Hello, Kim. President and CEO Jon Cherry, as well as other members of our management team. I am pleased that Perpetua's largest shareholder, John Paulson, is also on today's call. I would like to begin today's call by inviting John to provide his views on Perpetua's recent news. John?
Hey, thank you, everybody, and welcome. I told my fellow shareholders on this call. I am the largest shareholder, own approximately 31% of the company. I participated to the tune of $100 million in the latest offering, and I just wanted to have the opportunity to meet with you today, and I want to say I'm speaking as a shareholder, not as a director. I'm not a director of the company or an officer, so these are all my personal opinions, but I want to say this is almost like a dream come true for us. We've been involved in this project for several years, and we finally got all the permitting in place, and the key was locking up the financing, and now I'm super excited that with this equity offering, we basically secured the financing to go forward with the project.
Obviously, it assumes we have a letter of intent from the Export-Import Bank, but everyone is motivated to move this project forward. It was just a few months ago, we were unsure how we would finance it. We were looking for perhaps partnerships with other firms, but my goal was always for Perpetua to control 100% of the site. It makes it so much easier in decision-making. We don't have to be second-guessed or deal with a partner. So this offering that we just completed allows us to own 100% of the site. And those economics, I believe, for shareholders are much better than if we brought in a partner for 50%, especially given the price we paid to raise the financing, which I think is very favorable. And that's why I committed $100 million from the very beginning.
I'll just say a few words why we're so excited about this project. I believe it is a superlative asset amongst independents. It's right at the top in terms of amount of reserves. In terms of grade, it's one of the highest grades of any open-pit independent mine. In terms of production, we'll be one of the, or if not the largest independent producer in the first four years. And our cost is on the lowest, or certainly, I believe it will be the lowest of any independent producing mine in the U.S. So those four factors make it very exciting. In addition, all the NPV numbers you'll see are based on our current reserves of $4.8 million. But we believe there's considerable upside to the equity.
But even though you'll see, with the current mine plan, $4.8, the NPV at current prices is multiples of where the stock is trading today. So that's another reason for the excitement. But beyond the current mine plan, we think there is a lot of exploration potential in this site. We have both measured and indicated and inferred resources, but we also have exploration areas that don't count on either our reserves or resources that we have done drilling, very favorable results. I'll say last few factors, we're very excited about the support we received from the government for this project. The current administration is very pro-American, very pro-mining. They want to produce resources domestically, get a lot of cooperation from our regulatory bodies which oversee us. That includes the EPA, Interior, other regulatory bodies.
So we're very excited to have that support and then to have this mine in Idaho in the U.S. That, to me, makes this project even more valuable compared to having it in a foreign country where politically you're always at risk for the changing political environment. And in terms of execution, we have a great team. You'll hear from Jon later when he's got tremendous experience in mine development. And the other important thing, this is a brownfield site. There was a mine here already. So a lot of the infrastructure roads, they need to be updated, but we're not reinventing the wheel. We're redoing and upgrading the brownfield site to make it current. I'll say my last comment is why I'm interested in Perpetua and other gold mining companies. I would say I am bullish on the outlook for gold.
I think we're at a turning point in the gold cycle where the dollar is losing its preeminence as a reserve currency, and it started. There's two things that are affecting that. One is the political winds. When Russia started the war in Ukraine, both the Europeans and U.S. seized Russia's foreign reserves that were denominated in dollars and euros. That caused many other countries, particularly China, other Asian countries, other countries to wake up and say, "Are their reserves safe if they hold them in fiat currencies? Could, if they get into a conflict with Europe or the U.S., could their reserves be seized?" From that pivot point, there's been a meaningful increase in central bank demand to add to the gold reserves, and that's the primary reason why gold reached the current height.
But even with all the buying from China, their reserves are still only 6% or 7% of gold reserves of their total reserves. So it's very hard to replace the dollar. And with, we believe, continued demand from the central banks, that's going to continue to put upward pressure on the gold price. The other reason is inflation. We had somewhere between 20% and 25% inflation under Biden. So if you want to buy long-term treasuries in that time period of very low interest rates, with inflation, those securities have plummeted in value. While if you had gold, gold went up. So the inflation reduces the value of fiat currencies. And that's another reason why the central banks are moving towards gold. The last reason, we've seen the similar moves now from the private sector. So I think the outlook is very, very favorable.
I'd like the leveraged play by owning a gold mining company versus the physical gold. If the price goes up 20%, you get a greater impact if you own a mining company. So we'd like to express our viewpoint in gold through mining companies. And I couldn't be more excited about our equity investment in Perpetua. So that sums up my opinion. I wanted to share my viewpoints with my fellow shareholders I haven't spoken to in the past, but I wanted to just give you my personal perspective on why we're here, why we're so excited, and why we're so excited about the future for Perpetua. With that, I'll turn it over to Marcelo, my partner and also chairman of the company.
Just before turning it over to Marcelo, I just wanted to point out for our audience that today's presentation will include forward-looking statements. So please review our disclaimers on slides two and three. Over to you, Marcelo.
Thanks, Chris. I'd like to begin today's presentation by recognizing the diligent and hard work that the team at Perpetua has put in over many years to place the company into such an enviable position. As many of you know, in 2016, we began our permitting journey. Following a thorough and comprehensive process, we received our final federal permit last month, and the final state permits required to begin construction are expected this summer. Following the receipt of our letter of interest with EXIM in the spring of 2024, we began to advance our financing strategy in parallel with completion of permitting. Additionally, with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense, we also began to build our owners team and began to advance engineering for the project.
As the markets began to move favorably in our direction, we decided that the best course of action was for us to execute on the comprehensive financing strategy that was announced last week. The equity offering that we closed on earlier this week represents the first concrete step to secure the necessary funding for the successful development of the world-class Stibnite Gold Project. In conjunction with the equity offering, we also announced we're under discussions to secure $155 million of financial assurance necessary to post our surety bond in exchange for a $200 million-$250 million royalty stream. This additional capital will allow us to further satisfy our equity requirements for our Ex-Im loan, which we've applied for $2 billion. In aggregate, we expect to have up to $2.8 billion of available capital. Earlier this year, we issued our cost update, which included $2.2 billion of project capital.
On top of the project CapEx, we need an additional $200 million for working capital, G&A, and financing costs. Finally, as I mentioned, we also have to post the $155 million bond for financial assurance. We believe this plan provides us with more than sufficient capital to fund the project construction costs with additional funds for a cost overrun account, debt service, working capital, and exploration activities. Additionally, we are under discussions with other government agencies who may provide us with further debt overrun and working capital facilities. Our goal as a board is to preserve as much value for equity holders by minimizing future equity dilution. Now that we have the funding in place, the value proposition for Perpetua shareholders is clear and simple. In this slide, we show the illustrative equity value for Perpetua shareholders at different gold prices.
We calculate the NPV of the project starting year one of operations based on our current reserves. At $3,000 an ounce, the NPV is $6.4 billion. To calculate the implied equity value, we deduct $2.2 billion of the EXIM loan and interest, $250 million of a royalty stream, and $150 million of corporate G&A, which yields an implied equity value of $3.8 billion, or 2.7x our current market cap. Should gold prices rise to $3,500 an ounce, this implies a $5 billion equity value, or 3.6x our current market value. It's worth noting that this NPV calculation is solely based on our current reserves and assumes no resource conversion. With 4.8 million ounces of reserves, the Stibnite Project is the largest gold reserve in the United States in the lower 48 outside of the Barrick-Newmont-Nevada Gold Mines venture.
Though it's not shown on this slide, we also have 148 million pounds of antimony in our reserves. During the first four years of operation, our open-pit grades will run at 2.2 g a ton, which will be the highest grade open-pit outside of Nevada. Importantly, as we will get to later, we believe there are ample high-grade extensions to our existing reserves that we plan to drill out. Grade is the primary driver of economics for mines, and being at the top makes our project truly world-class. Over the 15-year reserve life, our project will produce approximately 300,000 ounces of gold per year on average and over 460,000 ounces over the first four years of production. This would position us as the largest independent gold producer in the U.S., with production peaking at over 550,000 ounces in year four.
The Stibnite Gold Project will be powered by one of the cheapest and lowest carbon emissions grids in the nation sourced from Idaho Hydropower. Coupled with a very low strip ratio and valuable antimony byproduct, we are expected to be the lowest-cost mine in the U.S., Canada, or Australia with over 250,000 ounces of annual production. Our base case economics assume $10 a pound antimony prices, which provide a $220 per ounce byproduct credit over the life of mine. During our first four years of operation, our all-in sustaining costs are projected to be $435 an ounce and average $756 an ounce during the life of mine. It is worthy to point out that currently antimony prices are over $26 a pound. Should antimony prices stay at these levels, we would actually be a negative cash cost mine during our first four years.
One of the reasons why we upsized our equity offering last week was so that we could allocate money for exploration. On top of the 4.8 million ounces in reserves we have today, we have 1.2 million ounces of measured and indicated resources and a further 1.2 million ounces of inferred resources. Our total endowment exceeds 7 million ounces. However, all of our NPV calculations are solely based on the 4.8 million ounces of reserves, which are all calculated at a $1,250 per ounce reserve pit shell. Once we receive our implementation letter from the Forest Service later this year, we plan to embark on an exploration drilling program focused on converting resources to reserves, finding higher-grade sources of feed to supplement our base case mine plan, and testing our best prospects.
Since our NPV is only based on reserves, the best way for us to add value to our project is by adding more ounces to our reserves. By supplementing our base feed with potential higher grades and increasing our mine life, we have the potential to significantly increase the NPV of our project. This is a playbook that we've seen before. Paulson was a cornerstone investor in Detour Gold years ago, and we provided the company with over $500 million to bring on the Detour mine into production. The mine, which is now Canada's largest gold mine, is now operated and owned by Agnico Eagle, the world's leading gold miner, where we are also a shareholder.
Importantly, the reserves there have only continued to grow and is now Agnico Eagle's most valuable asset in their portfolio. What makes Stibnite even better, though, is the fact that the geology here is better.
The Stibnite Gold Project is a high-grade deposit with very thick and continuous mineralization. We do not need to rely on high-volume efficiencies and continued expansions because grade is the driver of the superior economics. As you'll see in the coming slides, our enthusiasm for our prospects for exploration is premised on doing additional drilling along holes that have already encountered mineralization and not blue sky prospects. The first pit that we will mine at Stibnite is the Yellow Pine pit. In this slide, we can see that the deposit remains open, and the two drill holes show very high-grade mineralization below the existing pit. These two intercepts, 49 m at 5.42 g a ton and 34 m at 2.82 g a ton, demonstrate the potential to bring high-grade ounces into reserves. These intercepts compare favorably to the life of mine average grade profile of 1.4 g a ton.
I will note that any additional development is subject to additional permitting. The second pit that we will develop at Stibnite is the Hangar Flats pit. In this schematic, you can see the black dotted line showing the current reserve pit, while the red dotted line is the resource pit. We will conduct trade-off studies on the Hangar Flats area to see whether it makes sense to bring in these ounces in an expanded pit or a potential underground source of feed. Historic underground operations in the 1920s and 1930s exploited high-grade gold antimony shoots averaging over eight g a ton and several% antimony. Should we be able to bring this material into reserves, we could see a substantial benefit to our gold production from higher grades, as well as antimony production, which would boost our NPV.
Beyond the extensions to our existing pits, we also have a number of priority high-grade underground targets that have had historical drilling results. It's worth noting that these are known areas of mineralization that are not in our reserves, M&I, or inferred ounces. One of the most exciting underground prospects is at Scout, where we've seen wide zones of high-grade gold and antimony mineralization, such as 75 m at 4.69 g a ton gold and 0.2% antimony, and 43 m at 3.51 g a ton gold and 1.8% antimony. We've also seen some narrower and higher-grade mineralization, such as 6 m at 6 g a ton gold and 6% antimony. The Garnet prospect had a seven meter at 10 gram a ton intercept, and Upper Midnight, we've seen intercepts between 20 to 30 m between 6.72 g a ton and 14.7 g a ton.
To summarize, as you've seen in these slides, there's considerable upside potential to add to our reserves. If we're able to add more ounces to our reserves, our NPV should increase commensurately, and that will be the focus of our exploration efforts. A differentiating factor of our project is our valuable antimony byproduct. Antimony is used in a variety of different industries, including the automotive, plastic, and chemical industries. In addition, the military uses many different forms of antimony for munitions, fire retardants, and explosives. Like rare earths, antimony supply and processing is dominated by China. We own the only known reserve in the U.S. and now have line of sight to production, which will help strengthen our nation's supply chains and industrial base.
It's important to note that China placed export controls on antimony in the summer of last year and then placed an outright ban on exports in December. Recently, the administration published a list of 10 priority projects in the U.S., including the Stibnite Gold Project, in connection with the March 2025 executive order aimed at strengthening domestic mineral production and reducing reliance on China for critical minerals. This follows over $80 million in combined Department of Defense awards Perpetua has received. Because we will produce antimony, we've been able to receive our permits and have access to attractive financing from government agencies. In 2022, we became the first mining company to receive DPA Title III funding to help progress our project and permitting.
As you can see in the release from the U.S. Department of Defense, the DOD provided us with funding to, quote, "Secure an American source of critical minerals for munitions and missiles." This investment is essential to ensure the timely development of a domestic source of antimony trisulfide for the manufacture of small arms and medium caliber cartridges, as well as many other missile and munition items. With our development plans now in hand, we're doing our part to be a part of solution for our country's needs. As I mentioned, there are essential key industries that are heavily reliant on antimony. With the ban that was placed by China late last year, U.S. industrial end users are only now starting to feel the effects of that ban.
Just yesterday, Reuters reported that the Responsible Battery Coalition, whose members include battery maker Clarios, Honda, and FedEx, considered the antimony shortage a national emergency. We've been engaged with the U.S. government agencies as well as companies in trying to find solutions to onshore our antimony production, and we look forward to being part of that solution. Perpetua has a deep bench of experienced mining industry professionals to lead the development of this project. We've always continued to upgrade the quality of our team and will continue to do so going forward. On today's call, we have Jon Cherry, our CEO, Jess Largent, our CFO, and Mike Wright, our VP of Projects. Jon joined Perpetua just over a year ago and has had a long history of developing mining projects in the U.S., having worked at Rio Tinto for most of his career.
He worked at the Kennecott Copper Mine and permitted and built the Eagle Mine in Michigan as well. Our CFO, Jess Largent, joined us in 2021 from Newmont and Rio Tinto. Mike Wright, who's been spearheading our development efforts since he joined in 2023, has worked with some of the largest mining companies and contracting companies in the world. He's overseen projects globally whose capital budgets have been between $400 million and $6 billion. I would also add that our board has extensive mining experience that we draw on. Chris Robison, our lead independent director, spent his career at Rio Tinto and was most recently the chief operating officer of Newmont. Andy Cole, who used to be the general manager of Goldstrike in Nevada, was also the GM of the Donlin Gold Project and executive director of Barrick Gold's U.S. operations.
And finally, we also have Rich Haddock, the former general counsel of Barrick. With that, I'll hand it over to Jon to talk more about the team we've assembled and our development plans.
Thank you, Marcelo, and good morning, everyone. Again, my name is Jon Cherry, and I'm very excited about the opportunity to unlock the value of the Stibnite Gold Project. I'm an environmental engineer by training, and I've spent 36 years in the industry focused mostly on designing, permitting, financing, and building mining projects in the U.S. Let me touch on the key development team leads on our project. In total, our owners' team collectively has over 400 years of mining industry experience from concept to closure. Over the last 18 months, we've recruited and onboarded a world-class development and operations team to execute and see the project through into an operating gold mine.
I want to preface the next few slides and state the current development planning and design includes the expertise of the entire team and our partners with a few of the core team members shown on this slide. Note we have particularly emphasized building a team with balanced expertise in development, execution, and operations to ensure the project is delivered as designed. Many of the core team have pressure oxidation experience from design through execution, startup, and operations on projects such as Goldstrike, Pueblo Viejo, Peñasquito, and Mansourah-Massarah. Providing a quick project overview, the site consists of three open pits, stockpiling locations, and a centrally located processing plant containing only one of two autoclaves in the country not owned by Barrick and Newmont. The three different deposits will be mined in sequence, starting with the Yellow Pine before transitioning to Hangar Flats and eventually West End.
We will stockpile some of the lower-grade material from the Yellow Pine pit and other deposits for processing later in the mine life, allowing us to process the highest-grade material first. The plant will process about 20,000 tons per day or about 7.3 million tons per annum. The Tailings Storage Facility will follow best practices, including a fully lined geosynthetic basin. We will also backfill the Yellow Pine pit after mining is complete and as we transition to the other resources, which allows the river to be restored and have an easier gradient to provide permanent fish passage where there is none currently today. The workforce housing facility will have capacity for up to 1,000 workers during construction and about 500 workers during operations. There are already existing roads to site and nearby power line, but our plan is to upgrade and add new infrastructure in both areas.
For primary access, we plan to use the Burntlog Route, which includes upgrading about 23 mi of existing road and constructing another 15 mi of new road. This access route is preferable to the other options because it avoids traffic along waterways while also avoiding large avalanche chutes among other reasons. The transmission lines, we'll upgrade about 72 mi, including augmentation of the current 69 kV lines to 138 kV while modifying and building new substations to meet the increased load and reliability required. Right now, we are continuing detailed design and procurement while working with Idaho Power to further refine our execution plans. This slide highlights the maturity of the design, with engineering overall being approximately at 50% complete, with some key portions at 60% or more.
The first year's efforts will continue to focus on detailed engineering, but will run concurrently with early works activities focusing on road, power, accommodation, and the tailings storage facility. By allowing these critical path works to proceed in parallel with engineering, we will effectively de-risk critical near-critical paths and allow for increased design maturity prior to full mobilization. The completion of the worker housing facility in the second half of 2026 will be the key to unlocking full labor mobilization and execution of the entire process plant and infrastructure with well-developed and optimized designs. 2027 and 2028 will be peak construction labor periods focused on completion of the tailings storage facility and other infrastructure along with process plant, structural, mechanical, electrical, piping, and instrumentation, with initial commissioning commencing in late 2028 and ensuring first gold production in 2029.
So looking forward, we have a number of catalysts on the horizon for us. Later this summer, we should receive all the permits needed for construction, as well as close on the royalty or stream financing and post the financial assurance for the project. In the third quarter of this year, we should be looking at early works construction decision, and then in 2026, we look to close the EXIM financing, which leads to commercial operations eventually in 2029. And with that, I'll hand it back to Marcelo to wrap up.
Thanks, Jon. In this slide, we wanted to show the stock price performance of some of the companies that have successfully brought on projects. We show how their stock prices have performed since they secured financing needed to begin production. As you can see, Artemis's share price is up over 300%, while G Mining is up over 500%.
Skeena, who secured its financing but is still waiting on permits, has also seen its share price increase by over 200%. As you can see, now that we have our funding package identified, there's never been a better time to become shareholders. To wrap things up, Perpetua is uniquely positioned for upcoming success. We have a world-class project of scale and grade with extensive exploration upside. Our superb economics are underpinned by our high grade, our low strip ratio, and access to cheap hydropower, and supplemented by our valuable antimony byproduct. We think jurisdictions matter, and there is no better place to be a miner than in the U.S., and in particular, Idaho, one of the most mining-friendly jurisdictions in the world.
We have extensive support from our government partners as well as our stakeholders, and our ethos has always been to restore this abandoned brownfield site and to provide environmental solutions and reestablish fish migration and improve habitat conditions. Today, we're one step closer to accomplishing that. As Jon mentioned, we have a number of exciting updates in the months to come, and we look forward to sharing these with you. Thanks for your time, and now we'll proceed with Q&A that Chris will lead.
Thank you, Marcelo. For our audience, we will now begin the question and answer period. To submit a question, please use the Q&A button at either the top or the bottom of your screen. We'll give it a moment for questions to compile. Given the size of today's audience, we'll do our best to aggregate questions by topic and address as many as we can.
The first question is on contracting strategy. So I think Mike Wright, our VP of Projects, is on the line. So perhaps a good question for Mike and/or Jon Cherry. The question is, what is your overall contracting strategy moving forward?
Thanks, Chris. In summary, our contracting strategy is designed to maximize the inclusion of large-scope contracts. This allows for reduced interface points, also ensures capital efficiency through reduced indirect costs, and allows for Perpetua to maintain control through an overarching integrated project management team. These large contracting packages have been sized to incentivize large regional national contractors' involvement with their bench strength and resources required to deliver the project. We're in advanced stage negotiations with nearly all early need contracts required to maintain the quality schedule and costs that we require. And additionally, we're quite mature in our medium-term strategy development with contingencies for future partners.
I would also like to note that selected methodology ensures that balanced delivery approach to place the appropriate risk where those are best suited to have it to manage. So I hope that answers that question.
Thank you, Mike. Seeing a number of questions on the political landscape. So to summarize here, this question is best for Jon Cherry. The question is, what happens if there's a change in the administration, the executive administration in the next four years?
Thanks, Chris. So it's a really good question. So if you remember, we've been permitting this project over the last eight years. We've been started in the first Trump administration through the Biden administration and into another Trump administration.
We received our final record of decision from the Forest Service under the Biden administration and then subsequently our final federal permit under the Trump administration, especially because of the unique aspect of this project with the antimony and the connection to the Department of Defense and military. This is really a bipartisan project that ends up supporting the country as part of a strategic initiative related to some of the military needs. So our experience has been that it's been very bipartisan along the way, and we would expect it to continue to do so. And that includes myself and McKenzie. We're in Washington, D.C., at least once a month, meetings with the Pentagon and other leaders in Washington, D.C., ensuring that we can develop this project as quickly as we can with the various permit requirements that have been issued.
Thank you, John.
The next question, or I'm seeing a number of questions on downstream antimony processing. Jon Cherry, could you speak to the company's vision about downstream, well, the antimony processing that's envisioned in the current project and then downstream from there, where the end product would potentially go?
Sure. So just as a starting point or as a reminder, the antimony that we will produce from the site will be a bulk antimony sulfide concentrate that needs additional further processing into antimony metal or antimony trioxide, or in the case of the military, a very high-quality antimony trisulfide. The majority of antimony processing is dominated in China. And as Marcelo mentioned earlier, there's been a ban on exports of antimony coming back out of China.
There's a lot of support from the U.S. government to develop a supply chain for antimony in the United States, beginning with the only reserve of antimony in the country at our site where we would mine it and concentrate it. We've been in conversations with multiple companies, including Sunshine Silver and others, where we are looking at and evaluating opportunities to work with them and/or concentrate to develop that downstream processing for those eventual end users.
Thank you. So the next question is also for Jon and Mike Wright. The question pertains to project execution risks. What are the main downside execution risks to the project going forward? Which ones can you control and which ones might be out of your control?
Jon, do you want me to speak to
that or?
Yeah, why don't you start on that one, Mike?
Okay.
Typically, project execution risk is projects that are broken up into very small pieces and you have a massive number of typical interface points that always require additional decision-making and additional cost to manage that. Another typical risk area which we've addressed through the contracting strategy aforementioned. Another typical risk area is the transitioning to operations and the ramp-up curves. We have attempted to mitigate that risk as much as possible by bringing in that experienced owner, execution, commissioning, startup, and operations team early to have buy-in to the design, and that will likely result in significantly reduced ramp-up curves and smoother transition into that gold bar-making phase and antimony production.
Chris, if I could add one other risk, it's in the risk bucket here, but there's been questions about how could tariffs impact the execution of the project.
And we should definitely point out that there's only about $100 million worth of components that would be sourced from outside of the United States. So just that fact alone should minimize our tariff exposure with, obviously, the bulk of our equipment and gear coming from the United States.
Thank you. Next question is related to the autoclave and reads, what is the status of your autoclave? How much do you think it would cost? And also, is it necessary to process the sulfides related to gold, antimony, or both?
Mike, do you want to take a stab at the antimony design and go from there?
Yeah. To process antimony, antimony comes off prior to the autoclave in the concentrate form for downstream processing. And then you want to take it from there, Jon, through the autoclave status?
Yeah.
So basically, the antimony comes out of the ground with the gold. We have to separate the antimony from the gold regardless. So that's where we make our bulk antimony sulfide concentrate that we will ship off for downstream processing that I just talked about previously. We continue to progress with the autoclave design, and the capital cost on that is in the associated costs with that are in our cost update from this past February that's available online.
Great. Thank you very much. Given time constraints, we will conclude the question and answer period. Thank you to our panelists and for our audience for joining. For more information about Perpetua, please visit our website, perpetuaresources.com. A copy of this presentation, both the live presentation and the hard copy of the presentation, will be available on our website shortly after. Thank you.