From Andrew Cox, President and CEO of Rio2.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you to the Mining Forum for giving us this opportunity to present Rio2 and our projects. Just as a brief introduction, Rio2 is a Canadian-listed junior that's currently in a transition from developer to producer. I think that comes via two opportunities, one being the conversion of Fenix Gold from construction into operation. That happened in January this year. In January this year, we also acquired a underground copper mine producing asset in Peru. We're now a developer, and you'll probably see that reflected in our share price graph. This is just a photo of Fenix South, where we're actually mining today in the Fenix Gold Project. Reader advisory that you should probably read. Our company, whilst we're listed in Canada, we're probably an atypical company because our head office is based in Lima, Peru.
We have a small finance office in Vancouver. People, staff working from home. Our technical office, all our technical managers, staff are based in Lima, and we're probably a very Latin-based company in that respect, and that's probably a strength for us to be operating in South America. Myself and Alex Black both live in Lima, 20 years now. We've sort of become Latinized to some degree. Our main operation, Fenix Gold in Chile, located in the third region, Atacama, recently the Condestable mine in Peru that's been acquired and is now part of our portfolio. Next one. Just a quick shot of the people in the country. We don't really expect you to want to know who they all are or what they all do.
It's important just to say that, with the exception of the people that have come on board from Condestable, 90% of the rest of these people have come from what was the Rio1 company, Rio Alto Mining, which operated in Peru from 2009 through 2015 before it was bought out by Tahoe Resources. There's a lot of experience, a lot of knowledge. We built and operated two heap leach projects in Peru in that period, and it's the same team, the same people that we've taken to Chile and have executed on the construction of the Fenix Gold Project. We consider Fenix Gold to be our cornerstone project. It's located in Atacama, city of Copiapó, approximately 160 km by road, two hours' drive. Asphalted road, tar seal road to the project. Our nearest neighbor that people might take as a reference point is La Coipa, Kinross's project.
As you can see in the Maricunga belt, there's a whole lot of projects, a lot of gold endowment and projects that are probably being looked at again with the gold price where it is, and these projects generally are restricted for water. Water is a big issue in the area, and for us, that's one of our challenges to be able to expand our project to its full potential is to resolve the water issue. Just some facts about the project from the 2023 feasibility study that we did. With a $1,650 reserve gold price, the project has 17 years of mine life. This is the phase one operation with 20,000 tons per day processed. We are limited at stage 1 by trucking water. It was a fast-track start-up. How do we do that?
We truck the water to the site, we generate cash flow while we resolve the problem of how we build a pipeline, how we expand the project to its full potential. We have five million ounces of resources, and at 20,000 tons a day, obviously that's way too small a mining rate. We need to earn cash flow. We need to be able to put a desal pipeline into the project. At 80,000 tons a day, that then enables us to produce 300,000 ounces a year for more than 10 years. That's the biggest challenge we have right now, the biggest value unlock that we're driving for as a company. As I mentioned, we just finished construction, so we're producing gold since January. We have a large land package unexplored, which we're not really putting money into exploration outside of the project right now.
This year, we have earmarked CAD 10 million for near mine exploration, mostly at depth. To the section for the geologically inclined people here. Basically, it's an old diatreme of volcanoes. The sort of vertical structures you can see in the colors are volcanic breccia pipes, and the mineralization is generally associated with the breccia pipes, and to a degree in stockwork around in the host rock. It's a big, bulk, low-grade oxide gold project. The thing that you're probably not seeing from here, but the altitude, the highest point in that cross-section or long section rather at Fenix North is close to 5,000 meters and Fenix Central is 4,900, and then Fenix South is closer to 4,800. It is a high-altitude mine, and that does have some challenges.
You can see in the light blue line, that's the reserve shell at $1,600 from the 2023 feasibility study, the black line under that is the resource shell at $1,800 gold. The exploration program that we're doing is orientated to depth. In the section under Fenix North, we don't have much drilling information there. When we run the gold at $4,000 or $5,000, the bit's not pulling down because we haven't got information down below that. We're targeting deep drilling in this campaign to try and include that in our resources. A shot of Fenix South, where we're mining today. This was a peak of a hill when we started. We've had some breaking issues there, getting started, getting a flat area opened up. We're now not tripping over ourselves. Finally, we've opened up space. We've got drilling happening.
We can get great control in front of us and slowly starting to put some order into the mining and deliver the tons like we planned to the leach pad. Some recent photos of the construction of the leach pad to the top left, that's ongoing. To the right is the process plant and the PLS pond where we're storing water at the moment. Water being delivered by trucks, currently 1,400 cubic meters per day. Photo of a gold pour and in the bottom right-hand is the exploration drilling, the deep drilling that we're doing. Condestable, the second project we bought, a lot of people are saying, "Why copper? Why underground?" We're typically known as an open-cast heap leach run of mine operator. That's what our three projects have been. It was an opportunistic purchase.
It was a project that's close to us in Peru, very easy to access from Lima. It generates a good cash flow, steady production for the last 10 years, it's currently producing at 8,400 tons per day, or roughly 27,000 tons of copper equivalent. If you want to put that into gold terms, because I have to do it in my head, it's 80,000 ounces, roughly equivalent of gold. That's become the Condestable project for us, that's a running mine that doesn't need CapEx pumped into it, doesn't need much support. It's got a very good management team, we see it as a bolt-on cash flow generator to Fenix to help fund the expansion of the Fenix project. This is some data, 60 years of production. The copper equivalent, 27,000 again. Currently reserves 11 years.
We've got a project with 11 years of reserves in front of it. There is some big expansion potential near term to move from 8,400 tons per day to 10 and then 12 through permitting. That's basically largely completed. Very good mining costs, CAD 2.25 per pound. For a medium-sized mine, I think that's pretty competitive. Again, a big land package of unexplored hectares that need to be looked at, it's time and budget. Do we need to do something? Some photos of Condestable. It's a rare mine in Peru. It's on the coast. It looks out at the coast, low altitude, a very desirable place to work versus 4,800 meters, for example. Coastal views, beach houses at the beach, a nice place to work. Photo of the filtration plant. Condestable is currently moving from wet tailings to dry stack tailings.
That is largely advanced and be commissioned in the next month. The electric trucks. There's currently an ongoing trial with six electric trucks, BYD trucks underground. That seems to be going well, reducing costs, reducing emissions, reducing ventilation, et cetera. A photo of underground mining. The corporate snapshot. Currently at today's price, we're roughly worth $1.1 billion U.S. as a company. Share price of CAD 280. The cash balance is CAD 93 million, we have associated with that CAD 87 million of debt, which is related to the Condestable purchase. Our share price was going very well end of last year. It was climbing nicely. We had the re-rate from construction to constructions to operations. The acquisition of the Condestable project, which was received very well by the market, pushed us up to CAD 4. Gold came off. Trump invaded Iran lots of turbulence.
You see some of those amounts of shares transacted. Some of those days was massive, 15, 20 million shares being traded. Had a big impact and we seem to be recovering and climbing. There is also a list of some of our shareholders. The biggest shareholders in insider holdings in the company are currently around 7%. What are we doing? What are we looking for going forward with Rio2? Two assets, but both of them have organic growth potential, and this is what we are basically aiming for as a company. We are ramping up Fenix this year, 2026. We expect to produce 60 to 70,000 ounces. From 2027 onwards, we get to a flat rate of 20,000 tons per day to the leach pad, and that allows us to produce 100,000 ounces for the next four or five years.
We are pushing to release a PFS study on the expansion case at the end of this quarter. Currently waiting on two costing studies for a desal pipeline from Copiapó to the project. We need the data for CapEx, for OpEx, for a timeline. That will allow us to publish a technical document, which will let the market see what the potential expansion of Fenix looks like in the future. The drilling that I mentioned, the {audio distortion} drilling, which will internally do an updated MRE statement at the end of the year. Making a decision on the pipeline or the water supplier. We start engineering feasibility studies, permitting EIA process, and we expect that to take us into the end of 2028. Ideally, we would be taking a construction decision on the expansion at the end of 2028.
Rough numbers currently estimated to be CAD 400 million on the pipeline, CAD 150 CapEx on the project itself with internal expansion. That is ballpark figures, not from the studies, but from the preliminary information we are receiving. From 2028 to the end of 2028, basically a two-year construction timeframe for the pipeline and the project in parallel. From, let us say 2031, we would be ramping up again at Fenix towards 80,000 tonnes per day and 300,000 ounces per year production profile. In the case of Condestable, it is currently ticking along at 8,400 tonnes per day. The mineral reserve resource statement due this quarter, which will basically reflect that we have maintained 10, 11 years of reserve life in front of ourselves. We have covered depletion in this period.
Finally, the approval of the modification to the EIA for the 8,400 tonnes per day process or project to 10,000 tonnes per day. That will be granted in roughly June. We have an environmental permit to expand the project to 10, and then on top of that 10, additionally, we can ask for a 20% additional production capacity on a short form permit with the administrative permit. Looking forward, we have got the ability now to take this project to 12,000 tonnes per day throughput. How do we do that? Okay. We need, obviously, the plant to be upgraded. We are currently looking at that. We have our engineering construction team from Fenix. They finished in Fenix, they have come back to Peru, and they are now getting involved with this project.
We estimate a CapEx of around sub CAD 50 million to upgrade the plant to 12,000 tonnes per day. In parallel, the filter plant that you saw, the dry stack tailings, that deals with the tailings aspect of the expansion. We have something like 100 million tonnes of space permitted in the new modification for tailings. That's resolved. The dry stack also resolves the water issue. The extra water required to go to 12,000 tonnes a day comes from the dry stack filter filtration plant. We are also allocating CAD 5 million to near mine exploration in Condestable. What we're looking for there is at the surface, historically, there were two open pits above the underground operations, and we see potential there to prove up a resource at surface. It could be millions of tons at a grade of 0.5, roughly.
It's been left behind historically, today that's very interesting to us from an open mine perspective to the plant. The mine's operating at about 0.75 copper currently, 0.25 gold and silver, which equates to around 1% copper equivalent. Then with that information on the drilling, they require more drilling, assess options to develop the open pit projects in parallel, and that may be part of the 12,000 tonne expansion plan or it may be a separate aspect of the project, depending on the resource that we discover. That's basically Condestable. This is a video to finish. It's probably a feel-good video. Lots of human resource shots and people doing stuff. With a color, so you can sort of appreciate what the project looked like.
The Fenix video, unfortunately, was very construction orientated, we need to talk to our communications people and upgrade that to more of a mining orientated video. That's what we've been doing for the last 15 months, so it's still stuck in the videos a little bit. That's the presentation. That's what we're doing and where we're trying to go. Thank you.
Any questions from the floor?
Thank you. Congratulations, Andrew, on getting Fenix up and running at altitude. That's no mean feat. My question actually relates to your Condestable project. With fuel security on everybody's mind, I note that you're trialing some electric trucks there. Are you able to share with us what the average runtime is that you're getting out of those? Or are they sort of proving to be good? Or what's your thoughts on that?
Economically, yes. I don't have that technical data, sorry, on what the runtimes are, but on an economical per tonne basis, it's a significant saving. Yeah. Mariana, you don't have any further information on that?
It's enough for one of the
Yeah, enough for the shoot.
Yeah. Any other question? Just out of sight when you said that. Just out of sight.
I had one also on Condestable. That is, will you need to borrow in order to bring on those expansion things?
No, we expect that to be self-funding. The Condestable is a cash flow generator, and at these current copper prices and gold prices, we don't expect to have any trouble. Fenix has just gone cash flow positive in March. We're producing in Fenix and covering our costs now. As we ramp up, that will improve. We don't intend to do any more capital raises or financings or borrowing money, no.
The production grade for the first few years at Fenix?
Fenix is, like we mentioned, a big bulk, low-grade oxide project. We're doing run of mine, and we expect to achieve about a 75% recovery from all the test work. That appears to be panning out in reality. The head grades of the average project or the starter project or the phase one 20,000-tonne project is 0.5. We're currently feeding to the pad about 0.6, so we're high-grading to a degree to improve the cash flow in the first year. We'll try and maintain that for the first few years at about 0.6, 0.65 if we can, and then it will taper off back to the average grade of 0.5, 0.48 in year three, year four onwards. Yeah.
Any other question? Thank you very much.
You're most welcome.