Our next presenter is Michael Hudson, President and CEO of Southern Cross Gold Consolidated . Michael is a discovery-focused explorationist who has raised over $500 million for mining companies and co-founded seven public exploration companies across four continents. From his beginnings in Kilmore, Central Victoria, his exploration career has taken him to Broken Hill, Pakistan, Sweden, Finland, and Peru. Now I'll come back to Kilmore, which is the town where Southern Cross Gold's field office and core shed are located to service the Sunday Creek Project that Mike will take us through now. Thank you very much, Mike.
Thank you very much, Christian. Thank you, everybody. Thank you to the organizers of Diggers and Dealers for taking a punt on a Victorian-only gold story. I had a look to see how many were presented over the last few years. There weren't too many, but I'm very happy to see how, if I can actually present to you, how we're going. I'm going to talk to you while this is coming up. It's coming up to the time we need to powder our noses for the dinner tonight, so I'll get through it. We've got a very high-grade gold and antimony story. It's large. It's strategic with the antimony. Victoria's had a real renaissance with a new style of geology and a new government that is actually supporting mining once again. We're very well funded, and we've got a pathway to production.
Many of these words can't have been said about Victoria too much in the past, but this is all happening in Victoria now. We are TSX listed and ASX listed. As a consequence, I've got a lot of disclaimers here that I urge you to review if you're going to make an investment decision. What are we going to talk about? We're going to talk a little bit about Western Australia and Victoria, some of the myths and facts. Sometimes over in the Eastern states, we feel like the gold stops at the Western Australia-South Australia border. We've had a long and storied career in producing more gold in Victoria than we have for 100 years. We're going to talk about the momentum of this project. We've got nine rigs drilling today, and we're going to 22 rigs over the next year.
It's getting better at depth and getting more frequent as we drill more. It's a very strategic plan that we have, and I'll go through that, fully funded, and I'll talk about that pathway to production. I've already mentioned that Victoria is going through a geological and economic renaissance, and I really want to make that point a number of times today. Of course, we'll talk about the project. At the very highest levels, there's a very high-grade, large deposit, strategic, as I've said, with the antimony component, which is about 20% of the recoverable value. If we look at just the hit rate, this is well past a discovery story now. We've made this discovery over the last three years. We have more 100-gram meter hits per meter drilled than anything else I can see globally. There's certainly a lot of gold coming out.
We have a 200 km drill program that's underway, $165 million of cash to execute. We bought a lot of the freehold land over this project, so we own over 1,000 hectares over the project and for kilometers beyond to the south. Importantly, it's 100% owned, no royalties, streams, etc., other than the state-based royalty. Here are some of the metrics. I want to just point out a few things here. You can do your background research here. Probably a little small to see some of the names completely, but 30% of the stock is in the hands of some ultra-high net worth people who are the smartest people, arguably, in the gold space. Pierre Lassonde, who founded Franco Nevada, ran Newmont, and is well known, at least in Australia, for his curve, is one of our major investors, along with one of his business partners, Darren Morcom.
This is a masterclass that I've had over the last three or four years, learning from these very smart people. We have 25% institutions, both through the U.S., Europe, and here in Australia, some of the many names that our colleagues and peers also share, no doubt. The key point is that we're very focused on per-share metrics. Easily said, easily said, but very hard to execute. With the masterclass of the team and the people behind us, we are amazingly, I think, very good at doing that around making the key decisions at the right time. It's easy to create a billion-dollar company at the same share price. Very hard to do it with a rising share price. The giant orogenic deposits of the world. Of course, here we are in the home of the Golden Mile in Western Australia. Australia's other key orogenic area is Victoria.
There are some myths and some facts that underpin all of this. I thought I might make it a little bit lighter, and I went to ChatGPT and I said, "Give me a cartoon about this." What do you call a gold mine in Victoria? A tourist attraction. What do you call a gold mine in W.A.? A business. This is how it's often seen by many. Victoria did produce a third of the world's ounces at the time during the 1850s. It took W.A. 43 years to catch up around the late 1890s. We've had 130 years of dominance by W.A., but Victoria is going through its renaissance. Here is a reality check. This is Richard Schodde, who's globally well known at benchmarking our industry so very well. Here are his 12 key discoveries with the gold discoveries noted here made over the last decade.
Here we are down in Victoria with two of them. We saw Agnico Eagle present earlier today, who own the Fosterville Mine and Sunday Creek here along beside it, plus many of our other peers who've done such wonderful jobs across here in Western Australia, as well as Alkane up there in New South Wales. These are very rare assets. High-grade multi-million ounce assets are very rare in Tier 1 jurisdictions, and they attract premiums and they attract global interest. That's exactly what's happened with Sunday Creek over the last three years as we built this essentially by the drill bit. Here's the story, how it's unfolded. Many people don't know this story. It's a story that's developed very quickly. We're just going to take a longitudinal section. I'll get into the detail of the project a bit more.
Here's a 1.2 km strike of the key area down to 1 or 1 km. It was mined for a long time, and these mines are down to a few hundred meters along that strike. I want to focus your attention to the grades here, the plus 50 and plus 100 grams, so the red and the pink dots basically. This is when we listed the company on the ASX in March 2022. We had a few pink hits at depth. It looked interesting. Then we hit the key discovery hole here in late 2022. It was 300 meters at around 5 grams, made up of 13 high-grade structures. It just showed that it was something at depth. Remembering that we all knew the Swan Zone at Fosterville was a wonderful discovery after many years of mining at depth.
We now understand and know that these deposits do get better at depth. We followed that up over a year of drilling and found a lot more grade. We came out with an expiration target, defined by drilling, but too far apart the drill holes to put them all into a resource. That was something like, well, it was 1 miliion- 1.6 million ounces at about 7 grams- 9 grams gold equivalent. We kept on drilling. A few months ago, we caved and put this additional expiration target upgrade into that area I've just outlined there. You can see what that is, 2.2 million- 3.2 million ounces at between 8.3 and 10.6 grams gold equivalent. There's a lot of grade away from that that wasn't put into that area because it was just too sporadic. This thing is continuing to depth everywhere.
This is only 1/10 of the trend of the old mines. It's got a lot of room to grow. This is really that image to show that. That was the area that I was just showing you there in red, the old mines that we're drilling under. We're putting a few deep holes as we speak, nearly 2,000 meter holes down here to show that the system can continue to depth. What's most important is that this is a 10 km long system, and we've only put a few thousand meters into this area. We've done a lot of the groundwork over the last year with lots of IP, soil sampling, etc., beneath those series of old mines to go into those hatched areas. This is going to get a lot bigger. Here's something that's never been said at Diggers and Dealers. I'm pretty confident ever before. You're not going to believe me.
You're not going to believe me. What's the best jurisdiction in Australia to permit a mine today? It's actually Victoria. I urge you to go and look at the stats. Over the last six months, we've permitted four mines in the jurisdiction. No other place in Australia has done that. That's what it looks like. Let's hope the trend continues. There's certainly great willingness in the state to build its industry. Critical metals has changed the way people view mining, and it's a wonderful thing that now people understand the milk that comes from the cow that you have on the table, like the critical metal that goes into your phone or whatever it may be. There's a great linkage and understanding across the globe, and that's now pervaded into Victoria, without a doubt. Here's the plan. CAD 143 million , about AUD 160 million .
A 200 km drill out into that core area I just showed you how it was developing. Lots and lots of infill drilling to drill out a substantial resource to infill that exploration target. We're putting a decline in. We're permitting a decline as we speak. That's AUD 30 million Aussie or CAD 27 . We're going to de-risk the project, progressively permit it, and that brings drilling three times as fast. As I say to many people, the greatest destructives in our business of net asset value, CapEx, OpEx, I can't control those at the moment we're drilling out this deposit, but I can control the third, which is time. The decline brings forward the drill out three times as quickly. You never want to forget your regional exploration. We mentioned the Lassonde curve.
You want to add your Lassonde curves together so you can continue to increase the value of the company. That, of course, comes through exploration. We've got AUD 20 million for the regional exploration into those hatched areas along strike. We're going to go through in the first and second quarters into those economic studies. In terms of Victoria, it's a very different geology. What made Victoria famous was 70 million years geologically younger. Our peers around us, both at Mandalay, now Alkane, at Costerfield and Fosterville with Agnico Eagle, proved there were some very high-grade bodies that were very continuous and reconcilable. We found the next one. There's a very different geology. When you go into those systems, you go deep, and you can find some amazingly spectacular results. Lots of drill holes here, but just look at the gold and the antimony and the gram meters, perhaps very quickly.
Four out of those last top 10 intersections in this deposit have come in the last six months. It's getting better. Here are all intersections. A lot of people think high-grade is skinny, but the median width of all our structures, and there's over 70 of them, are greater than 2 meters and up to 4 meters median width average. It's a nice, wide, productive mineralization that is not skinny as your mine may go to those high grades. As I mentioned, this was a mine for many years, so we've got that benefit of all that information. In terms of the location of the project, as we just go into it quickly here, here's Melbourne. It's 60 km to the north. We own over 1,000 hectares of land there. That is, we've got 200 acres of blackberry, as I say.
We're also in the blackberry business, if anyone's looking for some. Fosterville's 100 km away and Costerfield's about 60 km away. Looking down through to the project, the tenure position is quite large. It's about something like 20,000 hectares. The freehold is shown here in the yellow and the white in this area with the core area here and that whole exploration trend through here. If we go underground just very quickly, the yellow holes are those that are in the lab. There's always news flow coming from Southern Cross Gold. The exploration target, the 2.2 million- 3.2 million ounces, was in this area with all these areas out through here still waiting to come in. We've made all these discoveries, though, in blue there over the last 6 months-8 months. The deposit is growing both laterally and continuing to depth.
This is getting much better out here at depth as well. In terms of the metallurgy, we put out some news today. It is a simple flow sheet. It's + 80% free gold. We have a gravity con and two float products, a very clean and marketable antimony-gold concentrate that is very, very low in arsenic. It will make a very marketable product. We have a third product, which is a sulfide con that has free gold, and that's about 15% of the gold deportment. In terms of the antimony, this is the exploration target, and it's apples and oranges. We only have this exploration target that I can compare with, but these are the top antimony deposits globally, and we feel somewhere between third and fifth at the moment. It's getting bigger, as you saw. It's a very significant component. We are in the U.S.
system with the DIBC, and we've been pre-vetted for DOD funding. We're talking at all these levels and right through all the government. To finish up, a very rare asset, very high grade, 10-gram multi-million ounce discoveries are rare in Tier 1 jurisdictions. The antimony does make it a very compelling business case. We have a government that's very much open for business, and we've got a pathway here to open this project into a mine over the coming years. We've got a seasoned team and a very, very strong supportive shareholder base focused on that per-share value. Thank you very much for listening, and thank you to the organizers.