Thank you everybody for your time. Outcrop Silver, our primary flagship asset is the Santa Ana project in Colombia, and it's one of the world's largest highest grade primary silver projects in the world. With that, obviously, lots of forward-looking statements. Encourage everybody to do their own due diligence. I won't spend a lot of time talking about silver, but you know, there's been a lot of attention or excitement around silver for many years that just didn't really seem to pan out. I have one big takeaway, is that I do believe the fundamentals of silver have changed dramatically with the huge demand increase from solar and industrial.
It's really changing the panorama, creating a very large supply-demand deficit that is. I truly believe is only a matter of time before there is a serious crunch and no easy way to get out of that problem with only 30% of silver production actually coming from primary silver mines. But let's just go directly to the company. Looking back in time, last year, we put out an initial resource, about 37 million oz total, one of the highest grade resources in silver in the world. 74% of the value is silver, the rest is gold. And also a very high percentage of that was in Measured and Indicated on a small portion of the project.
This year, in April, we restarted, really at nearly the end of April, restarted drilling, started with one rig, and now we are working with two additional rigs and have started generating some new news flow. But I wanna dive into what our strategy is. First, again, once again, one of the highest grade, either in equivalent terms or in just silver, pure silver, it is one of the highest grade resources, in the world, which is a great starting point, but I think the story only gets better. The second piece is that initial resource was really based off of six individual veins.
The takeaway is, every time we add an additional vein to this project, we know that we can add significant additional ounces, which really sets up where we're sitting today and what the strategy for 2024 is with this this year's program. If you look up at the top, these green lines and the two orange lines are the veins that were part of the initial resource estimate that was done last year. You can also tell that the majority of the lines are around in this northeastern section. The blue areas are the current permitted titles of the project, and that's about a 17 km trend that is covered by exploration titles, but we do have applications in for a much larger area that covers the entire 30 km trend.
We're in the center of what was the colonial age silver district of Colombia that at one time produced a third of Spain's silver. Okay? But as you can tell, there's more work has been done. Not only is there more, that's where all the resource is, but also where the majority of targets. But that's not because there's less targets as we move down, but there's been more work done in those areas. So this year, the big push is about testing additional targets. If you see the little bullseyes, those are veins that we think are drill-ready to be tested, and at the same time, we are doing more regional work in the area to generate more additional targets, which is saying, we have 37 million oz here, we need to demonstrate to market how we can make a considerable increase in our overall resource size.
Looking at it a different way, you can see the veins. The orange ones are ones that they are only open at depth, but there's really no additional room along strike. Green are resource with maybe some additional room along strike. These veins are the ones that we'll be drill testing, but we obviously have to generate more targets during this year, because the goal next year is to start looking at doing resource-specific drilling, where we can add the most amount of ounces for the least amount of meters.
We know our current valuation, we know how market is today, we know how much we're valued per ounce that we have in the ground, and we want to ensure that we are adding ounces for cheaper than our current valuation to make sure that our work is creating as much value as possible for our shareholders. That is the overall strategy. And here's an example of how it's played out so far this year. If you look, our initial hole into the Aguilar vein was about 0.5 meter, but at very nice grades, we called it our discovery hole. But as we find in continuation of mineralization at depth, obviously, we have ore shoots that have a different plunge, and we start hunting down where those ore shoots are, and we start seeing wider intersections at nice grades.
We started on Aguilar because it is a very long strike length, giving a lot of opportunities and a more disseminated type grade throughout. That's. But the grade holds up over time. The most recent testing that we did and just put out this morning was Jimenez, and we're very excited. Although it's narrow at 0.3 m , we have over 3,000 g/t AgEq . So even over a meter diluted, that's still over 1,000 g-m . So we're excited. We're checking the boxes and seeing what is our success rate, how many ounces could we potentially be adding if we drill it, and actually creating that as a table to make sure that we are making sure that next year, when we are focused on resource drilling, we're adding the most bang for our buck.
So that is the overall strategy, and this is a nice look at what those types of grades look like. It's a very interesting mineralization in silver and this is a nice cross-section to show the work and some of the serendipitous things that we have. While our main target came up at surface, the Aguilar, we're finding additional blind veins that were intersected, and we're getting some additional bang for our buck in this overall very significant trend, which is Aguilar. And we'd like to be able to repeat this story as much as possible throughout the year on our additional targets. And I guess I should go back. Our goal is, and actually where we're currently mobilizing, is to get down, all the way down to the bottom.
There's an area called Los Mangos, which is probably the highest grade sampling that we've had at surface and get all the way down, so we have 37 million oz up here. We've proven that we continue to see high-grade mineralization in the center of the trend, and we'd like to get down and prove that we have mineralization at the bottom to see where we can create a pathway to get to significant steps of much larger overall resource. Now, it's not the only thing that's special about the project, and I should take a step back and say I'm a mining engineer, so I have 25 years, and 15 of those are living in South America, but something that I get very excited about is the mineralization that we have at Santa Ana, because the majority of the silver is a silver sulfide.
That might not sound very interesting to many, but what I really like is it floats. We've done metallurgical test work and put it out, I think in June of this year, a combined test work, including gravity and flotation, and we're seeing some very interesting things, not only spectacular recoveries, 96% recovery of silver, 98.5% recovery of gold, but we are also producing a very high quality, high grade precious metal concentrate, right? Many, many people get grade, many people get recovery, but not many people understand payable, right? If somebody sends silver in a zinc concentrate, you do not get paid maybe but 75% of your actual silver.
But when you have a high-grade precious metal concentrate, we actually had some meetings today that said, "With those type of grades, I'm pretty sure we could give you a payable close to doré." Right? So we have a high grade, high recovery, high potential payable, and what's really important about that is obviously it really helps decouple a project from scale. So you can start at a smaller scale and grow quickly because you're gonna have a very profitable, potentially, a high, very profitable operation here at Santa Ana. And that's what I get excited about, because the overall strategy for the company is demonstrating how we can increase our overall value through increased ounces. Right? But we're also in the background thinking about what happens if price runs? What happens if market goes really, really bad, too?
What if it's impossible to raise additional capital? So we are looking, right, internally on how to create a smaller operation on the project now, and that could, if things run, it's a whole lot easier to expand a permit than it is to build a big project from zero. In addition, we're in one of the best jurisdictions in Colombia. Some of the biggest metal mines are there. Aris Mining's Marmato and Segovia. You also have Buriticá, which is Continental's Zijin. And another thing many people don't know, these projects also started smaller and continued to expand to 2,000-3,000 t/d . They have 50 to 100 working faces, 2,000 miners working, but this is the type of mining that is common.
What we're seeing in Santa Ana is not uncommon to be high grade, narrow veins and getting some significant production, and even directly to our south, there is a 500 t/d gold mine, so I'll also finish something that's close to my heart. We also make sure the ability to get and do these larger step outs, moving kilometers down a trend, wasn't capable without having excellent relationships with our community and having them part of the project, and it's something I like to pride myself on personally. Recently, the town of Falan, which is the closest to us, put up their letters so everybody can take a picture with seeing Falan in the background and put it on their Instagram and tag the little town.
Each letter had a meaning, and L was for legacy, and it was the legacy and future potential of silver. It has a picture of solar panels and a geologist looking at a piece of core, so it means they, their part of their own pride is their history and their future of silver, and for me, that's the best indicator of the work that we're doing, making them feel very much a part of this project. Great team. Myself, I won't go into my history, but obviously worked many 15 of my years of 25 working in South America. Guillermo is from Mexico and understands these narrow vein. Kathy, with me, was previously Silvercorp. Ana Milena was Executive Vice President of Collective and the President of Women in Mining.
We have a very strong team corporately and on the ground to execute. The other issue, and the reason I explained, we are making sure and want to make sure as we increase resource, even in this market, we're creating significant value. We do have a significant number of shares out, so I want to make sure that every single dollar I'm spending is going to be creating more value for the company. Our largest shareholder is Eric Sprott, and we obviously have, because we're a primary, true primary silver project, a very big beta and very dependent on silver price. So overall, we have a fantastic asset. I think we have a fantastic strategy to create growth, and we're also thinking about what comes next and how do we manage a project as market changes in front of us.
Thank you.
Ian, thank you. We've got a couple of minutes here for questions, if anybody has any questions. I'll start it off, actually. Ian, you mentioned about producing a silver precious metal concentrate. Does that imply that the precious metals themselves are refractory or not?
No, because the silver is a sulfide, it's floating. And I don't know if you saw the gravity, the majority of the recovery was in gold, so we're picking up obviously free gold, but the silver, because it's a sulfide, floats itself. So it's a silver sulfide.... right? It's not a refractory, it's not getting floated with a pyrite or sphalerite or, any of the other sulfide mineralization.
So, you will produce doré on-site?
We have actually taken that same metallurgical test work, and we smelted it and created silver to prove that you can go directly from that concentrate—
That's fine
— to a doré.
Okay.
But if you're gonna get concentrate, and pay the same as payable, doré might not be necessary. But obviously, if you have a process to create silver that's economic without using cyanide, it obviously creates a very high grade, high recovery, high payable, very tight footprint, very environmentally friendly footprint. It bodes a lot for the quality of a project. I'm a mining engineer, I like to be involved in projects that can become future mines—
Mm
— and that's what Santa Ana is.
Thank you. Does anybody else have a question?
Yeah, just quick follow-up on that. You have metal variability within these veins. Are you seeing that longitudinally as you go up and down?
We actually, every single one of the areas we're in continues to be open at depth. We're seeing a slight variation in the ratio between silver and gold as we get deeper into the system, sometimes you start seeing a higher gold ratio. But obviously. And I took the slide out that shows some of the variability along strike. There is variability along strike. We do see that, but that's one of the reasons why the previous resource, about 62%, is Measured and Indicated to have the geostatistics and understand very well how these veins.
We won't go into too much detail, but we basically have three different types where we see that, you know, it doesn't matter what vein area we are. They seem to perform in similar ways.
Thank you, and congratulations, and good luck with continued success.
Thank you.