chile, we own most of the claims over there. If you actually look at where we think the center of gravity is, it's not that close to the property boundary. Look at the technical reports, maybe we'll try to put out a map that kind of shows things relative to the property boundary. I think it's a misunderstanding in kind of the area that we own because we do own the claims in Chile and in Argentina. You need to look at the entirety of our land position to understand where the deposit is likely to be relative to that. We don't see the property boundaries being a constraint.
We see the main potential kind of heading off to the north and from Lunahuasi t o Los Helados. It's about 10 km, and we hold all of the ground in between Lunahuasi and Los Helados. We don't see a real constraint with the property boundary.
Okay, thank you. Another question. Is it an issue or an advantage to have a lot of the mineralization at depth for NGEx?
I mean, I think we have mineralization at depth, but that's the, I guess that was the whole point of talking about that wedge area. This mineralization that we're drilling at depth comes all the way up to the surface. In fact, the image that you're seeing on the photograph on the screen right now is an example of some of the structures, the mineralization that we're drilling at depth. This is kind of what they look like at surface. Even though we're drilling some deep holes, you know, it's not necessarily deep mineralization. It's just that it extends to depth. Mineralization extends from surface down to depths of, I guess we've drilled it up to 1.5 km below surface. It's not all particularly deep. I mean, that discovery drill hole, the discovery intercept, the 60 m of 7.5% is around 150 m below the surface.
We can see the structure that we drilled into on the surface. The mineralization is not, it extends to depth, but it's not deep.
Yeah, the planned exploration decline that we talked about, within about 200 m, it'll enter the Mars zone. We've got high-grade massive sulfide to surface. One of the interesting things here is because of the erosion and the topography, we don't have a thick weathered zone over top of the veins. We have sulfide mineralization virtually to surface in those areas. We do have mineralization deep, but it also comes right to surface.
Okay. Thank you. From the same kind of general perspective, do you expect to find high-grade veins to the West of the porphyry intrusion?
Yeah, I guess it gets to Neil 's comment about expecting good surprises. I mean, these systems tend to be symmetrical or cylindrical.
I guess the way to think about it is if they are cylindrical or, you know, kind of circular. What we've drilled so far is maybe like the Eastern third of the circle. I think it would be reasonable to expect it to extend a little bit to the South. Hole 43 tells us it's open to the North, and we haven't tested at all kind of over the top. If you think about it as a circle, we've tested one quadrant, maybe 1/3 of the circle.
The evidence we have is looking at the surface geology. If you look at the surface geology quite far to the West of where we'd expect the porphyry to be, you see steam-heated alteration, you see vuggy silica, you see all the things that you would tend to see above a high sulfidation system. It is entirely possible that we're going to see the same kind of veins as this on the West side as well as these.
And the North.
We have a few more questions about the royalty company. One question is to become a major royalty player in the space, LunR Royalties needs to be cashed up. Will there be any financing coming with the listing at the end of Q4?
That's a decision that's going to be made by the management team that we're putting in place. We don't want to talk too much about exactly what that company is going to do. We want to get the management team in place, and they're going to figure out what to do. I think the important thing though is there are multiple ways that that company can grow its royalty portfolio. I think there's an ability to generate royalties. I think there's an ability to be creative about the sort of deals that we do that aren't necessarily going to require a lot of cash.
I guess in that regard, another question asks, Vicuña Corp. owns 1% royalty on Lunahuasi. Is there an option to buy back that?
There isn't a written option, but obviously, like, you know, any other royalty that's out there, that's one that's available and probably one that's worth looking into.
Okay, thank you. There are a couple more other questions. One question on political environment in Argentina. Are you concerned about the political developments in Argentina in light of midterm elections recently?
I think that's one of the advantages that we see in applying for or trying to apply for RIGI. It would lock in the kind of fiscal conditions that would allow future development. We've operated in Argentina successfully for a long time through thick and thin, through all sorts of different governments. We've never really had a particular problem operating there. We're comfortable in Argentina. We're comfortable with the government policies. I think we've proven we can thrive. No particular concerns.
Okay, the last couple of questions here. One, there are a number of questions asking about consolidation and M&A in the district in general, be that for some of our neighboring properties or any other things. Is M&A something that NGEx continues to look at and consider in the future?
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, Lukas Lundin probably put it the best. You know, everything's for sale for the right price. As I said in my presentation, like M&A is not a strategy. M&A is just something that happens, and it's something that you deal with when you get a letter making a proposal. It's not something that we plan on or that you should plan on. What you need to do is develop your own business plan, pursue that business plan, pursue things that you control. You're obviously always open to M&A, but it's not something that you build your company around or you build your business model around. I think we're going to stay focused on that standalone development option. We think that's a really compelling opportunity for us.
We think it's a potential path to really significant shareholder value, especially if we could, you know, follow that and replicate that template that Lundin Gold followed so successfully. If M&A comes along somewhere along the way, obviously, we'll consider it. It's not something that, you know, is a key part of our business plan.
Okay, thank you. One final question from the webcast here. Slightly different question is on something we haven't talked about, but the question is, when do you think you'll start work on Valle Ancho ?
Yeah, that's a good question. For those of you that maybe aren't as familiar with NGEx , I mean, NGEx has traditionally been, you know, an exploration company. Our job is to go out and generate and look at new things. Obviously, for good reason, a lot of the focus over the last two years has been on Lunahuasi , but we do have other projects. The Valle Ancho project that the listener is referring to is a large land package that we hold to the North of the Vicuña District in Catamarca province, a couple of provinces to the North. It's a very large land holding, around 100,000 hectares. It's a much earlier stage than what we have in the Vicuña District, but we picked it up a couple of years ago because it reminded us of how the Vicuña District looked in the early days.
Big land package, kind of evidence from multiple different styles of mineralization. We haven't done a lot of work on it in the last few years because our efforts have been focused at Lunahuasi , but it's part of our portfolio. It'll be part of our thinking going forward, but in the short- term, we've got to stay focused on Lunahuasi . That's something that we're actively considering options. We don't want it just sitting there. We are considering options for how we move that ahead. No exploration program planned right now on Valle Ancho.
All right, thank you. There's no more questions from the webcast unless there's any last questions. I'll let Wojtek make his concluding remarks.
Yeah, I think we've said everything here. I definitely encourage everybody to look through the presentation in more detail at your leisure. Feel free to reach out to us if you've got additional questions once you've had a chance to look at things in more detail. I guess maybe the final words here would be that this has been a pretty amazing story of value creation. If you think back to the original NGEx, back in 2008, 2009, and where we started in the Vicuña District with a couple of early stage projects with a few drill holes in them to where we are today, it's been a pretty incredible story.
Hopefully the impression that we've left you with today is the one that we feel internally, that despite everything that's gone by and that's come before this, we're just as excited and just as optimistic about what the future has to hold as what we've been able to achieve in the past. Lunahuasi is still wide open. I'm particularly interested in that wedge, that huge volume of rock above the current drill pattern. There's a lot of rock still to be tested at Lunahuasi in every direction, and that's pretty remarkable given where we are. I think we're every bit as optimistic about what the future holds. I think NGEx is on a really exciting path to continue to generate a lot of value. It's a great story, and we're nowhere near, we're still at the beginning of that journey. That's it.