Directors, most of them were there, too. The second point, I guess we'd like to make, is that we're a very Latin-based company. Our management technical office is located in Lima, Peru, and the management team was pretty much entirely Peruvian. We're a little bit different from your average company. The corporate office effectively is in Lima. We have a small presence in Vancouver with our financial team who work from home. Recently we've transitioned from being a developer into an asset producer. Fenix Gold, which we've been developing in Chile for the last eight years, is now in a ramp-up year. Condestable, which is an underground copper mine located south of Lima in Peru, is a producing asset that was acquired in February this year. We're now basically a 2-asset producer with the ramp-up in progress. A corporate snapshot.
Last week before the gold price crash on Monday, we were basically a $3.65 share price, which was equivalent to almost $1.5 billion of value. Some of our biggest shareholders are on that list. You can see BlackRock probably the number one, and then there's a lot of other names that I'm sure most of you will probably understand or recognize. 7% of the company is owned by insiders. We have two assets, as I mentioned, in what we consider to be tier 1 jurisdictions. Our first asset, which is a development asset now in ramp-up year, is Fenix Gold. Fenix Gold's a high-altitude, open-cast heap leach oxide gold mine in Atacama Region of Chile. It's basically situated at an altitude of 4,600 m for the process plant, and the mining pits are located as high as 5,000 m.
It's a difficult environment, and recently with the weather events in Chile that we've experimented, we've been impacted quite badly in Q3 by those events. You can see on that map that it's located approximately 160 km from Copiapó. That's basically, that black line on the screen is an international highway which goes across to Argentina. The Fenix Gold project is located very close to Kinross's La Coipa project. The Maricunga Belt, which is a prolific gold zone, has over 80,000 ounces of gold identified. Several projects from Arqueros or Kingsgate up in the north down through La Pepa, Volcan, sort of early-stage development assets. Cerro Casale, Caspiche to the south. I mentioned that this whole area is water-challenged. It's an area where there's a lot of potential gold deposits but no water for mining.
The Fenix Gold project was started by trucking water from Copiapó up the International Highway 31. We're doing about 1,400 cubic meters per day of trucked water to allow the operation to work. Part of our expansion plans to the Fenix Gold project are the implementation of a desalinated pipeline in the next five years or so, which allows us to take that project from the 100,000-ounce level at 80,000 tons a day. In the future, being able to produce around 300,000 ounces. 20,000 tons a day is our nominal rate for the starter project with the water transport by truck. That's a bottleneck on our project currently. Just some information that the reserves for the stage 1 starter project, the 20,000 tons per day, 115 million tons at 0.48 g, roughly 0.5 g per ton. This is a bulk heap leach project.
Very low stripping ratio of 0.84 g initially. Once we hit our mining rate of 20,000 tons a day during this ramp-up year next year, we would expect to produce around 100,000 ounces. We have a big land package. We are only exploring near mine at the moment, at depth and around the perimeter of the project. We are not looking at regional exploration. Our feasibility cost was $1,870 gold back in 2023. That has changed. Obviously, diesel prices and labor costs have gone up, but then again, so has the gold price. We are looking to expand the project in about five years' time to 80,000 tons a day and 300,000 ounces. There are some photos recently from the aftermath from the weather events that we experienced. Top left photo is the leach pad. We have basically had 3 m of snow during July and August.
Fenix typically receives 15 cm of snow per year, so the quantum of snowfall that we had has been extremely difficult, and it has impacted operations quite badly. The photo to the bottom left, which is the operations area just after the snowstorm. You can see the containers and the offices were practically buried in snow. Whilst the storm cost five days' worth of time, the cleanup and the getting the core roads open again was another five days. You can see the excavators, very difficult to work with the covering of snow on the leach pad. The top right photo is Fenix South, where we are mining currently. Fortunately, the snowfall was not so bad there. Fenix is a big bulk, low-grade oxide deposit. It is effectively a volcanic diatreme.
Those three peaks you can see are three cones that were part of a volcanic complex, and within the middle of each cone, there is a vertical breccia structures rising up from below. The breccias are mineralized. Around the breccias and the andesites and dacite host rocks, there is a sheeted vein stockwork system. There are two types of ore. There are the breccias, which contain clasts of broken up stockwork thrown up in the breccias. In the host rock around them, there are the sheeted vein systems, which are about 30% of the mineral. 70% of the mineral is contained within the breccias. The circles at the bottom of the long section are basically areas where we do not have enough drilling.
With the gold price now at over $4,000, the black line you can see on that cross-section and long section is $1,800 gold shell, and we are drilling constrained. We have just been completing a drilling campaign at depth below the existing Resource. The black holes were completed prior to the snowstorms. The gold holes still to be done. We will restart them probably November, December, once the weather improves. With that information completed next year, we would expect to be publishing an updated resource estimate, probably early Q3 once the mineral results at the lab results are back, the model has been worked, and we have it at an acceptable level to publish. There will be a big increase in resources from low-grade material moving into ore, and then new resources at depth that we will be adding to the deposit. Second project is the Condestable underground mine.
You can see on the section it is located 90 km south of Lima, approximately 2 hours' drive south. It is one of the dream projects in Peru because it is located on the coast at low altitude, and very few projects are that lucky. It is a historic project that has been working for over 60 years, 60 years of replacement of reserves. Today, they still have 36 million tons of almost 1% copper equivalent. That is effectively made up of 80% copper, 20% precious metals, of which the bulk is gold content. Producing annually around 25,000 tons-26,000 tons of copper equivalent. Roughly 20,000 copper and the rest are precious metals. Very good low operational costs of $2.52 per pound produced. Again, a big land package, concession package, which has not been explored in the last 15 years by the last previous owners. They have been focused on production.
Condestable also comes with an expansion potential, approved permit that was received last month to take our plant production from 8,400 tons and step it up to initially 10,000 tons per day processed. At 10,000 tons a day, we can then step to 12,000 tons with a short form permit for an additional 20%. We are currently looking at the expansion plans for the CapEx that we require. We estimate roughly $50 million CapEx spend in Condestable for the expansion to 10, 000 tons and 12,000 tons. We will be basically, I guess, approving that with the board next quarter and announcing that to the market that we are undertaking that expansion.
Some photos from the Condestable operation. That is one of the mine portals to the top left, drilling underground, top right, loading underground, bottom left, and then mineral being delivered to the process plant in the bottom right-hand corner.
Our H1 or Q2 highlights. Basically, we continued with the ramp up year. We had a slow start in Q1. If you remember, we did not achieve our targets. Most of those issues were resolved in Q2. The labor requirement for the truck drivers was resolved. The equipment issues was resolved with mining fleet purchased for the project arriving from our alliance contract with Stracon. We basically took our production from 13,000 to 16,000 over the quarter. We are looking to get to 20,000 as a steady state nominal mining rate. At the same time, we also had some really freezing temperatures during the May period, so the El Niño pattern has brought a colder than expected winter. We were - 23 degrees during May, and we had a very fast learning curve on the leach pad of using our plastic covers to prevent the pad freezing.
We did have some freezing issues as part of that experience. By July, we had been able to employ double-layer plastic covers on the leach pad, which were providing a 12-degree temperature difference from the ambient temperature. As a result of that, during the July and August storms, the leach pad was able to keep functioning and circulating solutions. That was a positive as part of that experience. Condestable produced as expected, very stable production, 725,000 tons of processed at 1% copper. Basically, the costs were maintained other than diesel, which we cannot control. At the end of the quarter, of Q2, I know we are almost Q3, but we had almost $50 million in the bank. We have cash on hand. Then we have kicked off an exploratory program in Q3 coming up in Condestable around what were previously historic open pits.
Fenix Gold drilling that we talked about, the drilling around the perimeter of the project and to depth. We published an updated technical report on the Condestable reserves, updating that to an old report which was over four years old. We also did work on ore sorting for Condestable. This is something that may work, it may not. We are committing to purchasing a trial machine, a pilot operation, that would process up to 1,500 tons per day, and we will trial that next year. It has been imported. Arrives end of October. If it works, it will be an additional source of material from low-grade stockpiles, from waste dumps at 0.4 copper that we have on the project, 10 million tons. That potentially is part of the expansion plan in Condestable from 8,000 tons to 10,000 tons to 12,000 tons.
It remains to be seen if the lab results can be replicated at an industrial scale. The Q3, we have published this on Monday morning, so we can talk about it. You can see during July, the impact of the first snow event that was effectively one meter of snowfall. Reminding everyone that 15 cm is the typical annual precipitation of snow. Then recovering from that at the end of July into August. Then we got hit with a second event that brought 2 meters of snow. Again, shut the operation down for over two weeks. Then during September, we have had two or three smaller 24-hour to 48-hour events with the same thing, operations shut down because of whiteout, blizzard, snow-driven conditions, and disruption to mining. The net result of that is the gold production.
You can see that in August, September, we were basically achieving 4,000 ounces per month into June/July. Then we have dropped to 2,400 ounces. September looks like it is going to be closer to 2,900 ounces when we finish the month. Then if we have good weather conditions for the rest of the fourth quarter, we will be able to ramp that up again to 4,000 ounces initially, 6,000 ounces, 7,000 ounces, which will get us to approximately 40,000 ounces versus the 60,000 ounces that we guided at the start of the year. So it is a combination of the slow start in Q1 and then the weather impact that we have experienced during the winter season.
Basically, we have big growth plans within both assets. We have talked about it. The Fenix expansion to the project requires a water pipeline. We have been working for over a year now with two desal providers that have existing infrastructure today.
We are at the point now where we have term sheets presented by both of those providers, and we will be making a decision into Q4 on which provider we go forthwith. That information will then allow us to publish the long-awaited PFS study for the expansion. So expect to see that in December. That, I guess, will give everyone a photo of what, the 80,000 tons per day and their production of up to 300,000 ounces per year, which takes advantage of the resource. The resource for Fenix Gold from 2023 is 5 million ounces at 0.38. Again, a big deposit, bulk low-grade mineralization. The near mine exploration, that has been suspended. We were hoping to do that mineral resource estimate update at the same time. Has not happened.
The drilling will restart November, and we would hope to be able to publish an updated MRE statement 2027, let's say second half. Once we decide on a water provider for the project expansion, we then move into an engineering stage. Initially engineering to support the EIA application. Then the engineering study continues in parallel with the EIA application, moving through to detailed engineering. We would hope to have a construction decision presented at the end of 2028. That pipeline CapEx could be anywhere between $150 million up to $450 million, depending on the configuration of the pipeline and other offtakers. The on-site CapEx for the expansion of Fenix to 80,000 tonnes a year is estimated to be around $200 million. That's something we'll be looking at. We'll be turning that into a feasibility study at some point, next year or early 2008.
The construction of the pipeline and the project expansion at the same time, once a decision is made, is expected to be about two years. Basically, that would have us expanding Fenix in late 2031 and the ramp up during 2032 to maybe 2033, 80,000 tons per day placed on the leach pad. Condestable continues to operate at 8,400 tons a day. The ore sorting pilot plant, that'll start at the end of the year, and we'll run that for one year if the results are encouraging. The near-term expansion based on the permit that was approved last month to take it to 10,000 tons a day. There's construction decisions imminent on that, and procurement would start Q4. The expanded plant works would start second half 2027 and carry through to 2028, and late 2028 would be ramping the project to 10,000 tons per day.
The ramp to 12 potentially involves ore sorting, but we also have two historic open pits at Condestable. There's information that we cannot publish because it hasn't got the quality controls. The QA/QC hasn't been done on those. But there's indications that there's a good surface resource of millions of tons at 0.4 in the Condestable open pit. We'll be drilling that. We've started last week for 16,000 m this year, 17,000 m next year. At the end of 2027, early 2028, we'll be publishing a surface resource for a Condestable copper deposit. That's something that could potentially lead into a future open cast operation. Again, we don't know. It could additionally be material that supplies the plant during the 12,000 ton a day expansion. Lastly, just quickly to finish, we do have a tungsten project.
This is something that came with the shell company that was used to form Rio2. Prospect Resources was the shell company. This project's been sitting on the shelf for eight years almost now, and we've dusted it off, given that tungsten prices are favorable at the moment. Critical metals. We completed a site visit. We published a 43-101 based on the existing drilling information, the historic drilling done in 1983, 2005, 2008. You can see there's some intercepts there that are okay. They're probably not well, but they're not bad either. We're committing next year to do a summer drill campaign on this project. It's located approximately 70 km southeast of Mayo in Yukon. That 2,000 m drill program will allow us to make a decision on what we do with this.
The idea is probably to spin it off to a different company or sell it as an asset. It's not something, I think, that as Rio2 that we would expect or want to develop ourselves. So that's it. Thank you.
Thank you. All right. Any questions, please?
All right. Well, I might jump in with one in the last couple of seconds, Andrew, if that's all right. So at Condestable, given the pretty positive-
Sorry, I'm having hearing problems.
Yeah, I know. Sorry. I was saying at Condestable, given the positive outlook for copper, is there an opportunity to bring forward that open pit and maybe upscale it?
So yeah. The question, is there an opportunity to bring forward in time the open pit and upscale it? Difficult, because it is an open pit surface operation, and Condestable is currently approved for an underground mining operation, so we have to go through an EIA process. If we potentially just, the hits coming back were very positive and we could see a significant resource developing, we could possibly fast-track that permitting process. But, five years is probably reasonable fast track, maybe four years. We would probably cut a year off that maybe. But it is unfortunately not something. We really need to understand what that resource is. It may even warrant a new plant. So instead of the 12,000 ton a day existing plant, maybe it is a 50 million, 60 million tons of 0.4 copper that would require a 20,000 ton a day plant.
We sort of need to really understand what the resource is, and what we are actually trying to permit through the EIA process. We could possibly cut a year off that maybe.
Okay. Brilliant. Look, thanks again, Andrew, for a really interesting presentation.
Okay, thank you.