Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming our last presentation for this half session in the afternoon, Mr. Walter Coles, Executive Chairman, Skeena Gold & Silver. Walter, please.
Yeah. Thank you. How many minutes do I have? 20 minutes?
20.
Okay.
It's tough here, isn't it?
Okay. All right.
Talk quickly.
All right. I'll try to get through this presentation pretty fast. Skeena Gold & Silver has a project in British Columbia. It's called the Eskay Creek Project. It's a large-scale gold and silver mine that we're building. It's got very high grade, which translates into low operating cost, which would confer us with really strong cash flows and profitability. As I mentioned, we're under construction right now. We're about halfway through the build on the project. The Eskay Creek Mine previously was an underground mine, and it was a legendary mine operated from 1994 until 2008. What made it legendary was the grade. You can see there 45 grams per ton on the gold, and then mixed in with that was 2,200 grams of silver. On a gold equivalent basis, it's about 2.5 ounces per ton.
I've never heard of a mine that had scale with this kind of grade. It was doing 350,000 ounces-375,000 ounces of production a year with a mining rate of 650 tons a day. Incredible. Just to give you a little history, I took over Skeena when it was a Shell company in 2014 and embarked on a strategy of trying to buy, or better said, option assets off major mining companies during the downturn in the cycle. We were successful in optioning six projects, three of which worked out reasonably well. We still have two of those today. We optioned an asset called Snip, or past-producing underground mine, from Barrick that was in the Golden Triangle, British Columbia. After we optioned Snip, we optioned Eskay Creek in 2017, and we ended up acquiring this asset from Barrick in 2020.
In that time period, we've done the exploration, we did a PEA, we did a pre-feasibility study, feasibility study, and then another feasibility study to improve on the first one. It's been a long journey, and we're very close to the finish line. Probably one of the most significant de-risking events with this project is, no surprise, an agreement with the indigenous tribe, Tahltan First Nation, which we did in January. Following right after that, we got our Environmental Assessment Certification and permits. In B.C., that is no minor undertaking. B.C. is a difficult place for permitting. Probably took us three years, and we probably spent CAD 100 million in the environmental assessment process. If you're going to go through all that trouble, you got to have a big prize on the other side to make it worthwhile. We're in an area called the Golden Triangle.
It's got that nickname because it's been prolific over the last 100 years for copper discoveries, gold discoveries, silver discoveries. We're very fortunate to have a past-producing mine because that means somebody else built a lot of the infrastructure that we're able to use. We've got roads. We had an existing camp. We have an existing tailings facility with ample capacity. Probably the biggest advantage we got was after Barrick shut down the mine, an energy company drove down the mine access road, which was down a river valley, and decided to build a CAD 2 billion hydroelectric facility 17 km from the old mine site. Whereas historically, Barrick had powered this asset with diesel and propane, now we've got incredibly cheap hydro power. We have a contract with BC Hydro to give us electricity at CAD 0.045 per kWh. Big competitive advantage to have power at that price.
I jokingly refer to this as the money slide. In our first five years of production, we're going to average $1.1 billion a year of after-tax profit. I'm going to show you how we're going to extend that sort of cash flow profile out through year 10 before the end of this year. The payback on CapEx is eight months. The IRR, over 100%. It's a very, very robust mine that throws off a monster amount of cash. I will mention that we, just on Friday, closed a high-yield debt deal. Our lead banks were KKR and BofA, but we had Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan and Jefferies and BMO on the syndicate with us. We went out to raise $750 million. We had orders of $4.2 billion. We were able to tighten the interest rate.
We initially went out with 9 1/8 coupon, and we were able, on the back of that very strong demand, tighten the interest rate up to 8.5%. This is the first high-yield notes issuance that I'm aware of by a pre-revenue mining company. I think we've broken the ground here, and hopefully, it provides a pathway for other development companies to access capital rather than the knee-capping rates of Blackstone and the Orions of the world. We did use these proceeds to refinance out of our debt facility with Blackstone and Orion. I'd also add it's a very covenant-light package. This is the production profile. It's front-end loaded. When we did our pre-feasibility study, we had a nine-year mine life. We did our feasibility study, we have the current 12-year mine life.
We'll be coming out with a Mine Plan Update in November that'll take the mine life out to 15 years, and it will also backfill years seven through 10. We'll get that grade up, and so we'll maintain an average open-pit grade of about five grams for years one through 10. Again, when's the last time you saw a big open-pit with grades of six grams, 4.6 grams, five and a half grams? That's what sets this project apart, is unicorn-like grams per ton on the grade. I guess I will add that the all-in sustaining costs in years one through five came out in the Feasibility Study at under $550. The caveat is that Feasibility Study was done in 2023. We all know we've had some inflation since then.
When we come out with our mine plan update, it's probably going to be around November, we'll update those numbers. I suspect we'll end up around CAD 750 or CAD 800. Still, again, when's the last time you saw a big open-pit mine with all-in sustaining cost at less than CAD 1,000? I mentioned, what really separates this deposit from other large open-pit deposits around the world is the grade. Second-highest grade of a large open pit in the years 1-5, or if you take our life of mine, still would rank number 6 in the world. I talked a lot about the gold, but this is going to be Canada's largest silver mine. The silver represents 1/3 of our economic value in the precious metals. We're going to average, in years 1-10, almost 8 million ounces of silver a year.
If we didn't have any gold at all, this would be a major silver mine. We're lucky the gold represents 2/3 of the economic value. This is our timeline to production. We're sort of done on the left one-third of this slide. We're in the middle of the middle one-third. We're started mining the ore now. We're finishing the engineering. The procurement's basically all done. All the equipment we need, we basically bought. It's either at site or down in the valley below. Really what we're doing right now is installing the equipment in the mill, and we're targeting to start the mill up in April of next year. 12 months from the beginning of production here. Looking to achieve 90% throughput on the mill before the end of summer next year. As I mentioned, we're about halfway through on construction.
CapEx spent to date is just over CAD 300 million, and we have about CAD 354 left to go. We're adequately funded with that CAD 750 million high-yield deal that we just completed. I mentioned that we're halfway through construction. Our CEO, Randy, who's a mining engineer, likes to say to me that we may be halfway through construction, but we're more than halfway through the most difficult parts of the construction. He often says to me, it's the earthworks and getting up out of the ground, doing the foundations is where a lot of projects trip up. We're through all that. All that stuff is behind us. As I mentioned, we're really in the installation part of this project. We've already mined three million tons in pre-stripping.
We're really fortunate in that the Red Chris copper mine, which is owned by Newmont, very close to us, about 200 km away, is winding down. They have a workforce of about 1,200 people who are looking for new jobs, and it's a wonderful thing for the communities up there. Newmont's quite happy about it that their employees who are working at the open pit can transfer over to our project as it's ramping up. It's meant that we have really good access to skilled open-pit miners. In fact, we hired the General Manager from the Red Chris mine, and we hired the Mill Superintendent from that project over to Eskay. These are just some pictures from the fall, just to sort of give you a sense of the activity that's been happening up there. Even today, we have 700 people up at site.
As we increase the construction activities, in the summer months, we'll ramp up to 1,500 people up there. This is a look at where we're going to be putting the ore stockpile. So we're doing the foundation for that right next to the mills in the background. This a look at the mill building. You can see it in September and what it looks like today. And I will give you a little background. We took a bit of a risk because we started building this project before we got our final permits. So I had some really anxious months in October, November, December, where it looked like there was the potential for our permits to get dragged out, and when you have 700 people on the payroll, delays become very, very expensive. Fortunately, we got all our permits, and that risk has paid off.
It's allowed us to get to cash flow probably two years quicker than if we'd waited to start construction to after we got our final permits. Why did we take that risk? It's because I spent 10 years up there getting to know the local communities and the First Nations and building very strong community support for this project, which gave us the confidence to go for it. I mentioned the mill building's built. These are some recent pictures from the interior of the mill as we're getting ready to install the ball mills and move that along. In terms of the investment opportunity here, I don't think it's very complicated. We have a company that has no revenue today, and in 12 months turns on the mill and starts to generate massive amounts of cash flow.
The investment opportunity is buying a stock when it's still a startup, quote unquote, and then 12 months from now, the mill turns on, the cash flow turns on, and there's a re-rating in the valuation. That's the investment opportunity. This graph that we have up here is often referred to as the Lassonde Curve, named after Pierre Lassonde. It just shows the genetic evolution of a single-asset junior mining company that makes a discovery. You go through that euphoric early phase when you're growing the size of the deposit, a lot of enthusiasm around the exploration. Once you've delineated it and you go into engineering and permitting, you're in this sort of death valley. I will readily admit it's a painful part of the process of bringing a new project online. Investors call it dead money. Anyway, we're through that. We're fully funded. We're fully permitted.
We've got line of sight on production 12 months from now. I would expect that our stock price gradually grinds higher every month as we get closer and closer to the day that we start generating cash flow. We still have lots of upside. I'll tell you a story. Franco-Nevada owns 2.5% royalty on this project. 1% was back from the old underground mine. Their CEO, Paul Brink, said to me they love to get royalties on trophy deposits, which this obviously is. He said the reason is because trophy deposits are created by massive mineral systems, and they always end up being bigger than what people expect.
I'll tell you, I saw an interview from 1990 of the original promoter of Prime Resources, which discovered this deposit, and the promoter sounded like he was exaggerating things when he said, "I swear this is going to be 2 million ounces." Well, actually, from 1994 until 2008, it produced 5.5 million ounces gold equivalent. They shut it down because it was, quote unquote, done. It was mined out. Well, here we have today 4.6 million ounces of reserves. You add that to the 5.5, already 10 million ounces of production in reserves at this asset. I will tell you, it's going to continue to grow. You saw it in our pre-feas nine years, our feasibility 12 years.
We're going to have a mine plan update that comes out in November that's going to drive reserves from 4.6 up towards six and our mine life out to 15. This is how we're going to do it. We've got another past-producing underground mine we acquired from Barrick 40 km away. It's the Snip deposit, and there's 800,000 ounces there at nine grams. We'll be bringing that in. That very high-grade material will mix in with lower grade at Eskay to raise the average grade profile. We're going to steepen the pit, reduce the strip rate, and get more ounces that are currently underneath the pit from the 2023 feasibility study. Wait till you hear this one. The old tailings facility has 2.2 million tons of waste rock and tailings with an average grade of 6 grams-7 grams.
We're going to be reprocessing that material as well. We still haven't gotten to the other metals. This is a multi-metallic deposit, so it's got zinc, it's got lead, it's got a very large amount of antimony. We haven't had time to bring that into the economics. We're going to try to bring that into the mine plan update that we come out with in November, but there's more to come beyond all of this. I call Eskay the gift that keeps giving. Because everywhere we look around, we find another way to add profitability here. One minute left? Okay. All right, I'll skip through these things. We've been very well-supported by the Canadian investment banks, though I do expect that over the next six-12 months, we'll get more research coverage from the bulge bracket banks.
For instance, those banks that were on our syndicate for the high-yield deal, Goldman, J.P. Morgan, UBS launched coverage on us back in December, Jefferies. I see the opportunity here is to transition our shareholder base from the dedicated, super smart natural resource investors like you all to the more generalist investors as we start generating cash flow. Those U.S. banks are going to help us do that. That's it.
Thank you. That's a presentation that creates a lot of questions I'd love to ask, but any very quick questions from the floor, please? Gentleman over here, please.
I had a question on the metallurgy. Do you see any potential problems when you have arsenic and antimony and difficult materials like that? Have you done some testing, or do you foresee any problems in that part of it?
The short answer is no. I don't foresee any problems there. There is some arsenic in years one through two and a half. The first year is the worst. It's about 3% arsenic, but there are lots of other projects out there that are creating concentrate with higher levels of arsenic than that. There's some penalties, and those are incorporated in our 2023 feasibility study. I think over the first three years, those penalties amounted to $77 million. It's like a rounding error when you're generating CAD 1.8 billion a year of EBITDA.
The other thing I would add is I think there's upside to the estimates we used for payabilities back in 2023. I'm talking about smelter payabilities, because the smelter market, there's too much capacity, smelter capacity globally. Smelters are what used to be treatment and refining charges where you had to pay the smelter. Now smelters are paying to try to get ahold of feed. If anything, I see upside in that aspect of the project. Of course, we have done metallurgy testing ad nauseam on this project.
Thank you, Walter. Sorry, we're out of time. I apologize, sir. Otherwise, the next umpire here will throw me off stage.
Okay.
Very interesting presentation. Please join me in thanking, thank you.